Today Will Be Different(29)

“Oh. Joyce will know.”

“Joyce?”

“Joyce Primm,” I said. “My editor. Let me speak with her.”

“Um, Joyce Primm isn’t with Burton Hill anymore.”

So that’s why Joyce had been calling, to tell me she was going to another publisher.

“Where did she land?” I asked.

“At a cheese shop in Nyack.”

“Oh.”

“I heard it’s a really good cheese shop,” Camryn offered.

So it hadn’t been Joyce Primm calling. My phone just thought so because I’d entered Burton Hill’s main number in my address book.

What a singular sensation, to have the facts of my career unraveling and raveling back up all at the same time.

“And, so, my book?” I asked.

“The Flood Girls?” she said. “It was kind of due eight years ago?”*

“Are you my new editor?”

“I edit YA.”

“YA graphic novels? I’m sorry. I’m confused.”

“We’re not doing a lot of graphic novels anymore,” Camryn said. “They were big ten years ago but we got burned by a few. You know, Joyce and her cheese shop.”

“So you’re saying my book is canceled?” I said. “You’re just going to eat my advance?”

“I suppose we could sue you?” she said helpfully.

“That’s okay.”

“I feel bad,” Camryn said. “Maybe this is a conversation you should be having with your agent. Who’s your agent?”

“Sheridan Smith,” I said.

“Right.”

“What?”

“Someone said she’s a homeopath in Colorado.”

“She is?”

“Publishing,” Camryn said. “You might have heard. We’ve been going through a rough patch.”

“Gee.”

“You can still write your book,” she said sweetly. “It probably just won’t be for us. Oh!” She’d almost forgotten. “This file. I’m not sure if you want us to send it to you. Looks like contracts, correspondence, a Christmas card you drew for Joyce where instead of reindeer it’s the Looper Wash ponies and instead of Santa it’s that guy with the thing whose name I can’t remember—”

I hung up and dropped my phone into the bait bucket.

I sensed a strong gaze. The Native American.

“Bad call?” he said.

“Bad call,” I said, and walked away.





My oxfords crunched up the sculpture garden path toward the glass pavilion. My body was numb and made of feathers. People and sculptures grew denser until I was in thick with picnickers packing up, mothers chasing toddlers, tourists posing, the spindly legs of the red Calder spaceship teetering.

Oof. I was on the grass. I’d tripped on an outdoor light.


“I need help.”

It was a story Joe once told. He was in Indianapolis for the NFL Combine and he’d gotten food poisoning. He’d spent all night on the tile floor of his hotel bathroom burning with fever. Vomit, sweat, diarrhea: name an orifice, there was something coming out of it. He found himself moaning, “I need help. Someone help me.” As a doctor, Joe knew he didn’t need help. His body simply had a bug and the quicker he expelled it, the better. But he found himself “made better in another way” by the act of repeating those words. “I need help. Somebody help me.” He said them over and over until he started laughing. The next morning at breakfast he overheard people at the buffet. “Did you hear that poor f*cker last night? I hope somebody helped him.”

I hated that story. Joe was my Competent Traveler. He wasn’t the one who laughed naked on the shower floor of a Holiday Inn Express. He didn’t cry out helplessly to no one.

I’d forced myself to forget the whole episode. Until now.


I picked myself up off the grass. I sprinted the rest of the way, a bead of red running down my shin.

The glass of the pavilion was pure reflection. Orange the color of the birch leaves. Flat-bottomed clouds skipped across the sky. In a patch of inky ocean, I could make out Spencer standing with his back to me.

A sign: CLOSED FOR INSTALLATION. The door was propped open.

Spencer conferred with a gaggle of art types, at their feet a patchwork of furniture pads. Men in blue rubber gloves. The guy from before, still with the level in his teeth. An older woman with wild gray hair and harlequin-patterned tights spoke with her hands. Spencer noticed me over his shoulder. He shot me a very annoyed look.

Annoyance! How quaint!

I spotted Timby in the corner, legs folded impossibly underneath him, examining with quiet concentration the contents of my purse.

Timby with his pinch pots and darling belly and paper airplanes and backward Ys and his love of winter and carbs and walking sticks and his scavenging for clues to help him better understand the screwy adult world. Timby, it’s not your fault my mother died when I was your age. You don’t know that all the time you have with me from now on is a gift. It’s not your fault I can’t absorb that lesson myself. That I’m cobbled together from broken promises of jigsaw puzzles never started and pot-holder kits unopened. That’s why Timby reads Archie! It’s a steady group of characters behaving predictably. It’s a world with the guarantee of small-scale problems. How do I break it to you that people aren’t predictable? That life is confounding and sadistic in its cruelty? That when things go your way, it never makes you as happy as you’d expected, but when things go against you, it’s a cold-water jolt, an unshakable outrage that dogs you forever. But I can be steady. I will show you kindness and bring you snow— “Mom?” In Timby’s hand was the ring of keys with the lanyard of baby blocks.