By Any Other Name(2)

“Zany Lanie.” Joe from our mailroom pops his head inside my office and gives me an air fist bump.

“Joe, my bro,” I quip back automatically, as I’ve been doing every day for the past seven years. “Hey, perfect timing—have you seen four big boxes of signed books arrive from Noa Callaway’s office?”

“Sorry.” He shakes his head. “Just this for you.”

As Joe sets down a stack of mail on my desk, I fire off a diplomatic text to Noa Callaway’s longtime assistant, and my occasional nemesis, Terry.

Terry is seventy, steel-haired, tanklike, and ever ready to shut down any request that might interfere with Noa’s process. Meg and I call her the Terrier because she barks but rarely bites. It’s always iffy whether simple things—like getting Noa to sign a couple hundred books for an event—will actually get done.

It will be a travesty if our guests go home tonight without a copy of Noa’s new book. I can feel them out there, two hundred and sixty-six Noa Callaway fans, all along the Northeast Corridor, from Pawtucket, Rhode Island, to Wynnewood, Pennsylvania. They are taking off work two hours early, confirming babysitters, venmoing dog walkers. They are dropboxing Monday’s presentation and rummaging through drawers for unripped tights while toddlers cling to their legs. In a dozen different ways, these intrepid ladies are getting shit done so they can take a night for themselves. So they can train to the Hotel Shivani and be among the first to get their hands on Two Hundred and Sixty-Six Vows.

I think it’s Noa’s best book yet.

The story takes place at a destination wedding over Valentine’s Day weekend. On a whim, the bride invites the full wedding party to stand up and renew their own vows—to a spouse, to a friend, to a pet, to the universe . . . with disastrous results. It’s moving and funny, meta and of-the-moment, the way Noa’s books always are.

The fact that the novel ends with a steamy scene on a Positano beach is just one more reason I know Noa Callaway and I are psychically connected. Family legend has it that my mother was conceived on a beach in Positano, and while that might not seem like information most kids would cherish knowing, I was raised in part by my grandmother, who defines the term sex-positive.

I’ve always wanted to visit Positano. Vows makes me feel almost like I have.

I check my phone for a response from Terry about the signed books. Nothing. I can’t let Noa’s readers down tonight. Especially because Two Hundred and Sixty-Six Vows may be the last Noa Callaway book they get to read for a while. . . .

Our biggest author is four months late delivering her next manuscript. Four unprecedented months late.

After a decade of delivering a book each year, the prolific Noa Callaway suddenly seems to have no plans of turning in her next draft. My attempts to get past Terry and connect with Noa have been fruitless. It’s only a matter of time before our production department expects me to turn over a tightly edited—and nonexistent—manuscript.

But that’s a panic attack for another day. Alix is due back from maternity leave next week, and the pressure will be on.

I’m flipping through my mail, waiting impatiently for Terry’s response, knowing I need to get down to the venue—when my hands find a little brown box in the middle of the mail Joe delivered. It’s no bigger than a deck of cards. My distracted mind recognizes the return address and I gasp.

It’s the Valentine’s gift I had handmade for my fiancé, Ryan. I unwrap the paper, slide open the box, and smile.

The polished wood square is pale and smooth, about the size and thickness of a credit card. It unfolds like an accordion, revealing three panels. In fine calligraphy is The List I made long ago. It’s all the attributes I wanted to find in the person I’d fall in love with. It’s my Ninety-Nine Things List, and Ryan checks off every one.

I’ve been told that most girls learn about love from their moms. But the summer I turned ten and my brother, David, was twelve, my mom was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma. She went fast, which everyone says is a mercy, but it isn’t. It just about killed my oncologist father that even he couldn’t save her.

My mom was a pharmacoepidemiologist on the board of the National Academy of Medicine. She used to fly all over the world, sharing stages with Melinda Gates and Tony Fauci, giving speeches on infectious diseases at the CDC and WHO. She was brilliant but also warm and funny. She could be tough, but she also knew how to make everyone feel special, seen.

She died on a Tuesday. It was raining out the hospital window, and her hand seemed smaller than mine. I held it as she razzed me for the last time.

“Just don’t be a dermatologist.”

(When you’re born into generations of doctors, you make jokes about imagined medical hierarchies.)

“I hear there’s good money in it,” I said. “And the hours.”

“Can’t beat the hours.” She smiled at me. Her eyes were the same blue as mine, everybody said. We used to have the same thick, straight brown hair, too, but in so many ways, my mom didn’t look like my mom anymore.

“Lanie?” Her voice had gone softer and yet more intense. “Promise me,” she said. “Promise to find someone you really, really love.”

My mother liked overachievers. And she seemed to be asking, with her final words, for me to overachieve in love. But how? When your mom dies and you are young, the worst part is that you know there’s all this stuff you’ll need to know, and now who’s going to teach you?