Who is Maud Dixon?(14)

The family got off at Lexington and disappeared into a doctor’s suite on Eight-Seventh Street. Florence forced herself to wait a full minute before following them in.

“Can I help you?” A fortyish woman with bleached blond hair smiled at her expectantly from behind the reception desk. Florence glanced at the pamphlets in front of her. She was in an orthodontist’s office.

“Um, I have an appointment with Dr. Carlson?” she said. Dr. Carlson was the name of her dentist growing up.

“I’m sorry, there’s no one here by that name.”

“Oh. Hm. Do you mind if I just sit for a second and check my email? I have his information in here somewhere.”

The receptionist smiled and nodded.

Florence sat across from Ingrid and the girls. They had briefly fallen silent during Florence’s exchange with the receptionist, but Tabitha started talking again.

Florence scrolled through her phone and listened to the child tell a dull story about gym class.

Then Ingrid’s phone rang and she said, “Hang on, goose, I have to take this.”

She swiped the screen. “Hi, David.” Florence could hear a man’s tinny sing-song through the phone. Then Ingrid cut in: “That’s absurd. I’m not doing that…No…No…Well, let’s try to get someone else then…She did that show about felons?…Yeah, that’s a good idea. Alright, call me back.”

Ingrid hung up and sighed. She made eye contact with Florence and rolled her eyes. “Sorry about that.”

“That’s alright.” Then Florence added, “You have a lovely family.”

“Thank you,” Ingrid replied with a pleased smile, turning it on her girls one after the other.

At the sight of Ingrid’s white, even teeth, Florence pressed her lips together, suddenly ashamed of her crooked smile. She’d never been to an orthodontist. She forced herself to rise from the couch and surrender the warmth of the waiting room.

Outside, it was turning dark and a cold rain had begun to fall. She was tempted to wait for Simon’s family to emerge, so she could follow them home, but she didn’t want Ingrid to think she was stalking her. Besides, she had to get back to work. When she’d told Agatha that she was getting a cavity filled—she’d claimed an appointment for a dental exam last week—Agatha hadn’t received the news as serenely as she had in the past. She had a tendency toward passive aggression that Florence didn’t understand—she was already in a position of power; why didn’t she just use it to ask for what she wanted? Instead, she had dropped a manuscript loudly on Florence’s desk before she left for lunch and asked for her thoughts by the following morning, adding pointedly, “if you can find the time.”

This performance was obviously supposed to generate a feeling of contrition in Florence, or at the very least a small quiver of anxiety. But she felt neither. Instead, she felt oppressed by Agatha’s utterly commonplace expectations—email X, call Y—as if Florence were any low-level flack. She wanted to take those expectations and twist them like a pinkie finger until they snapped.

This was not the job, or the life, she wanted—which was precisely what Vera had been telling her for years.

Florence had thought Vera would be appeased after she landed the position at Forrester. Instead, she’d asked, with extra-sibilant force: “An assistant? Like a secretary?” Florence had tried to explain that this was the way things worked, that everyone in the literary world started out as an editorial assistant, but it was useless once her mother also found out that she would be making less money than Vera herself did.

And so the tension between mother and daughter had continued to escalate with every conversation. Florence felt like she was running a Ponzi scheme: Vera demanding an immediate return on her investment, and Florence paying her down as best she could in tiny installments of affection and apologies, biding her time until she could scrounge up the capital she owed.

But perhaps she had absorbed more of her mother’s impatience than she thought.





9.



A few weeks later, Florence was on the elevator heading to work when Simon stuck his hand in the door just as it was about to close. He hesitated a moment when he saw her, like he wished he hadn’t caught it after all, and then Florence saw why. Ingrid was with him. He recovered and said, “Hello, Florence. All’s well?”

“Fine, thank you,” she said. Ingrid stood with the expectant smile of a woman waiting to be introduced.

“Right,” said Simon. “Have you met my wife? Florence, Ingrid Thorne. Ingrid, this is Florence Darrow, one of our most promising editorial assistants.”

“Pleasure,” Ingrid said, with a very firm handshake. She didn’t seem to recognize her from the orthodontist’s office. “I have a shirt just like that.”

“Oh, really?” Florence blushed. She’d bought it after seeing Ingrid’s.

Simon cleared his throat and said in response to a question that no one had asked, “Yes, well, Ingrid is actually here to meet a friend of yours. Amanda Lincoln.”

“Amanda?”

“I slipped her a copy of Amanda’s manuscript, and she thought she might be interested in turning it into a film. Trying her hand at producing.”

“Amanda’s manuscript?”