“You’re silly, you are,” his daughter said.
“Well, that, too.” He went over to her and ruffled her hair. When he looked up, he said, “Feels funny not having all that weight on my left side. I leaned away from it to keep my balance. Now I’m like this.” He mimed someone leaning back and to the right and about to topple over.
“Like not having your land legs after you’ve been at sea for a long time,” Marshall suggested.
“Just like that!” Dad sent him an admiring glance. He felt good—he didn’t win them that often. Dad went on, “You ought to be a writer or something.”
“Or something,” Marshall echoed. “Would be nice if I could make a living at it, or even come close. Janine’s making noises like I ought to get a real job.”
Playboy wandered into the front room. Here were a bunch of people who knew him. Obviously, they’d gathered together for no other purpose than stuffing him full of kitty treats. What else were humans good for? God had given them thumbs so they could open the packages He magically provided. Playboy stropped the ankles of each of them in turn. He purred like far-off thunder. The better his routine, the more he got fed.
Marshall petted Playboy but didn’t reach for the goodies. He wished they hadn’t named the cat after his big sale. Every time he saw the fuzzy beast, he got reminded he hadn’t made another big sale any time lately.
“Can I, Mommy?” Deborah asked.
“Okay, but only two,” Kelly said. Deborah fed Playboy. He inhaled the treats and then beat it. Now that the humans had done what he wanted, he didn’t need them any more. Till the next time.
“What kind of real job would you get?” Dad asked.
“She’s talking about something in, like, advertising,” Marshall said. “By now, I’ve sold enough stuff that I’ve got kind of a résumé.”
“Yeah, you would, wouldn’t you?” Dad said thoughtfully. When he looked at a problem, he eyeballed it carefully and from all sides. He looked at it like a cop working on a case, in other words. “Job market’s not what you’d call great, but selling a bunch of stories could make you stick out—and that’s what you want. Nothing wrong with a regular paycheck, either.”
“I know.” Marshall also knew he wouldn’t have passed his thirtieth birthday without ever getting one if not for the kindness of family and lover. Even so… “I’d rather go on doing what I’ve been doing.”
“If you’re gonna do that, you’ve got to find a way to make it pay more,” Dad said.
“We talked about novels a while ago,” Kelly said. “Novels pay better than short stories, huh?”
They had indeed talked about them. Marshall had thought about tackling one more than once, in fact. Every time he did, the amount of work involved, and the effort to keep all his balls in the air and make everything come out the way he wanted it to, scared him too much to let him keep going. So he said, “Yeah, they do,” and left it there.
“You’ve got some chops now,” Dad observed. “When you try to sell a novel, you can say you’ve had stories here and there and in Playboy. You’re not Joe Shmo who doesn’t necessarily know the alphabet all the way through.”
“I guess,” Marshall said. He’d still be trying to crawl out of the primordial slush pile. But his father had a point. He wouldn’t be bubbling up from the reeking ooze at the bottom of that pile.
“And,” Kelly said shrewdly, “if you can sell a novel or two, it may keep you from trying to write chewing-gum ads or whatever.”
Somebody had to write chewing-gum ads. Otherwise, there wouldn’t be any. What would happen to chewing gum then? No one wanted to find out. But Marshall would have bet that whoever did write those ads didn’t come home from the office feeling proud of himself for having done something cool every day. More likely, the guy gulped a slug of Old Overshoes and figured Well, okay, two more weeks and we can afford to fix the roof.
Next to that existential—not despair, but resignation, which might have been worse—wasn’t the fear of jumping in over your head by starting a novel a small thing? Mm, not a small thing, but a smaller thing? “Mm, maybe,” Marshall said, as much to himself as to his father and stepmom.
When Vanessa got to the bus to head for another delightful day at the widget works, the driver handed her a small sheet of paper. He had a little pile of them near the fare box; he was giving one to everybody who boarded.
Vanessa sat down in the first empty seat and read hers. Due to budget constraints, the number of buses traveling each route on a daily basis must be reduced. Effective November 15, the following schedule for this route will be implemented. If this is impactful on your commute, the inconvenience is apologized for. Should more funding become available, we will attempt to facilitate a restoration of service.
Calling the writing wretched gave it the benefit of the doubt. The bureaucrat who’d cranked it out must have grown up without a native language. If Vanessa thought that was bad, she let out a yelp of pure horror when she looked at the new schedule. Seeing the Mummy or the Wolfman couldn’t have dismayed her nearly so much.
This bus got her to work about a quarter past eight, which was okay. After November 15, it would go the way of the dodo and of Yellowstone National Park, though less spectacularly than the latter. There would be one that got her to work a little before seven, and one that got her there going on ten. No happy medium.
“Man, this sucks!” That wasn’t her; it was the African-American woman who’d got on right after her. But she couldn’t have put it better herself.
Several people swore at the driver. “It ain’t my fault,” he said. “They gonna cut my pay, too, on account of I ain’t drivin’ as much.”
“That’s terrible! You ought to sue them,” Vanessa exclaimed. She leaped as passionately into causes as she did into everything else.
“Not me. I ain’t suin’ nobody.” The driver shook his head. “I got two little kids. Ain’t gonna do nothin’ to mess with my job, not when I got them rugrats to feed.” Vanessa had no answer to that. She thought children were a ball and chain, but she didn’t suppose the bus driver would want to hear her say so.
When she got to the widget works, she showed Mr. Gorczany the bus-schedule change sheet. “Can I change my hours so I can still ride in?” she asked. “Earlier or later—whichever you’d rather.”
Her boss pooched out his lower lip like a spoiled little boy. “That would be inconvenient, because you wouldn’t be interfacing with the rest of the staff as much,” he said.
She hadn’t thought anyone used that stupid piece of jargon any more. She’d underestimated him. “I don’t think I’ll be the only one the new schedule affects,” she answered. Try as she might, she couldn’t make herself say impacts, much less impactful.
“Well, let’s examine some alternative choices,” Nick Gorczany said redundantly. “Could you drive in?”
That was straightforward enough. It was also more than clueless enough. “Could you double my pay?” Vanessa blurted. He still tooled around in his BMW. Did he think everybody else was made of money, too?
“No,” he said, which was also straightforward enough. “Could you ride a bicycle? Most people seem to have bicycles these days.”
“I have a bike. I could ride it in, I guess, but it would be a pain,” Vanessa said. “I don’t live real close to here. That’s why I take the bus.”
“Well, let’s see what we can work out. I don’t want to inconvenience you too much, but I don’t want to impair our efficiency, either,” he said. The haggle that followed would have made a secondhand-parts dealer in Lagos jealous. They finally agreed she would ride her bike Monday, Wednesday, and Friday of one week and Tuesday and Thursday of the next, taking the bus and coming in early on the days when she didn’t ride. It was a fifty-fifty split between what she wanted and what he wanted, in other words.