Читать книгу: «Marrying Up»

Marrying Up

JACKIE ROSE

lives in Montreal, Quebec, with her husband, daughter and dog. After cutting her teeth in the publishing world editing a travel magazine, she decided to devote herself to writing full-time (and not just because she prefers to work in her pajamas). Jackie is the author of Slim Chance, also published by Red Dress Ink. Marrying Up is her second novel.

When she’s not looking herself up on the Internet, Jackie likes to spend her time sleeping, shopping and musing about the meaning of it all. She’s currently hard at work on her third book.

Marrying Up
Jackie Rose

www.millsandboon.co.uk

MILLS & BOON

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For Dan, the bookends of my love life.

Eternal thanks to…

My amazing editors: Sam Bell, for your kindness, calmness and can-do-ness (I’ll miss you terribly!), and Farrin Jacobs, for your thoughtful, artful guidance in shaping this story. My devoted agent, Marcy Posner, for all your wisdom and patience. Superdesigners Margie Miller and Tara Kelly for another wonderful cover. Margaret Marbury and the rest of the brilliant group at Red Dress Ink for making it all happen so beautifully yet again.

A truly stellar team of baby-sitters—Sandy, Bubba, Rachel, Nelu and Allison Ouimet—for loving my kid as if she were your own. Galit, for letting me adopt and abuse your laptop (I hope it’s still under warranty). Shoel, Issie, Rose, Ted, Dan, Darline, Selena, Dino, Keenan, Jordy and Sarah, and all the girls, near and far, for asking, caring and sharing.

Dan, most of all, for being my live-in motivational speaker. Your passionate sincerity, sympathetic soul and boundless enthusiasm for all things me remind me daily why I married you. And, of course, Abigail—the littlest, loveliest person I know.

Contents

Prologue

Part One

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Part Two

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Part Three

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Epilogue

prologue

The Last First Day of the Rest of My Life

BUZZ BUZZ! “Looks like another scorcher today folks! Eighty-eight degrees and—” BUZZ BUZZ! “—rising fast! But we’ve got twelve uninterrupted minutes of cool tunes coming up—” BUZZ BUZZ! “—so stick around for some Culture Club, Metallica and Phil Collins—” BUZZ BUZZ! “—right after these—”

My first conscious thought is that I want very much to stab myself in the eardrums to make it stop. But I smack Snooze instead, the blessed silence returns, and I bury my aching head beneath the pillow.

Soon, instead of cursing Buffalo’s Number One Home of the Eighties, Nineties and Beyond with all the fire and venom I can muster, I’m dreaming fitfully about Phil Collins. He’s holding a crisp white bouquet of stephanotis and riding naked on a unicycle down the aisle at my brother’s wedding….

BUZZ BUZZ! “—and the seventeenth K-HIT caller who can tell me Axl Rose’s real name—” BUZZ BUZZ! “—will win a pair of tickets for tomorrow night to see November Rain—” BUZZ BUZZ! “—the rockingest tribute band Buffalo has ever—” BUZZ BUZZ!

Oh, for God’s sake!

(SMACK!)

I lift the pillow and squint, one-eyed, at the glowing green numbers…. 8:10. Crap. But everything gets fuzzy and warm again and I drift off… Ahhh…there’s Phil again, and he looks lovely—

BUZZ BUZZ!

Grrrr…

(SMACK!)

I squint again… 8:23? Damn. I squint harder… 8:28! Shit!

Painfully, excruciatingly, I open the other eye. A pack of Canadian cigarettes next to the alarm clock comes slowly into focus….

No. Please no. Oh God, NO! NOT AGAIN!!!

I wipe the sleep from my face, panicking now. On the floor, ripped spandex shorts, a bicycle seat and a muddy tire….

Maybe it’s a dream. A bad, bad dream.

I pinch myself—hard—just in case, and wait.

Nothing.

Hoping against hope, I turn over….

Ugh. There he is—Jean-Jean. On my formerly very white Egyptian polished-cotton sateen jacquard sheets by Ralph Lauren. Still wearing that dirty baseball hat. Still sleeping. Snoring, even. The audacity.

Maybe he’s just a hallucination.

Yes, that’s it! A hallucination induced by alcohol poisoning!

But as last night’s events bleed through my slowly waking mind like a spreading stain, I recall that I only drank two and a half martinis over a four-hour period. Barely enough to give me a hangover, let alone mental delusions or visual disturbances of any kind.

But wait… Hold on a second… I did have several olives, come to think of it, and hadn’t I once read somewhere that gin-soaked olives have been known to cause, in some suggestible individuals, effects not unlike those of the storied tequila worm?

Perhaps not. But surely there was an explanation other than the obvious: That I’d slept with the idiotic French-Canadian bicycle messenger from work.

Again.

And yet here he is, all wrapped up in my fine 400-thread-count bedding like a birthday present from hell. Happy 29th, Holly! Here you go—humiliation incarnate. Hope you like it! What, pray tell, could I look forward to next year? A tumor?

But it isn’t my birthday. Thank God at least for that. Nope, it’s just a plain old Friday morning. Which means that last night’s senseless debauchery was both desperate and stupid, completely devoid of any excuse—rational, alcoholic, depressive or otherwise. Understandable for a Saturday night maybe, when the symptoms of singlehood flare up and otherwise disgraceful hookups might be forgiven, but on a Thursday?

I should be ashamed of myself. Beyond ashamed, really. Why hadn’t I just stayed home alone and watched an E.R. repeat with a cheap bottle of wine like all the other normal, hopeless, single women in Buffalo?

“Excuse me,” I say, and nudge him with my heel. Hard.

He turns over, grunts and smiles.

“Ahem!” I say loudly, covering myself.

“Heh?”

“Please, Jean-Jean, wake up! Allez vous!” I don’t know much French, but I can assure you my tone spoke volumes.

“Come hon now, ma petite. Believe me when I tell you I know you don’t want dat! For sure I know dat!”

“Jean-Jean, it’s like this, so please listen carefully. Last night was a mistake. I know I’ve said this before and I’m sorry, but this time I really mean it—I don’t want to see you anymore! So please just go home, okay? Please. Just go…”

He grins and rolls his eyes at me. “Dat’s what you said hlast week, ’Olly, and da week before dat! But you halways come back to Jean-Jean for more!”

“Well, I can promise you I’ll be sticking to my word this time and—”

“Eh!” He puts a nicotine-stained finger to my lips. “Why say someting you regret? Jean-Jean, you know, is twice da fun! And to love ’im is to deserve ’im more dan once, ma petite. Many, many more time dan dat! So now dat you ’ad ’im, you can’t forget. No never!”

