by Judith Ivie
“What’s the problem?”
“I am continually amazed at how wildly most of the people who send me manuscripts overrate their talent. It’s as if reason deserts them when it comes to assessing their own work.” She waved me into the room, and I perched on the window sill to chat for a moment before beginning my day.
“God’s gift to publishing, huh?”
“You betcha,” she agreed, chuckling wryly at the screen before her. “Take this one. According to his author bio, he’s actually out there teaching writing courses, and people are paying him good money to go to them.” She shook her head in disbelief.
“So he has to be pretty good, right?”
May turned away from her computer in disgust and picked up her own coffee. “Believe me, I’d love to think people had more common sense, but the facts prove otherwise. This man misspelled his own one-word book title, and the rest of his three-chapter sample goes downhill from there.”
I laughed along with her, but she had my sympathy. “Oh, dear.”
“Oh, dear, indeed, but there’s more. This submission is not his first book. He’s been published by a vanity press—you know, one of those outfits that will put anything into print for a fee—for years and has actually managed to sell a few books, presumably to readers who are as ignorant as he is. Combine that with the fact that aspiring writers are shellin’ out their hard-earned cash to attend his workshops, and you have the worst of all possible results, a bad writer who thinks he’s a good writer.” She grimaced into her coffee mug.
“What are you going to tell him?” I asked.
“What I always tell them—the truth as factually as I can. I’ll point out the spelling and grammatical errors in the sample and suggest he hire a professional editor before submitting his manuscript elsewhere, but he won’t listen to reason. He’ll just get huffy and tell me I don’t know what I’m talking about, and who do I think I am blah blah blah.” She closed her eyes and pinched the bridge of her nose, then grinned.
“What’s funny?” I asked, glad to see her sense of humor seemed to be intact.
“I was remembering the last time I made the suggestion about a professional editor to a new writer. I’d actually made the mistake of acceptin’ her manuscript, based on the recommendation of an inexperienced beta reader who’d reviewed it for me. It was my fault a contract had been issued, so I felt honor bound to keep my word and publish the thing. It was a disaster, full of the most basic mistakes from spelling to typos to incorrect hyphenation and proper names, but I slogged away and edited it into something approaching publishable. When I sent it to her for proofreadin’, I suggested as kindly as I possibly could that future work really would benefit from the attentions of a professional editor.”
“I hardly dare ask, but what was her reaction?”
May’s expression was resigned. “What she should have done was get down on her knees and thank me for spendin’ a week of my life making that pile of horse pucky into something approaching a book, but they never do that. Instead, she told me she’d already had it reviewed by a professional editor, can you believe it? Needless to say, I was dumbstruck, but I guess there are charlatans chargin’ money for all kinds of things out there and people naïve enough to pay ‘em.”
“Wow,” I told her when I managed to get my mouth shut. “I’ve got to tell you, I’m becoming a little disillusioned with the writing and publishing business. I had no idea it was so rife with scam artists. Why do you keep doing this again?”
“Oh, you’re just hearin’ my bad stories because I need to vent. There are lots of talented writers and competent, ethical editors out there, too, and it’s been my absolute pleasure to give more than a few a leg up. Drop by again, and I’ll tell you about some of those folks. I’m just cranky right now because I’ve read four terrible submissions in a row.”
“That would do it,” I assured her. “Feel free to unload on me anytime.”
Fortunately, the sun really did continue to shine as the gorgeous autumn weather continued, and it helped lift everyone’s spirits. There is nothing quite like the scent of drying leaves to a New Englander. It instantly transported me back to my youth, scuffling through the leaves on my walk to school with my best friend and searching eagerly for fallen horse chestnuts, coveted prizes in those days. The best kind were so ripe, their husks split on impact with the ground to reveal the gleaming, reddish brown jewels within. That heady October aroma was one of the many things I would miss about New England if we really did have to move south. I wondered unhappily what autumn was like in Florida. Was there autumn in Florida?
