I wake with a splitting headache. There’s no way I’m hungover—I might be a lightweight, but my five sips of liquor last night couldn’t have made quite this impression.
No, this is a kind of headache I am all too familiar with: caffeine withdrawal.
Before I collapsed into my freshly laundered hotel bedding last night, I’d turned off my alarm, cranked my volume up all the way—in case Margaret decided to call—and shut the blackout curtains.
The clock on the bedside table reads 9:32 a.m. A full hour later than my usual first cup of espresso. I stumble out of bed and throw open the drapes to find brilliant sunlight, a clear blue sky, and turquoise waves crashing against the shore below.
It’s interesting that Margaret’s property is on the far side of the island, backing up toward the marshy waterway that separates Little Crescent from mainland Georgia, rather than out here, where—judging by the string of resorts near the main drag and the mansions farther to the east and west—all the tourists and the millionaires seem to favor.
Maybe that’s because she wants to avoid people, or maybe there’s more to it than that. Either way, I make a note in my phone to add it to the list of questions I’ll ask if and when she agrees to the book.
The last note I made, sometime late last night, reads play with structure??? After several seconds of casting my mind backward, I remember what I was talking about.
The idea came from Our Friend Len, Hayden’s book.
Len Stirling had decided to authorize the biography shortly after his dementia diagnosis. He’d hoped it could help slow the progress of the disease, but more than that, he thought it would be a comfort to his family and friends after he’d gone. Not died, necessarily, but lost his memory of them.
Hayden had told the story in reverse, each section focusing on the Len of a different era as his short-term memory faded, and then, gradually, his old memories too.
In one of their final conversations in which Len remembered Hayden, he’d shared his fear of losing himself, of reaching the point where not only did he not recognize his old band, or his wife, or his daughters, but he no longer knew who he was.
Hayden had asked Len what he ought to tell him, if Len should ever ask the question Who am I?
And in a way, that question had been the scaffolding for the whole book, the thesis of who, ultimately, is the legendary Len Stirling. What, in the end, matters most about a person’s identity.
After some thought, Len had answered Hayden, “Tell me I’m your friend Len.”
By then they’d been working on the book for four years, only Len’s manager and most intimate acquaintances aware of the diagnosis that led to it.
And that final section, the portion of the book concerned with Len’s childhood in the Mississippi Delta, beautifully stripped away the legend and the mythos to present just that: a loving portrait of a friend, of a boy who’d rescued snakes from torture at the hands of the neighborhood kids, one who’d hung his head in shame after shoplifting taffy on his younger brother’s birthday, a more human Len than he’d probably gotten to be in a long time.
Obviously, I wouldn’t emulate the structure for Margaret’s book, but finding some other device like that might help to achieve something similar, to scrape away all the labels and rumors and stories piled atop this person and reveal the person herself.
Before I can think through it any further, though, I’ll need coffee.
I take a quick shower and get dressed: a pink skirt that’s technically a tiny bit too short, big watermelon earrings, and a white knit top. I step into my sandals; grab my purse, sunglasses, and room key; and step out into the cool, breezy morning, a layer of salt coating my skin almost instantly.
I jog down the steps and get into my car. I grabbed a coffee at Main Street Bean yesterday before my meeting with Margaret, and it left a lot to be desired, but I found a spot online with rave reviews, a ways back toward the bridge to the mainland.
Punching the name of it—Little Croissant—into my phone, I start the car. The Cranberries song I was listening to on the way home from Margaret’s yesterday automatically starts playing, and I crank my windows down as I pull out of the hotel’s parking lot.
Within a few minutes, the palm trees that dot the road at regular intervals are replaced by more wild foliage: cypress and live oak and massive century plants, the shaggy grass beneath them dappled in shadow by the rising sun.
I take a left onto the four-lane road that heads out of town and off island, eyes darting from the GPS to the narrow cross streets as I pass them.
Ahead, a wide dirt turnoff flanked in more palm appears, a grid of candy-colored wooden signs posted there beneath a larger sign for the Little Crescent Enclave.
Little Croissant Coffee Bar
Two Dudes Pizza
Turquoise Turtle Antiques
Esmeralda’s Fine Art & Jewelry
Sisters o’ the Sea
Booze Hound
I turn down the drive and find myself hemmed in by twin rows of squat shops, each as brightly painted as its respective sign. Both sides of the enclave are built atop graying wooden platforms—protection against flooding—and every single shop has its door(s) propped open, shoppers milling in and out with coffee cups in hand.
The road ends in a round, white-graveled parking lot, a huge gnarled tree at its center, and I take the closest spot I can find, leaving the windows open so the car doesn’t bake. I hop out, admiring the charming little nook tucked away by woods for a moment before picking my way toward Little Croissant.
The line is all the way down the platform steps, but it takes only a few minutes for me to put in my order, and since I’m just getting drip coffee, I’m waiting only a moment beneath the upper seating area’s sun-sails (there’s also a stone patio down off the side of the platform) before the teenage barista at the shack’s serving window calls my name.