With that, he hops out of bed and begins collecting the T-shirts and rags and rubber bands which comprise his work uniform.

“What does that even mean?” I moan to no one in particular, and fling his cigarettes toward the door. “Please hurry, will you? I’m late for work….”

“Jean-Jean is halways ’appy to oblige you, ’Olly. See you—layter!”

The cheeseball winks at me twice, in case I didn’t catch it the first time. He stuffs his crap into a mud-splattered backpack and swaggers out the door, leaving me alone with a beer bottle full of cigarette butts and unwelcome memories of last night’s awkward fumblings.

I pull the covers back up over my head for a few precious moments and vow to try and see the bright side of this latest romantic debacle. Like…at least I was getting some! That has to be worth something, right? And to be completely honest, Jean-Jean isn’t such a bad guy, anyway—he just needs to grow up a little. With some career counseling and maybe a Queer Eye makeover, he might even make a nice boyfriend for someone someday. Just not for me. In the meantime, what did it matter? Nobody would ever have to know…

Except moi, that is.

Fortunately, my history with Jean-Jean taught me that while the nausea and self-loathing born of my temporarily misplaced affections may linger for a while, eventually they dissipate along with most of the gory details. (Mother Nature is no fool—if the passage of time didn’t take the edge off our labor pains, our heartbreak, our bikini waxes, the human race probably would have died out aeons ago!) And thanks to a few modern amenities—namely condoms, soap and water—potentially unwelcome reminders of such ill-advised trysting are practically a thing of the past.

The regret, though…well I suppose that’s a little different. It never fully disappears. It just sort of fades away until it becomes a tiny little pinprick of shame, part of the growing list of things I wish I’d done differently, or not at all. Yes, the regret is unfortunately quite permanent. Kind of like the new grease spot on my pillowcase.

Two showers later—including a violent exfoliating session that would have skinned a lesser woman alive—I am officially late for work before I’ve even left my apartment.

No, the day has not begun well.

On difficult mornings such as these, I try to find solace in a series of uplifting aphorisms I’ve collected over the years. They help me salvage whatever shreds of optimism I can from the wreckage of my life. So I try to tell myself that the world is my oyster, that comedy is just tragedy plus time, that today is the first day of the rest of my life.

Today is the first day of the rest of my life?

The perfect mantra for chronically regretful yet eternally hopeful sorts like me. Most of the time, the simple, wonderful truth of it is enough to put the spring back in my step.

Only today the slate is not clean, the start is not fresh.

The start, in fact, stinks.

part one

chapter 1

The Day I Died

It would probably go something like this:

Hastings, Holly. 1975–2060. Passed away of chronic liver disease on Friday, December 31, 2060, alone again on New Year’s Eve, since she didn’t have a date, and hadn’t in many, many years. She was 85.

Miss Hastings, was born in Buffalo, the fourth child and only daughter of the late Louise McGillivray Hastings, a bookkeeper, and the late Lawrence Hastings, a schoolteacher, both also of Buffalo.

After completing a three-year degree in Journalism and Professional Writing in slightly more than five years at Erie County College, Miss Hastings took a job at this newspaper, which she believed would be an important stepping stone in her fabulous career as a writer. The single Miss Hastings quickly found her place among the many talentless hacks at the Buffalo Bugle, penning obituaries and taking classified ads for more than fifty years, until her forced retirement in 2052.

During college, Miss Hastings took up social drinking, which eventually evolved into full-blown alcoholism after a string of failed relationships. Due to her inability to write the Great American Novel, or even a Not So Great One, the mateless Miss Hastings never left the Bugle, as she had planned. In fact, she never left the Buffalo-Niagara Region. Hell, during the last five years of her life, she never even left her house!

Miss Hastings leaves behind nobody—not even a cat. The bulk of her meager estate will be divided among her many creditors, and her body will be donated to medical science, unless somebody claims it before noon tomorrow.

Well, that wasn’t so bad, really. I’ve almost certainly—no, make that definitely—come across worse lives, written lamer obits for real, actual people. Haven’t I?

Hmmm…

Okay, so even if I haven’t, technically speaking, there’s no cause for alarm just yet. The whole point of the exercise is to imagine the way things might turn out, you know, if everything stays the same. To see where my life is heading, worst-case scenario. But even if it all comes true, so what? Cats, after all, are pretty crappy compared to dogs, so if ever there were a pet not to have… And let’s not underestimate the ultimate satisfaction of sticking it to the credit-card companies from beyond the grave.

I print my final draft, fold it up until it’s a tiny little square and shove it way down into the bottom of my bag.

Okay, Holly. Back to work. No need to feel sorry for yourself.

Despite the fact that I hardly have a thing to do except sit around and wait for someone to call, I try to keep busy. I hone my pitch for a story about the Buffalo fashion scene (don’t laugh—we can’t all live in New York or London or Paris, no matter how much we might like to, but that doesn’t mean the rest of us are oblivious to life’s finer things) and color-code my files until at last the phone rings. Will it be a trumpet seller? A passport found? A grieving relative? My boss, Cy, telling me he finally needs my feature, A.S.A.P?

“Holly Hastings,” I say into the receiver.

“Um, hi.” A woman’s voice. Very shrill. “I want to place an ad. In the personals.”

“All right,” I sigh. “Go ahead.”

“Okay. It’s for the ‘Women Seeking Men’ section.”

Of course it is. “Yup. Go ahead.”

“Will you tell me if you think this is okay?”

“Sure.” Poor thing. I knew she didn’t have a chance, and I hadn’t even heard it yet.

“Okay,” she exhales purposefully. “This is what I have. ‘Cuddly thirty-five-year-old princess seeks knight in shining armor. I love babies, four-star restaurants and international travel. You’re a gorgeous, tall, marriage-minded physician or lawyer, between thirty-three and forty. I’m five foot one, have brown hair and brown eyes.’”

“Oh, that’s perfect,” I say, taking it down.

“You think?”

“Definitely.”

“Oh my God! I can’t believe I’m doing this!” she shrieks. “I’m so excited! Can you get it in for tomorrow morning? Before tomorrow night, I mean? Can you? I have an extra ticket to The Vagina Monologues at Shea’s!”

“Sure thing.”

“Great!”

I take the details and hang up.

Women Seeking Men. As if. Had she ever taken the time to actually read our little rag, she might have noticed that for every ten women seeking men via the services of the Buffalo Bugle there is only one man seeking woman.