Resolutely, I shoved that thought to the back of my mind. I decided there was no point in mentioning Armando’s job dilemma to Margo and Strutter until we had more facts, and since I had no idea when that might be, I just kept quiet. Why upset them, I reasoned? I was already upset enough for all of us, and it wasn’t as if there was anything they could do to help me. Instead, I focused my attention on my daughter Emma and grew determined to discover why she’d been so silent lately. If I needed to make an appointment with her to accomplish that, so be it. Soon after arriving at work, I sent her an e-mail announcing that I was bringing lunch to her office at twelve-thirty, and I hoped she would be free to eat it with me. Her reply assured me that she would be. So far, so good.
By twenty minutes past twelve I was zipping across the Putnam Bridge, which spanned the Connecticut River between Wethersfield and Glastonbury. Driving across bridges isn’t normally one of my favorite things, but the Putnam was so familiar to me, I had no problem with it. No alarming steel structure encased it, and the uninterrupted paved roadway on Route 3 was only two lanes wide in most parts. I was able to mosey along at a mere ten miles over the speed limit without some annoying leadfoot tailgating me.
At the highest part of the bridge, which isn’t all that high, I could enjoy a full view of the river and the blazing sugar maples and sumac on either bank, competing for best in show. The foliage was so beautiful it was difficult to keep my eyes on the road ahead. Luckily, most of my fellow travelers were equally enchanted and seemed content to allow me to proceed at my own pace. Soon enough, I was over the bridge and heading for the Hebron Avenue exit I preferred when visiting Emma.
As I pulled into the parking area of the little office building across from the post office, I was relieved to see Emma sitting on the back steps, waiting for me. Her eyes were closed and her face turned up to the sunshine, so I was able to take a good, hard look at her without being obvious. Doing so gave me the usual jolt of pleasure. Such an attractive young woman, I thought to myself as always. Seeing her every day blunted the impact somewhat, but now that we worked in different towns, and it had been several days between visits, the sight of her made me smile. She had my coloring, a slightly sturdier build, and long ash blonde hair smoothed away from her face in a casual ponytail. She wore jeans and clogs and a cowl-necked sweater—nothing special, but they suited her perfectly. As pretty a girl as she was, though, it was her smile that put her over the top. When she opened her eyes and grinned at me, my heart stopped its anxious thumping, and I was filled with gratitude. Nobody who smiled like that could have anything seriously wrong, and I breathed a mother’s sigh of relief.
“Hello, daughter,” I greeted her. “I’m your old mother. Recognize me?” I plopped down next to her and handed her the bag lunch I’d brought from The Cove Deli, cups of homemade chili and a chicken salad plate for us to split.
“Mmmm,” Emma approved, digging for spoons and napkins, “and yes, I get your little joke. It’s been a few days, but I’ve had some things to get straight in my head before I underwent parental inquisition, so don’t yank my chain, okay?” She popped the lid off her chili and dug in. “This is the best chili ever, next to yours. I do miss the food places on Old Main Street.”
“Well, glad to hear you miss something about your old stomping grounds. Since you didn’t dodge my lunch invitation, I assume that you are now ready to talk about …
whatever.” I put my own cup of chili down beside me to cool and relieved the chicken salad plate of its top cover, carefully keeping my eyes on what I was doing.
Emma plucked a succulent cherry tomato from the plate and popped it into her mouth. “This has got to be the last of the Anderson Farm crop,” she mourned, referring to the homestead and fresh produce stand that had anchored the Broad Street Green for as long as I could remember. She closed her eyes to savor the garden freshness of it. “And yes, I’m ready to talk. In fact, I’d like to know what you think.”
“I’m all ears,” I assured her. “What’s going on, Em?”
She seemed to have trouble finding a place to begin. I chewed salad greens and waited. “Well, you remember last month when I went to L.A. to help my friend Ellen and her dad with the local charity golf tournament? It’s a big deal around there. I sent you pictures,” she reminded me.
