Breakfast and absolution.
“You are the effing best,” I told her sincerely.
Barbara never stopped typing, but the smug expression on her face was one of the friendliest I’d seen.
Gatt spewed a string of common and colorful obscenities as soon as I opened the door. He summed up, “Are you insane?”
“I had no idea you were in this early, Gatt. Satellites don’t wait.”
“Bullshit! Nothing gets sent unless I approve it.” He waved the remote in the direction of the largest monitor. The screen was paused over the last few seconds of my piece. It must be running on the in-house channel. Without Gatt doing anything the image suddenly reversed and played again. He clicked on the audio.
“…where some mystery always remains.”
“What the hell does that mean? Where’s the auto-shit? Where’s the erotic stuff? All I see are a bunch of kids playing with the wash.”
“Did you watch the piece from the beginning?” I propped my butt on the arm of a chair. Two all-nighters in a row; I was trashed. If I sat down now, I might not get up again.
“No, I haven’t watched the piece. Because you didn’t bother to show it to me. But I know this is not what we discussed.”
“It’s good stuff.”
“Not for pre-prime, it isn’t. Not against game shows.”
“It’s six minutes of programming, Gatt,” I snapped back. “I’m sure network has other material that can conquer the game show.”
“I want to see it. Now. And I may have changes. So you’d better stick your ass to the chair and see what happens next.”
I could see daylight through the window. The view was exactly the same as a week ago-parking lot to weed field to pasture. Today though, I wasn’t looking at a horizon line. I was looking at a time line. Present and past laid flat, right in front of me. The rest of my life started now.
“What are you worried about, Gatt?” I had switched to crisis calm, but sales-mode was hard to muster. The protective shell hadn’t hardened over my work yet. I picked up a pencil and a piece of scrap paper lying on Gatt’s enormous desk. “I’m telling you this piece has class. It’s mysterious. It’s metaphysical. It’s tragic. The target demographics are going to eat it up.”
“Network is not ‘eating it up’ after that pitch you fed them.” Gatt dug inside his desk drawer for a fistful of sweetener. He ripped half a dozen sugar packets clean through the middle. Sugar crystals exploded all over his desk. Some of them must have made it into his cup. He gulped a swallow followed by, “Jesus God, I hate freelancers.”
“You saw most of the raw stock before I cut it together. Give me some credit.” I rolled my neck and got a sound like something breaking. Deliberately, I jotted a short message on the scrap paper. “You’re pissed at me because your nephew got his fingers burned.”
“Bullshit!” he countered. There was a growing sheen to his head which was pumping red and white flashes of furious blood to his skin. “You should have shown me the finished version before you released it. Simple courtesy, even if nothing had changed. Those guys at network are going to want your ass on a platter now. Your problem is you want it both ways. You want a team position but you act like a freelancer. Here today-gone tomorrow. No respect for the team!”
Same theme, new variation. “I’ve been up two days, Gatt. Speaking of bullshit, I’m too tired to take this right now.” I stood up.
“You walk out that door, don’t think you’re coming back.”
“No, I don’t think I am.” I pushed the note across the desk. Signed and dated, it read simply, I resign.
I turned around and Ainsley was standing in the doorway, wearing his goofiest grin, carrying a VHS cassette pinched between his bandaged fingers. His face was pale, his eyes glassy, and he had a hint of manic vibration about him. Six or seven hours in the booth, running on nothing but deadline adrenaline and diet pop, and my college boy was still standing. Don’t ask me why, but I felt a little flash of pride.
Ainsley tilted his head to see around me. “Seen the story yet, Uncle Rich? It’s great.”
Gatt couldn’t speak. He pointed. His eyebrows twitched. His nostrils flared.
“Go ahead and show him,” I told Ainsley. “I’m gone.”
4:23:51 p.m.
I begged a ride off the mailroom courier to pick up the Subaru. Then drove back to the hospital, waited around for the doctor’s discharge and suffered through forty minutes of paperwork, wherein I promised to turn my entire self over to accounts receivable for parts if I forfeited on my bill.
Tonya kissed us both goodbye and went back to the city. Jenny cried.
“I’ll be back on the weekend, honey. You can count on it.” Tonya always knew the right thing to say. For both of us.
At last, Jenny and I were on the way home. It was a quiet drive. We hadn’t really been alone together since I’d shipped her off to school on Monday. The silence swirled between us, warping into an emotional black hole that sucked my energy. I wanted to pull over and slump into a long, dark nap.
I’m in this for the long haul, I reminded myself. Consider Jenny first.
As we pulled into the garage, I looked for her face in the rearview mirror. “Home at last.”
“Yeah,” she said. She didn’t sound convinced. She climbed out of the car and into the house without a glance back. It took me longer to gather up the sack of stuff from the hospital and my camera bag.
“Remember that guy we met at the picnic on Sunday-Sheriff Curzon?” I followed her inside the house. “He’s supposed to stop by later. Maybe share a pizza…what?”
She stood stock still, four feet inside the doorway. I almost stepped on her.
When she tipped her head to look up at me, I could see her eyes had dilated, the black iris swallowing up the lighter brown of her eyes. Her lips moved barely making words.
“What?”
“Someone’s here,” she whispered.
My first instinct was straight out of a bad TV movie. “Don’t be silly.” We were only four feet inside the door. They’d told me Jenny might be jittery coming home, but this was more than I expected.
“Someone’s in the house?”
Her head bobbed up and down, fast. “The TV was on when I first came in,” she said. “And the light, too. But they turned off when I opened the door.”
It sounded a little too specific to be a hallucination. I pushed her behind me.
“I put the lights on timers, remember? Wait here. I’ll check it out. Stay by the door.”
“No!” She grabbed my wrist.
“Jenny, calm down, babe. You don’t want to wait?”
She shook her head.
“You want to come?”
Nod.
No one could be in the house. The fact that my heart was beating twenty percent faster was my irrational need for excitement.
I dropped all the junk I was carrying and took Jenny’s cold hand in my warm, moist one. I led her over to the closet, quietly opened the door and removed the midwest girl’s weapon of choice-a solid oak, regulation, Louisville slugger.
In sixteen-inch softball, the balls aren’t the only things that run bigger.
Jenny appeared suitably impressed.
“Stay behind me,” I said. “But watch my bat.”
The main rooms of the house made a loop-entrance area to living room, family room, kitchen, dining room and back to the front. A hall off the living room led to the bedrooms. The garage led straight into the kitchen eating space. We walked all the way around the house once, turning on all the lights, before I said, “All clear.”
“Let’s check the bedrooms,” she whispered. “Just in case.”
Right. We walked up the hall and checked the bedrooms, too. Nothing.