It is all just so sad. Sad and funny. Sad that she dares to believe Dr. Right will call her by tomorrow night to begin with. Funny that she thinks a show about female sexuality and the c-word will make suitable first-date entertainment anyway. And sad again that The Vagina Monologues is not just a theatrical experience, but also a fairly accurate way to describe so many of our sex lives. Because only the rare, the proud, the few can claim to be involved in any coed, long-term, mutually respectful…er…dialogue.

And that’s okay.

Just because it’s sad doesn’t mean it has to ruin your life.

You see, some women wallow in singlehood the way pigs wallow in shit. But that’s just not me. There’s no shortage of far worthier sources of anxiety and self-reproach, like bioterrorism and ozone depletion and flat-chestedness. I also find obvious desperation of any kind profoundly futile, since I know that men—even the most uninformed, unenlightened, uninspired of them—unerringly pick up on that scent a mile away. In theory, therefore, there’s no point in being miserable simply because one happens to be flying solo, while broadcasting your panic at the thought of it will simply ensure that things stay that way.

So even though the prospect of dying alone and poor and completely catless might faze some, I will probably handle it quite well; as a person who’s experienced near-epic singlehood, I don’t even know what it’s like to be in a meaningful relationship, save for one long-term mistake and a few flings here and there, all of which ended in varying degrees of disaster and confusion. Truthfully, it has never really bothered me before. I’ve always trusted that fate will bring me together with the man I’m designed for, some day, some way.

Until now, I suppose.

I reach back down into the bottom of my bag and feel around for the little square of paper. For the first time ever, as I reread my pitiful obituary, twinges of doubt make inroads into the romantic certainty that has served me so well for so long.

What if he never comes? What if he doesn’t exist? What if we never meet, and just pass each other by in the street over and over again until we marry the wrong people, divorce, grow old, get senile and die? More likely still, what if I screw it all up when we finally do find each other, and all that lonely, crazy, catless stuff really, truly happens?

The seeds of self-pity had been sown that morning, when Jill, my roommate, whose life I’d always thought was at least a little bit worse than my own, threw some sympathy my way after she saw Jean-Jean exiting my room.

In the kitchen, she and her everpresent but vaguely mysterious boyfriend exchanged knowing glances across the table as I frantically ripped open a box of Pop-Tarts.

“There’s fresh coffee,” Jill offered. “Hazelnut-vanilla decaf. I just made it.” I could tell that what she really meant was, Holly, you poor, poor thing. What a horrible ordeal you’ve been through. Perhaps a hot beverage might distract you from the memory of it, if only for a few moments.

“No time,” I said, fighting with a silver package. “You’d think there was gold inside these bloody things….”

She looked at me with sad eyes. “You’re so meticulous about everything, Holly. Except what you put in your body.”

“Thanks, Jill. I know.”

The girl is a health fiend. Yoga, soy, supplements—the whole package. How someone can go through life like that is beyond me. The way I see it, we only have five senses, and to squander one of them on the likes of kale and lentils is akin to blinding yourself voluntarily, no matter how much cumin is involved.

Somehow, though, she manages to make me feel like a child every time I order a pizza or sleep in on Sunday. Don’t get me wrong—I love her to pieces. In some ways, Jill Etherington is like the mother I never had. Well, that’s not exactly fair, since I do in fact have a perfectly serviceable mother, albeit one who never really minded if I ate Count Chocula for dinner in front of the TV or skipped phys ed in high school.

To save a few minutes, I decided to eat my Pop-Tart raw. She shook her head as I stuffed the broken pieces into my mouth.

“It’s an acquired taste,” I informed her.

“Why don’t you at least sit down to eat?” she suggested.

“Why don’t you stand up?” I snapped back.

Despite my impatience with her that morning, one of the things I admire most about Jill is how she’s always ready and dressed for work two hours before she has to leave the house. Granted, she goes to bed at 9:00 p.m., but still—being early for anything is an excellent quality I hope one day to have. Maybe it has to do with being excited to get where you’re going—work, date, spinning class, whatever—but since Jill is a clerk at a paper-processing plant, and I know for a fact that she despises her job, that theory couldn’t possibly explain her rise-and-shine attitude.

Not to say that I’m late for things. Actually, I’m often on time, even if it’s just barely. When I have to be somewhere, the digital clocks in my life govern my every move. In the morning, I know precisely how long it takes me to shower, to get dressed, to eat. A mere minute one way or the other might make the difference between panic and calm. I’ll even blow a traffic light to save a few seconds on my way to work.

A therapist of mine (I no longer remember which one, exactly) once suggested that my personal game of Beat the Clock has nothing to do with valuing punctuality, but rather that it’s part of a need to inject drama and adventure into my daily life. While that may be true, I also know that waltzing in past your coworkers twenty minutes after nine makes a bad impression, no matter how late you stay to make up for it, and is definitely not a good way to get ahead.

Lately, though, despite knowing better, I seemed to be having an awful lot of trouble getting to the Bugle on time, and not just on those mornings after the night before. Since it was becoming clear that I was never going to get ahead there no matter how early I showed up, I suppose I was finding it a little hard to stay motivated.

“Don’t be grumpy, sweetie,” Jill said.

“Huh?”

“I said, don’t be grumpy.”

“I’m not grumpy. I’m late,” I mumbled.

Boyfriend, who’d been uncharacteristically quiet until that point, slammed his mug down on the table. “No way! I hope that dupa with the bicycle seat isn’t the father!”

“No, you idiot. Late for work,” I said.

Boyfriend was a bit of a moron, and a lot of an asshole, though Jill chose not to see it. His name, for the record, is not at all important. Although my dear roomie is quite taken with the idea of having a boyfriend in general, she doesn’t seem to care all that much about who fills the position, and is content to overlook all manner of glaring biographical inconsistencies in order to enjoy the perks of coupledom. She hasn’t been single for more than forty-eight hours since junior high, and this latest prize was simply one in a long line of subpar rebound guys who’d morphed into serious boyfriends.

“Seriously,” Jill said. “What’s going on with you and Jean-Jean?”

“Umm, we… I mean he and I were just… I was… I mean, he was…”

She waited patiently for me to finish, but there really wasn’t much I could say in my own defense. It was a rotten, unholy lust whose name I dared not speak for fear of giving it any more power than it already had.

Boyfriend glanced up and offered, “Well, I think you two are perfect for each other.”

“You don’t have to be ashamed, Holly,” Jill added kindly. “Your personal life is your business and I’m sure you have your reasons. And he’s…not so bad, really. So why don’t the two of you consider dating more seriously?”