“Thanks!” I call inside as I grab the cup.
Two decades’ worth of tongue burns, and I still haven’t learned to be cautious with that first sip, which is why I find myself with a very full mouth of something that is definitely not coffee, and thus somewhat disgusting.
I almost spit it out, but at the last conceivable second force myself to just hold it in my mouth long enough to turn the cup around and read the name and order scratched on its side.
Green tea. (Instantly less disgusting now that I know this.)
Hayden. (Instantly more embarrassing.)
“This must be yours then,” a low, rumbling voice says behind me, and I turn to find a large expanse of chest in front of me, a gray Purdue T-shirt clinging damply to it.
My head tips up past a collarbone, Adam’s apple, and strong jaw to an angular nose and glowering light brown eyes.
It’s a marvel I remember to swallow the gulp of tea before blurting, “Why are you so wet?”
His glower deepens as he holds the paper cup in his hand out to me, my name clearly written on the side. “It’s called sweat. It happens when you run.”
I take the cup and pass the one in my hand to him. “What were you running from?” I ask guilelessly.
“Boredom,” he says dryly. “And sloth.”
“I had no idea there were sloths here!”
He stares at me, trying to determine whether I’m serious. I feel my smile growing.
Either way, he doesn’t get the chance to acknowledge what I said, because his watch starts ringing with a phone call. He eyes the screen, and I see something like satisfaction flare in his eyes before he drops his arm and meets my gaze again. “I’ll leave you to your morning,” he says curtly, and turns, tapping the call over to his earbuds as he stalks down the steps toward the lot.
“See you around!” I shout after him, forcing myself not to check out his butt. Or legs. Or back.
He glances over his shoulder as if reading my thoughts, and I look away right as I hear him answer the call: “Ms. Ives, hi.”
I tell myself that her calling him first is a good thing.
Obviously she’d want to get not-quite-firing-but-definitely-not-hiring one of us out of the way before sharing the good news.
But still my heart is in my throat the whole drive back to the hotel, and singing along at the top of my lungs to “Linger” feels less celebratory than desperate. Like doing jumping jacks to stem off a panic attack.
It will be okay, I promise myself. Either way, it will be okay.
I’ve been through way worse than losing out on a dream job. And since I barely told anyone aside from my literary agent, a couple of work friends, and Theo about this job, there’d be hardly anyone to let down.
Thank god I didn’t tell my mom. I almost did, multiple times. The temptation of finally working on something she was remotely interested in was nearly too great.
I love my mom, and I definitely respect her, but the list of things we have in common is short. In the Venn diagram of things she thinks are worth writing about and things I might actually have a chance to write about, the history of America’s most influential media family might actually sit in the middle.
In her mind, I’d be contributing to history, and for me, it would be a chance to find the love story inside all Margaret’s family’s tragedies.
Really, Dad’s the one I wish I could tell. He was the one who first introduced me to Margaret, when I was a little girl. He used to play all of Cosmo’s music while he and Mom cooked dinner, but he especially loved what the superfans called the “Peggy Quartet.” The four love songs Cosmo wrote for Margaret.
My father, the only other romantic in the family besides me, adored their larger-than-life love story. He used to call Cosmo the “Great American Storyteller”—He gives you just enough to leave you champing at the bit to get the rest.
A phone call interrupts the song playing through the car speakers, and I yelp like someone just grabbed me from behind, flicking on my turn signal and pulling into the parking lot of a small strip mall, the smell of sunbaked blacktop wafting in through my open windows.
I check the caller ID: Margaret!
Is it good that she called so fast after speaking with Hayden?
Or does that mean his call didn’t require the requisite apologies that came with passing on an offer? Was it, instead, only a quick see you on Monday, cowriter?
“You can do this,” I remind myself. Whatever this is. It’s just a job.
I take a deep breath and answer the call on speaker. “This is Alice Scott.”
“Hi, Alice,” a brusque, not-at-all-Margaret-like voice blusters through. “Jodi here.”
“Oh! Hi!” I recover. “How are you?”
She blows right through that: “Margaret was wondering whether you could come by for another meeting today. Maybe at dinnertime?”
“Yes! Definitely!” I say. “Around five or six, then?”
She snorts. “Good lord, I wish. She’s over eighty, and still eating dinner like a twenty-five-year-old in Rome. Eight p.m. But cocktail hour’s at seven thirty. Don’t be more than five minutes early. Or late.”
Frankly, I can’t imagine Margaret caring whether I landed in that precise ten-minute window, but I’d guess Jodi might care quite a bit, and that’s good enough for me.
“I’ll be exactly on t—” The phone line clicks before I can finish my sentence. “Hello?”
No answer. She’s already gone.
The Cranberries blast back into song, and this time when I sing along, it’s fed by sheer joy.