Ellen McDougal was a friend of Emma’s from high school. Her family had relocated to California shortly after Ellen and Emma graduated, but the girls had kept in close contact, visiting back and forth a couple of times a year.
“Yes, I do remember that trip. You had an especially good time, as I recall.” I stopped chewing and turned to look at her. “You met a man, right?” She was accustomed to my reading the signs and didn’t even flinch. “He’s turned out to be a special man,” I went on, noting the telltale blush creeping up her throat, “and you’ve kept in touch.” A small smile turned up the corners of her mouth. “But he lives in California,” I finished up.
“Russell lives in Elkton, actually,” she corrected me, and I felt a small surge of hope.
“Elkton, Maryland? Then he was just visiting L.A. like you were.”
“He was visiting Ellen and her family because he’s an in-law. Ellen’s sister is married to Russell’s brother, but no, he’s not from Maryland.”
I thought hard. “Virginia?” I asked hopefully, not thrilled but willing to settle.
Emma decided to put me out of my misery—or into it, depending upon your point of view. “Sorry, Momma. He lives in Elkton, Oregon. Bad luck, right? Especially since he grew up right around the corner from here in Cromwell. His family is still here.”
I digested this information in silence, waiting for the other shoe to drop, but Emma merely helped herself to a heaping forkful of chicken salad and munched contentedly. “You’re not engaged or anything, are you?” I asked finally to nudge her into offering a bit more information.
She gazed at me patiently but did not, as I had expected, roll her eyes at my silly question. That in itself was alarming. “Not yet, but you never know. I really, really like him, Momma, enough to fly to Oregon in a week or so and spend some time with him to find out if we maybe have a future. So how stupid do you think that idea is?”
I put down my fork and examined her face for signs of joking, but I found none. She had met a man from Elkton, Oregon, and she was flying out there soon to see if they had a future together, and she was asking what I thought about that.
It has long been my position that my primary job, as the mother of grown children, is to keep my mouth shut, and I’ve worked hard to stick to that tenet with both Emma and her slightly older brother Joey. Emma was a handful as a teenager, and her father’s and my divorce when she was fifteen had been the perfect excuse for her to act out. My memories of those years involved many visits to the high school to meet with the principal and various other members of the faculty about her behavior.
Joey had waited until a few years later to frighten me half to death, taking off to the Midwest to obtain his commercial trucker’s license. He then criss-crossed the country in a seventy-three-foot rig for a couple of years before settling down in Massachusetts with his bride and baby girl. We had all been fortunate to survive these coming-of-age episodes and discover we were still friends, and I had every intention of keeping it that way.
Except now my daughter was telling me she may have met The One, and he lived in Oregon, and she wanted my advice. Or did she merely want my approval to pursue this improbable dream? I could tell her what I really thought, which was that however wonderful this new man was, and however magical the chemistry between them might be, long-distance relationships very seldom work out, so she was probably wasting her time and airfare. But where would that pronouncement get me? On the receiving end of a chilly brush-off as she went home to pack her bags and dream of a West Coast future, that’s where. So I did what any mother in her right mind would do: I lied.
“I think you need to do what you need to do, Emma, and you’re the only one who knows what that is. You’re all grown up and in charge of your own life. Just know that Armando and I will be tickled to death if things work out well, and if they don’t, well, we’ll be here for you anyway. Daddy and Sheila will feel the same way, I’m sure.” This last was pure bravado, since Emma’s father Michael and his second wife Sheila tended to be on the conservative side and would probably be horrified at this latest development. I beamed at Emma with as much confidence as I could manufacture.
She listened to my little speech with a straight face and swallowed the last of her chili. “Well, well, Pollyanna lives,” she said after patting her lips on a napkin. She chose another cherry tomato from the plate in my lap. “Who are you, and what have you done with my mother? You are so full of baloney, I don’t know whether to laugh or cry, but I applaud your instincts. I only hope you can get to a phone fast enough to encourage Daddy and Sheila to suck it up, too. I’m not looking forward to that conversation, I can tell you.”