“Are you joking? I can’t tell…”

“Well, you obviously can’t keep your hands off each other. I suppose you have chemistry or something. What’s so terrible about that? It’s…nice. Embrace it.”

The girl was obviously insane. Served me right, answering an ad for a roommate from the bulletin board in my therapist’s waiting room.

“I don’t want your pity.” I put my head down on the table and closed my eyes.

“There, there,” she said, and began stroking my hair.

But Boyfriend would not be deterred. “I think Holly’s hot-hot for Jean-Jean!”

Brilliant.

“Yeah, I think maybe she is,” Jill agreed.

Walking in to work late was definitely better than this. “I think one of you’s extremely jealous and incredibly hot for Jean-Jean, and the other one’s crazy. And I think Jill’s the one who’s crazy.”

“I suppose that makes me jealous,” he deduced.

“Among other things.” I got up and headed for the door. “And if you don’t mind, keep your nose out of my business.”

“She must be on the rag,” he said loudly to Jill, who rolled her eyes and looked at me as if to say, “I know he can be a little insensitive, but at least he’s got a pulse.”

The beauty of my job is that I know, better than almost anyone, how even the most pathetic of existences usually reveal at least some merit when you simmer them down to a mere two hundred and fifty words. Vacuous socialites, crooked politicians, celebrity pornographers and yes, even old maids—all leave their mark in one way or another. Sometimes you just have to read between the lines.

Take the life of John Michael Whitney. Local boy, beloved son and brother, star of his high-school football team—that part was easy. Unfortunately for Johnny, though, his True Defining Moment—most every life has one, subtle or not, and the best obituarists can nose them out like blood-hounds—came a bit later on, when he ran over and killed the mayor of a small town on the Texas-Arkansas border while fleeing the scene of a botched liquor-store robbery in the mid-’80s.

Of course, poor Mrs. Whitney loved her son dearly despite his many vices, and requested that we gloss over the incident in his obituary. “He was so good at football,” she told me plaintively over the phone, “and crafts, too.” Turns out the guy was the Martha Stewart of Death Row, finding solace among his beeswax candles and Christmas wreaths, which he sold to the guards’ wives for cigarette money. But the state wasn’t nearly as impressed, and in the end, not even his God-given talent for macramé was enough to save him from Old Sparky. But I made sure to include it in his final tribute.

It may sound overly forgiving—what of the poor mayor (a bigot and a drunk!) and his grieving widow? (a two-timing tramp!)—but that’s just part of what we obituarists sometimes have to do: rewrite people’s less-than-stellar lives into pleasant little blurbs to help friends and relatives feel all warm and fuzzy about them. It’s the ultimate final makeover, and I believe everyone deserves at least that.

Everyone except me, it seems.

There is nothing warm and fuzzy about my life lately, unless you count the chenille throw I’d taken to huddling beneath on the sofa, emerging only for work and a few hours of drunken weekend abandon, with the occasional booty call from an idiotic bicycle messenger thrown into the mix. If there is merit in there somewhere, damned if I can see it.

The upside of such a mundane existence is that I am left with plenty of time to wonder about the meaning of it all. Where is my life going? Will I ever have a real boyfriend? Do I have a destiny? And if I do, and it turns out to be a shitty one, will it be possible to change it?

Answering these questions has recently become Number One on my priority list, relegating to Number Two for the first time in three years my plan to save up enough money for a set of large but not huge breast implants. The tasteful kind.

As the waves of existential angst wash over me day after day, week after week, month after month, much as they had in high school (minus the haunting Bauhaus soundtrack), it has begun to dawn on me that there might be more to it all than an okay job and a rundown two-bedroom flat over Marg’s Olde-Tyme Medieval Shoppe.

Which brings me back to why I really spent the better part of this morning writing my own obituary and cursing the cats I didn’t have. It’s not as morbid as it seems, actually. Plenty of obituarists while away the hours in between jobs perfecting their own final tributes, as well as those of friends and loved ones, or even, if the mood for vengeance strikes, those of enemies, bosses, ex-lovers and so on.

Of course, I usually while away those very same hours taking classified ads for free puppies and used cars, since I wear many different hats at the Bugle. Many ugly, unflattering hats, including one Get-Me-A-Coffee-Will-Ya-Holly fedora, ungraciously bestowed upon me most mornings by the Life & Style Editor, Virginia Holt. Not that I even work for her, but what can I say—no? I don’t think so. Not if I want her to accept one of my story pitches before the end of time. One day, I hope she and her enormous crocodile Hermès Birkin bag—which I would bet a year’s salary was the only one in the entire city—will be kissing my arse, but until then, my lips are glued to hers.

Anyway, maybe it’s because I’m superstitious, but I have never been able to shake the feeling that if I wrote my own obit, there would suddenly be occasion to use it, like the second I left the building a giant anvil would fall on my head and pound me into the pavement à la Wile E. Coyote. The same reasoning prevents me from signing the organ-donor spot on the back of my driver’s license, something which I believe is tantamount to suicide. It’s like saying, “Hey! Whoever’s up there—I’m ready! Take me now and feel free to use my parts!”

I explained all this to Dr. Martindale last week after he suggested the exercise as a way to pinpoint the source of my growing anxiety, but he wasn’t buying it.

“Nope. It’s a bad idea,” I told him. “Definitely a bad idea. Hits too close to home.”

“What are you afraid of?” he asked.

“Ummm, dying?”

“That’s original.”

“I’m in no position to be taunting the gods, Doctor M. No way.”

“It’ll help you learn a little bit about yourself. Writing one’s own obituary is a fantastic impetus for action. I recommend all my patients do it—even the ones who don’t happen to write them for a living.”

“Ha, ha. But seriously…I can’t do it.”

“Sure you can.”

“I don’t want to.”

“Why not?”

I thought for a moment. “Maybe I don’t want to confront my own mortality?”

That sounded good.

“No, I don’t think so,” he said. “But maybe…just maybe…you’re afraid of confronting your own vitality.” He pronounced the last word slowly, as if I needed help figuring out how very witty he was. Utterly spent, he leaned back in his big leather chair and folded his hands triumphantly over his belly.

I squirmed on the couch. “Are you going to put that in your next book?” I asked. “It’s pretty cheesy, if you don’t mind me saying so. Oh, but that reminds me—I’ve been meaning to tell you this—since it doesn’t look like I’ll be writing my book any time soon, I thought maybe you could immortalize me by using me as one of your case studies. Whaddya think?”

