By Any Other Name(7)

“Brilliantly.” I take out my phone to show her the photo I’d taken earlier for Alix. This picture is worth a thousand of the words I’m too nervous now to say.

“I wish I could make it,” Sue says.

“We’ll splash the launch all over social media. It’ll be like you were there.”

Sue smiles cryptically at the image going black on my cell phone before looking directly at me. The smile fades.

“Listen, Lanie,” she begins, “what I’m about to say isn’t going to be easy for you.”

I hold my breath, gripping my armrests. If she fires me, I honestly don’t know what I’ll do. Ryan tells me all the time how many jobs there are out there that I’d be great at, but that’s because he wants me to move to D.C. I don’t want another job. I want this one.

Sue opens a folder on her lap, flips through a few pages. Torturing me.

“Shoot. It’s not here.” She rises and goes to the door, sounding slightly piqued. “Frank? The document?”

There’s scuffling outside and Frank’s apologetic murmurs. While Sue waits at the door, I look away, as from a surgeon about to amputate one of my limbs. I face her oversized windows and watch the snow falling on the café awning across the street.

And of course, this is the view I’d have while getting fired. That café is the place where I got this job, seven years ago.

I was twenty-two, just out of college, and wildly optimistic. The week before graduation I had come across a job posting online:

Editorial Assistant, Peony Press.

By then, I was an English minor, but for all intents and purposes, still pre-med. In an instant, my plans to move home and spend the summer studying for the MCAT? Poof. Gone. This was a sign. I was never meant to be a doctor. I was on this earth to bring more stories like Ninety-Nine Things into the world.

I took a Greyhound up to New York. I slept on friends’ parents’ couches in various boroughs, and waitressed at a Greek diner while I waited for Peony Press to call.

They didn’t. Nor did any of the other publishers where I applied for jobs.

By September, my couch prospects and my dad’s patience ran out in the form of a plane ticket home. The day before my flight back to Atlanta, a visitor arrived in Queens. I stood on my friend Ravi’s mom’s fire escape, squinting into hazy sun at what appeared to be my grandmother.

Lest any cookie-baking, tissue-up-the-sleeve images form in your mind, let me set you straight: My bubby Dora is a fighter. She survived Auschwitz, and after her family immigrated to America, she became one of three women in her graduating class at Yale School of Medicine. When she gave me The Talk in eighth grade, it was a weekend-long celebration, culminating in popcorn and a screening of Dangerous Liaisons. For as long as I can remember BD has drunk exclusively from a coffee mug that reads BADASS MOTHERFUCKER.

“Which way is this Peony Press?” she called up to me on the fire escape.

“That depends. Do you have a bomb?”

“Darling, I’m wearing Chanel. It doesn’t really go.” My grandmother jerked a thumb at the idling taxi behind her. “I’ve got this very handsome gentleman waiting to take us there, so please come down. We’ll wave goodbye to the one that got away, I’ll buy you a martini, and tomorrow, I’ll take you home.”

We sat for hours at the café across the street from Peony’s office. She told me the same stories that never got old about my mom when she’d been twenty-two. She was adding new details, things I didn’t know about the time Mom skipped her graduation to see Prince on his Purple Rain tour—when I realized there was something I had never asked my grandmother.

“BD.” I brought out my old copy of Ninety-Nine Things from my canvas bag. I’d kept it with me, like a totem, ever since I’d come to New York. “Do you remember what Mom said to me right before she died?”

“You could fill a book with all the things I don’t remember, honey,” she said, but with that little wink that let me know she did remember, only she wanted me to tell the tale.

“She said she wanted me to find someone I really, really loved. But she didn’t say how. Or when. I just can’t figure out if I’m going about it—my life—in the right way.”

“If I could solve the mystery for you, I would,” she said, patting my cheek, “but then, what the hell would the fun of life be?”

I knew she was right, annoying as it was. BD took a picture of me holding the book, with the Peony office through the window in the background.

“One day,” she said, “in the comfort of your unknowable future, you’ll look at this picture, and you’ll be glad we took it today.”

And that was when Alix de Rue stepped into the café for a decaf cappuccino.

I recognized her from the photograph accompanying the only interview I’d found online related to Noa Callaway. She was five feet tall in kitten heels with a short blond bob, glossy lips, and a giant purple scarf. I nudged BD.

“That’s the one who got away.”

“The editor?” BD gasped. “Go talk to her.”

“Hell no.”

“If you don’t, I will,” BD said. She was one large dirty martini in. “I’d hate to see you lose the job to me.”

I downed the cold rest of my coffee and stood up. “You’re right. That would suck.”