As usual, my intuitive daughter had seen right through me, but that was okay, I told myself. As long as she knows we’re in her corner, she won’t run off to Elkton just to spite us, as she would have ten years ago. I blew out a breath and handed the rest of the salad plate to her.
“Okay, you got me, but at least my heart is in the right place.”
“You definitely get points for that,” she agreed.
“Of course I’m terrified for you and hope you aren’t setting yourself up for a terrible fall, but you’re not fifteen anymore, and you’re smart enough to have weighed the negative possibilities already. The amazing thing to me is that you’re also optimistic enough to see the positive possibilities and go check them out. After all the boyfriends and break-ups in your past, that’s pretty darned resilient, and I admire that. I do.”
Her grin was sly. “I get it from my mom,” she told me. “I’ve been watching you pretty closely for the last thirty years, you know, and I picked up a thing or two about getting back on the horse that threw you.”
“Yee haw,” I acknowledged the compliment. “Ride ‘em, cowgirl. Now tell me everything about Russell. Why is he in Elkton when his family is here? Wouldn’t it be easier for him to fly back east and stay with his folks? What does he look like, do you have any pictures? Come on, give with the details.”
An hour or so later I crossed the Putnam Bridge again, this time heading back to Wethersfield. I had broken my daughter’s silence, to be sure, but now my head was swimming with almost too much information. Russell was an environmental restoration consultant and had just landed the job of his dreams in Oregon, which meant he didn’t have any vacation time accrued and couldn’t make the trip east. He loved living on the West Coast and had done so for more than ten years, although most of that time had been in California. He was a couple of years older than Emma and had never been married. In addition to the brother who was married to Emma’s friend Ellen’s sister, he had a married sister in New Jersey. He also had college friends all over the country with whom he kept in touch and often visited. He skied and hiked and played the guitar. No pictures yet.
Was I happy? No, but how often is a mother truly thrilled with her adult children’s choices? Exactly, which is why I clung to my original principle of parenting at this stage of things and got an even tighter grip on my misgivings and my mouth. Emma would do what she would do. She was a big girl, and she’d been raised to think for hers
elf. She had a good brain and a ton of common sense, so even allowing for the fact that hormones trump intelligence almost every time, I was hopeful. What else could I do? I wondered how much to tell Armando. Emma was his princess, and he had enough on his mind at the moment without adding this to his list of worries.
On Wednesday Strutter took her turn at the Vista View sales desk, leaving Margo and me to hold the fort. We arrived at the Law Barn within seconds of each other and let ourselves in, expecting to see May presiding over the coffee pot, but we were disappointed. A bad feeling came over me as I shut the front door behind us and gazed at May’s empty office. The concern on Margo’s face told me she felt the same way. We looked at each other.
“Did you talk with her last night or this morning?” I asked.
Margo shook her head slowly. “No, the last time I spoke with May was on the way out of here late yesterday afternoon. We were both about dead on our feet after the day we’d put in, but she was feelin’ pretty cheerful. She said she was down to the last few manuscripts to review, and she’d just about made her mind up about them. She was also lookin’ forward to a visit from one of her favorite authors, Judy Hathaway or Holloway. She writes some of those steamy romances I’ve been tryin’ to get you and Strutter to sample.”
“Is Judy arriving soon? Maybe May is just running around doing hostess-type things, like putting sheets on the guest room bed and planning menus,” I offered without any real conviction, heading for the copy room to start the coffee maker. Margo trailed after me.
“Mmm, maybe, but Judy won’t be here for a couple of days yet. I think Auntie May said she was going to ask Tommy to finish up on paintin’ the upstairs walls before then so she could air out the fumes.” She put her briefcase on the floor and stuck her head into May’s little room, peering around as if she might be hiding behind a file cabinet. She looked at her elegant little wristwatch. “This doesn’t feel right to me. It’s not that early. I’m going to call her and make sure she’s all right.” Having made her decision, she picked up her briefcase and disappeared down the stairs to our office. Frankly, I was in complete agreement with her. This didn’t feel right to me either.