“I think you’re using humor to avoid a difficult topic.”

“…maybe something like, ‘Holly H., moderately insane twenty-eight-year-old brunette with flat hair and obsessive-compulsive tendencies including but not limited to a fear of free-falling anvils and severe stove-checkitis?’ That would be fine with me, if you want. And maybe you could also mention that I’m cute and not currently seeing anyone.”

He smiled broadly. “Is it really any wonder why?”

Even my own shrink didn’t think I was relationship material.

“Careful…” I told him. “I know you have a son, and I know he’s single. You don’t want me looking him up now, do you?”

“He doesn’t go for pretend-crazy, Holly. He prefers the real thing,” he said without skipping a beat. “And if you want me to use you as a case study, you’re going to have to give me a little more than just garden-variety phobias and general wishy-washiness. Not if it’s going to be a page-turner.”

“I’m sorry my misery bores you, Doctor M.”

“Not always. Have you had any more poodle fantasies lately?”

“Huh?”

“Oh…sorry,” he said, flipping back through his pad. “That was my eleven o’clock.”

Nice. How could I beat that?

“I do have a recurring nightmare about Phil Collins. I think it might be sexual. Does that help?”

“Not so much, no.”

“Well, I’ll see what I can do.”

Dr. David Martindale is a very well-respected and widely published psychologist on the self-help circuit, and I was lucky to count myself among his patients. Still, I wasn’t so sure it was going to work out between us. The butterflies were gone, so to speak.

Yeah, yeah, so I’m a therapy junkie. I’ve been to twelve different psychologists and psychiatrists over the past five years and I’ll make no apologies for it. I see the entire mental health profession as a sort of sanity buffet from which I can pick and choose what I like and pass over the rest. The breadth of my phobias and anxieties demands a holistic approach.

Hmmm…

Okay. So maybe I’m making it sound a little worse than it actually is. I am in fact quite a normal person. A normal person who simply has no luck with men, feels underappreciated at work and whose self-esteem just so happens to be in free fall at the moment. That’s the problem, I guess. I figure if I keep digging a little deeper, I’ll find something fascinating behind my averageness. Something less mundane than the truth, which is that growing up being relentlessly teased by my three older brothers and for the most part ignored by my beaten-down parents has turned me into one of those self-deprecating panicky types looking for love and appreciation in all the wrong places.

I know it may seem self-indulgent on the surface, since I don’t have any real problems to speak of, but therapy has changed my life. It has helped me learn who I am—privately quirky, a little bit dark, but ultimately hopeful—and imparted to me the gift of self-awareness. You see, monitoring my own thoughts and feelings saves me from the thing I fear the most: Limping through life like a mindless automaton. The woman in the gray flannel suit. The lovesick puppy dog. The enthusiastic imbiber of cyanide-spiked Kool-Aid.

The problem, I’m beginning to realize, is that all this heightened consciousness comes at a price. When you finally start to see yourself as the universe sees you—one of roughly six billion ants living beneath a perpetually upraised foot—desperation and apathy cannot be far behind. So, to take the sting off the inexorable march to the grave, I sometimes enlist the services of other ants with medical prefixes to help me turn my frown upside down.

I’m currently involved with two therapists. They don’t know about each other, but I’m thinking of telling Berenice about Doctor M., just to spice things up. Since she sees all psychiatrists and even most psychologists as pill-pushing whores in cahoots with evil pharmaceutical conglomerates, it’ll give her some incentive to come up with something a little more inspired than Saint-John’s-wort and a bubble bath, those panaceas of the antiProzac set.

Despite my misgivings about Martindale’s commitment to the seriousness of my complaints—I had to admit that his obituary exercise sounded a lot more promising than Berenice’s solution (which involved some sort of birth reenactment), so I decided to throw caution to the wind and give the obituary thing a shot. There was just too much junk swirling around in my mind, and it seemed like a decent way to start clearing it out.

As I reread the news of my passing, one possible path laid out before me, I have to wonder: What would it take to rewrite this life? Defined by one horrible crime and faced with years of boredom and loneliness and regret on death row, John Michael Whitney clung hopefully to his pine cones and glitter glue. I’m sure, in his own mind, he saw himself not only as a murderer, but as an artist, with something positive to offer the world. But what about me? Is there anything out there to redeem my existence, before it’s too late?

The prospect of emerging from Berenice’s giant plastic womb a brand-new person suddenly sounds a whole lot easier than figuring that out.

chapter 2

Writer’s Block

Even though I knew George was probably busy—Fridays being the day she rips the covers off mercifully unsold fantasy novels at the Book Cauldron and sends them back to the publishers—I called and asked her to meet me for an emergency lunch. I calmly explained that if she didn’t come and rescue me from myself, I was bound to dash immediately across the street and buy seventeen cartons of cigarettes, after which I would be only too happy to ditch work and spend the rest of the afternoon in the park, smoking one after the other until there was nothing left of me but a bit of charred lung and one diamond earring. (I’d lost the other last week, and was hoping that the remaining stud, in its loneliness, might magnetically guide me to its partner’s hiding place.)

“Why all the doom and gloom?” George asks as she plops down into the booth.

“Look, you know me,” I say. “I’m an optimist.”

“Mmm, I wouldn’t say that. You’re too superstitious.”

“Fine. Then I’m a guarded optimist….”

“More of a fatalist, I’d say. But a cheery fatalist.”

“George! Just listen. The point is, I think I’m losing my grip on happy thoughts. Something’s got to be done.” I pull the tattered obituary out of my purse and slide it across the table.

“What’s this?”

“Just read it,” I tell her, exhaling dramatically.

As she does, I signal the waitress. “I’ll have a bacon cheeseburger, a double order of fries, and a Jack and Coke.”

She looks up from her pad and pushes her sliding glasses back up her nose with her pencil. “We don’t have a liquor license here, ma’am.”

Nice. The one day when I could really use a bit of liquid lunch.

“Fine. Make it a milkshake, then. Chocolate.”

“I’ll have the Nicoise salad,” George says. “With the dressing on the side, and no potatoes. Oh, and are there anchovies on the salad?”

The waitress nods.

“Were they packed in oil?”

“I would say so, miss.”

“Hey!” I interrupt. “Why is she a miss and I’m a ma’am?” The nerve.

They stare at me blankly, then return to the business at hand. “Well, then forget the anchovies,” George tells her. “No, wait. Keep them. No wait! It depends on the tuna. Was that packed in oil?”

“I don’t know, miss.”

George is utterly confounded. “What should I do?” she asks me.

I shrug.

“How about I just bring you a nice green salad?” The waitress suggests.

“Okay,” George smiles, relieved. “Oh, and a Diet Coke. With a wedge of lime.”

The waitress shakes her head and shuffles off in her sensible orthopedic shoes.

“Dressing on the side!” George calls after her. “God. That was close. Which do you think are worse—carbs or saturated fats?”

“Are you kidding? I have no idea,” I say impatiently, motioning for her to keep on reading. In the meantime, I snack on my fingernails.

As soon as she finishes, she reads it again, then ponders for a minute or two. “I think you’re nuts. Why did you write this? Didn’t you say you’d never do your own?”

“Yeah, but Doctor M. said it would help me see where my life is going, give a voice to my hidden fears and then identify new goals for myself.”

“And the problem is…what exactly? You’re afraid you’ll never have a cat? ’Cause if that’s it, we can get you a cat. I think there might even be a sign up at the store. Black kittens or something…”

“Ha, ha,” I manage weakly.

“Look, Holly. If you’re for real about this…”

“I am. I so am. Help me.”

George nods seriously. “Okay. Where to begin? Well, I guess everyone’s afraid of dying…”

“I’m not afraid of dying,” I tell her. “I’m afraid of dying alone. I’m afraid my life will have meant nothing to anybody.”

“I get it, I get it.” She thinks about it for a second, then adds, “Look. It’s okay to want to change your life, to write a book or whatever. It’s okay to want a better job. Work on that. Fine. But you’re afraid of being single? Come on. That’s so…mundane.”

“I know. But all of a sudden I can’t help it. I just never thought my life would turn out like that. And looking back over my eighty-five years—what did I really contribute? Nothing! God, what a waste! And I had so much love to give…so much love to give…!”

My throat tightens and my ears begin to ache. I flash back to Dr. Pink, a self-styled “lacrimal therapist” from a few years back whose clinical methodology involved systematically reducing her patients to tears. She believed that public crying was not a sign of weakness and emotional instability, but rather a healthy purging of inner turmoil and a sacred statement of communal trust to be celebrated by anyone fortunate enough to witness it. But I hated crying—here, there, anywhere. No wonder Pink only lasted three sessions.

I gulp back the tears, but George is unimpressed. “Okay, first of all, Holly, you’re still alive. All right? You didn’t die single. You didn’t even die. For God’s sake, you’re only twenty-eight. So it’s not like you can say your life ‘turned out’ like anything, because you haven’t even lived it yet.”

“Exactly,” I whimper.

“Huh?”

“I’ve got to do something, G. Before it’s too late.”

“So do something. Take action, girl!”

“But what? That’s the problem.”

“Why don’t you just try to write something?”

Just what I need to hear. “You write,” I snap, a little too cruelly. It’s a sore point for her. George has been working on the same Star Trek screenplay since our second year at Erie. By the time she gets around to finishing it, the actors who play the characters will all have boldly gone into retirement.

She twirls a dark and frizzy curl around her finger and stares down at the table.

“I’m sorry,” I say. “You’re absolutely right. I should try. I really should. But…but you know how hard it can be. It’s like, I work all day, and I finally get home and the last thing I want to do is stare all night at another screen.”

She snorts.

“TV doesn’t count.” Just try and come between me and my set.

The waitress delivers our meals and leaves before I can complain.

“This is wrong,” I whisper, knowing George will forgive me if I can make her laugh. “Didn’t I ask for chocolate? What’s the point of vanilla? Who would want a vanilla shake? It’s the complete antithesis of chocolate—it’s the absence of flavor!”

The waitress glances over at me from the cash with a dour look.

“You want me to get her back?” George giggles as she wrings every last drop of flavor from the lime wedge into her Diet Coke.

“Don’t you dare!” She knows I am deathly afraid of incurring the wrath of food-service persons. They have so much power. Complain one too many times and God only knows what might find its way into your tuna-salad sandwich.

“You’ve seen too many Datelines,” she informs me as I sullenly drink my shake.

“Hidden cameras will be America’s new conscience in the twenty-first century,” I say between slurps. Vanilla isn’t so bad, really.

“Now there’s a topic worth exploring….”

I’ve spent the past five years trying to come up with a great idea for my book, and George is always trying to help.

“Naw, it’s already been done.”

Since September 11th, countless writers have taken fear and ignorance to the bank, but I feel that people are ready for happier thoughts, instead of just another paranoid title like The Osama Next Door, or Nine Legal Ways to Watch Your Nanny, or Why Vegetables Cause Cancer. Unfortunately, though, thoughtful critiques of consumer-health alerts and diatribes decrying the end of privacy have also been done to death. But what if I incorporated those themes into a novel? Hmmm… It just might be crazy enough to work.

“Holly?”

…a sort of Bridget Jones’s Diary meets 1984 meets Dr. Atkins’ New Diet Revolution…

“Holly? Hello?” George snaps her fingers.

“Sorry,” I mumble, and promptly lose my train of thought. Ideas for my book are so exquisitely rare and delicate that the mere act of remembering them crushes their goodness into oblivion. I’ve all but resigned myself to the impossibility of writing a single word.

“You just need a little inspiration.”

“How can I get inspired when all I do is work, come home, watch TV and boink the bike messenger?”

Oops.

“Aw, tell me you’re kidding! You didn’t! Not again! Ew!”

“I did,” I reluctantly admit.

“But he’s so…he’s so…”

“Gross? It’s okay. You can say it. I know he is.”

“I knew I should have come over last night. You’re not to be trusted. How many times do I have to tell you? Holly Hastings good. Bicycle boy bad.”

“I was working late, and he was there picking something up….”

“Mmm-hmm…”

“Look, I finally finished the piece about that new parking lot on Broadway and I wanted to celebrate! Is that so wrong?” Very occasionally, when they tired of my constant begging for assignments or felt a hint of guilt after turning down yet another one of my story proposals, one of the editors will ask me to fill a few very unimportant inches, usually sandwiched on some back page between the calls to tender and the previous day’s corrections.

She peers at me skeptically. By now, George has long since inhaled her salad and has moved on to eating her dressing-on-the-side with a spoon.

“Well, I was home alone, and would have been delighted to go out for a drink.”

“Umm…didn’t you have that coven thing with your mom last night?” As the product of a mixed lesbian marriage, George was half Wiccan, half Jewish.

“Oh please, Holly.”

It was worth a shot. I knew full well that the next Wiccan day of worship wasn’t until the fall equinox.

“Okay, so maybe I just needed to be held.”

“But by Jean-Jean?”

“What can I say? I’m pathetic,” I groan. “What’s wrong with me?”

“You’re just a lonely, lonely woman. You know, I bet if you found a job you liked better, everything else would fall into place. And one that uses FedEx instead of that shitty messenger service.”

Oh, if only it were that simple.

“There’s nothing really wrong with my job. I can think of at least a half dozen people who would kill to work there. It’s me, G.I know it is! It’s like all of a sudden, I’m so bloody bored and frustrated and negative about it that I don’t know what to do with myself. And it’s not like I’d be able to find something better in Buffalo, anyway… I’d have to move to New York for that, and God knows that would be a little more than I could handle right now! Besides, I’d rather be at the Bugle even if there’s no chance of me ever getting promoted to anything, ever, than at some boring software company or bank writing internal newsletters. My job’s fine. It’s me that isn’t!”

“Well, that’s a relief. Because frankly, just being bored at work isn’t a good enough reason to drive you into the arms of Jean-Jean.”

“I’m teetering on the brink!” I shriek. “I’m playing Russian roulette with my love life…. God! I must be insane. Who knows what else I’m capable of!?”

She nods sympathetically and glances around to see if my ranting is disturbing any of the other patrons. “I know, Holly. It sucks.”

But there’s no stopping me. “You know, up until a couple of years ago, everything was fine…. I liked work. I was proud of my job. Yeah, I was! I learned something new every day, even if it was just useless stuff like how much Sabres tickets were going for, or how to spell the names of rare diseases. And you know what else? I was even able to write. Not that I always did, mind you, because usually I didn’t, but I could, you know? When I wanted to…”

“Calm down. I remember. There was that short story about the big empty house with all the locked doors and the kid with the key-shaped fingers. It was very Twilight Zone. You could have submitted that somewhere, you know. It was good. Really good.”

“You think?”

“Oh yeah.”

“Maybe I should have written a whole book of short stories,” I sigh. “It was totally my genre.”

“Still could be.”

“Don’t you ever just feel like things used to be better in general? Like weekends. Weekends used to be so much fun, remember? Clubbing Fridays and Saturdays. Sometimes even Thursdays. Waiting in line at Blaze all night. Who cares if we even got in? That was fun! Why don’t we ever do that anymore?”

“Blaze burned down. And I think you might be romanticizing things a little…. We mostly just got drunk at McGinty’s. There was never any lineup there.”

I laugh. “Probably because there were no doors on the stalls in the bathroom. What a dive! Still, it was great, wasn’t it? But now whenever we go somewhere, I feel like everyone’s five years younger than me and five times hotter and has better clothes and better jobs. Don’t you find?”

“Um, this is still Buffalo we’re talking about. You may very well have one of the best jobs in town,” she points out. “And nobody has good clothes.”

I raise an eyebrow at her.

“Except you,” she corrects herself.

“Thanks. But I have to buy everything over the Internet because you can’t find so much as a Louis Vuitton key fob in this town, not that I can afford one, anyway. I hate Buffalo, I feel like I’m over the hill at twenty-eight and…oh, screw it—I’m just going to say it. I want a boyfriend! I know it’s wrong, but I want a boyfriend. I want to be in love. So badly. It’s pathetic, I know, but I’m ready for my man. I really am. I’m tired of being above it all.”

George stares at me blankly. I’ve broken a sacred secret contract, and admitted That Which Should Never be Admitted by enlightened twenty-first-century women.

“Don’t look at me like that.”

“Sorry. I was just wondering what a key fob is.”

“I guess I thought that once I truly stopped caring about being alone, I wouldn’t have to be.”

“Like attaining nirvana the moment you shed all of your worldly concerns?”

“Exactly.”

The waitress, who has been listening in on most of our conversation, pops over to strike while the iron is hot. “Dessert, ladies?”

“Cheesecake,” I manage faintly.

“And two forks,” George adds. “You will find him, Holly. You’re both just doing your thing until you’re ready to meet, remember? And when you do, it’ll be forever. Isn’t that your theory?”

It is, but the whole Someday-My-Prince-Will-Come thing just isn’t working for me anymore. What I need is a warm body. With a heart. And a head. And a… Hell, who am I kidding? I want the whole damn package.

“All these years…” I moan weakly. “All these years, and I’ve just been sitting on the shelf, like an unwanted carton of milk about to expire.” The painful truth is that I’ve only had one long-term relationship, and that was back during my first year at Erie.

“That’s not exactly true…”

“Jim doesn’t count. Our relationship was based on a lie.”

After the crushing disappointment of graduating from high school still a virgin (I was pretty enough in a plain sort of way, just ridiculously shy around guys), I allowed myself to be tricked into a relationship with one of my brother Bradley’s loser friends. Jim was four years older than me, something that impressed me to no end, and still a virgin, too. I would later discover that as part of Bradley’s continuing efforts to get poor Jim laid, he and his friends decided I would make the perfect sacrificial lamb, since apparently none of the girls his own age would have anything to do with him and my thoughtful brother had overheard me crying to a friend about the humiliating prospect of entering college never having gotten any myself.

Bradley told me Jim liked me, and I eagerly fell in love with him before our first date. Things really blossomed from there. Jim and I were both glad to finally be having sex, so much so that he was even willing to endure the constant ribbing from his friends at not kicking me to the curb the morning after I gave it up, precisely seventy-two hours into our courtship. For my part, I was happy to overlook his dubious career goals—any job that allowed him to collect a paycheck while still being able to smoke pot all day long, a plan that came to glorious fruition in a part-time gig he landed driving one of those mini sidewalk-snow-removal buggies. Naive young thing that I was, and because Jim wasn’t exactly an evil person, I was also able to overlook those defects in his hygiene and intellect that had likely offended every other woman he’d met prior to me in order to experience the joys of couplehood for the first time.

Alas, the beautiful thing that was us casually dropped dead at a New Year’s Eve party about a year and a half into our romance, when Jim’s beer-soaked buddy Wojack marveled aloud at how much money had changed hands over the consummation of our relationship. I dumped Jim on the spot, after he high-fived Bradley instead of trying to lie his way out of it. And if I could have dumped Bradley that night, you can bet your life I would have. Making book on the Sabres was one thing, but your sister’s virginity? It’s no wonder my self-esteem’s a little shaky when it comes to men.

“The years are flying by, G. By the time someone wants me, I’ll be rotten and lumpy.”

“Lumpy’s not so bad,” George says. “I’m already lumpy.”

“But you’re good lumpy.”

My best friend’s waist-to-hip ratio is fairly generous, though it certainly doesn’t seem to bother anybody except her. When we walk down the street together, George’s jiggles and curves and curls garner far more lustful stares than my straight lines do. Still, she’s pretty timid when it comes to men, and almost completely oblivious to her effect on them. Her “sort of” boyfriend—one of our old creative-writing profs, a serial student-dater who’s been toying with her for years—isn’t helping her self-esteem much, either.

“Good lumpy? I wouldn’t go that far.” She snorts at the suggestion that such a thing might actually be possible. “I’d take an A-cup any day. You don’t know how lucky you are.”

“So why hasn’t it happened for me yet?”

The closest I’d ever come to a relationship since Jim (and now Jean-Jean, I suppose) was a string of three one-night stands with the same guy. Over the course of two semesters. He was a fairly cute bartender at a popular club just off campus—quite a coup, but I could never shake the feeling that Freddie thought I was a different person each time.

“Just give it time, Holly. It will. I promise. For both of us. And we’re in it together till then…”

At least I have that. With George around, I know I will never really be alone. We sit in silence for a bit, finishing the cheesecake. Good old cheesecake. How can you be sad when it’s giving you a great big hug from the inside?

“Maybe I just need to regroup,” I say finally. “Get a handle on things. Figure out where my life is going.”

“That’s the spirit!”

We pay the bill and head outside. It’s late August, and very, very hot. Three blocks away, the mirrored windows of the Buffalo Bugle tower shine brightly before the mostly older buildings of the city skyline. Inside, I know exactly what’s going on: absolutely nothing of any interest whatsoever. Today is exactly the same as yesterday, which was exactly the same as the day before that, and the day before that. I want to walk in the other direction.

“I haven’t taken a holiday since Christmas, you know.”

“Nobody could fault your work ethic.”

“It’s not doing me any good. Nobody notices. I’m there late all the time, working on all kinds of things that aren’t even part of my job description.”

“They notice, Holly. You’re really good at what you do. Look, call me later and we’ll figure it out. Just promise me you won’t start smoking again! At least not today…”

“Smoking, drinking, snorting—what’s the difference?” I laugh. “Remember, I know how it’s all going to end, anyway, so I may as well have a good time now. In fact, we should probably go out tonight and toast my long, lonely life. Like a premortem wake!”

“Oh, yeah!” She grins. “Now, that’s my girl!”

We part ways and George heads back toward the dingy bookshop and her own lame job, which is just as boring and futile as my own, although, it suddenly occurs to me, she never really seems to complain about it.

Fortified by diner food and the promise of a good night out, my optimism surges. And thinking about John Michael Whitney reminds me that my life—even the sad and lonely one I’d envisioned for myself that morning—reads like an absolute fairy tale. My obituary will be a call to arms; things are going to change.

Cy will have to understand. Though ground down by years of unpaid overtime, he rarely takes a day off, opting instead to live and eat and sleep in his office and take it all way too seriously. It’s not that Cy’s nasty, or even sexist—something I’d heard implied more than once by my oft-over-looked female coworkers—but he just doesn’t seem to get that not everybody can give one hundred and ten percent for $24,500 a year and no dental benefits.

“I need to take some personal time,” I tell him as soon as I get back from lunch.

Personal time, I am fully aware, does not count toward employees’ vacation time, of which I still have one week left and am hesitant to squander before Christmas. Though a right guaranteed by law, taking personal time usually imparts a faint whiff of mental instability, unless of course there’s been a death in the family. If Cy perceives my asking for it now as crazy or, even worse, frivolous or lazy, it might move me down a notch in his books, and I need him on my side if I am ever to get ahead at the Bugle.

“I see,” he says without looking up from his screen. “How much?”

“A week.”

“When?”

“Starting Monday?”

He glances at me. “That’s soon. Everything okay?”

“Yeah,” I sigh. “But I’m a bit…burned out.”

That oughta work.

Most of the senior reporters and editors I know seem to regard journalism as a sort of religion, with cynicism standing in where faith should be. It’s their lives, twenty-four/seven, and it’s easy to become weary under the weight of it all, whether you’re reporting live from the trenches of a war-torn Iraq like Christiane Amanpour or penning “The Buffalo Entertainment Beat” like the Bugle’s own Bucky Jones. In theory, it should be no different for me. Invoking a burnout, like losing the faith, is a serious admission, and one not to be taken lightly. Plus, it might even have the added benefit of suggesting to him that I take my job more seriously than I actually do.

“Okay,” Cy says. “Just get that intern whatsisname to cover you.”

“That’s all?”

“Yup. Have fun. And shut the door on your way out—I can’t seem to get a fucking moment’s peace today.”

So that’s it. I am so easily replaceable that an unpaid intern whose area of expertise is photocopying his ass is able to do my job on a moment’s notice.

I back out of his office and shut the door. His name, stenciled in stout black capitals, stares me square in the face: CY THURRELL, SENIOR ASSOCIATE EDITOR. Cy had finished school nearly two years after I did, though he was only one year younger. He’d started at the Bugle as a lowly free-lancer three years ago and moved up the ranks at the speed of light.

It has actually turned out to be a pretty big news day for Buffalo—a small warehouse fire and a hit-and-run involving a monster truck and a traffic light downtown—so the frenzied comings and goings of my coworkers are more than enough to distract me. The prospect of an accidental death or two has whipped me into stand-by mode, and I await intelligence of any fatalities with my usual combination of concerned journalistic professionalism and detached personal curiosity.

Now I suppose I should ask anyone who might find my anticipation of tragedy distasteful or inappropriate to please keep in mind that this is what I do, day in day out, and am no more eager for news of someone’s death than a garbageman is eager to see the can on the curb. But I will admit that five years at this gig may have hardened me a little to the whole concept of death and dying, to the point where I can probably think of it and speak of it with more ease than most. I consider this a blessing of sorts, since it has freed me from the usual hang-ups and sentimentality associated with the whole mess, provided the death in question is not my own, of course.

The key, in my line of work, is to strive for balance. And what could be more life-affirming than someone who makes you thank heaven you’re alive? Jesse, a reporter for the City Desk and deliverer of a crush that comes and goes, scoots over on his chair to apprise me of the situation.

“Fire’s not too bad. Team’s there now,” he says, with a crack of his gum. Normally, that sort of terse sexiness would be enough to send me into a tizzy of stuttered responses and imagined wedding-planning, but today I’m not up for it, even though he is in Abercrombie & Fitch from head to toe.