The Accidental Bestseller

by Wendy Wax

  Mallory hung up the phone and stared out over the deck. Relief didn’t exactly flood through her, but God, she hoped she’d done the right thing. Without thinking it through she dialed Chris’s cell phone, wanting to share her news with him.

  The phone rang so many times that she was ready to hang up. When he came on the line, his voice carried none of its usual warmth and enthusiasm and she realized he must have been debating whether or not to answer. “Hello, Mallory,” he said.

  That was it. Not once in the twelve years they’d been married or the year for which they’d dated had Chris ever offered so little of himself to her.

  “Hi.” Mallory cast about for what to say but it was almost as difficult as filling a blank page had become. “How was your weekend? Did you go up to the beach house?”

  “Nope.”

  “So you stayed in the city?”

  “Yep.”

  She felt a horrible stab of guilt as she pictured him alone in New York, when everyone who could would have fled the city for the final hurrah of summer. She felt even worse when she thought about how she’d spent the weekend. True, most of her time had been spent working, focusing on Kendall, but she’d been surrounded by people who cared about her. Chris had been alone.

  His silence reached out to engulf her but it was far from the companionable silence they normally shared. She felt an urgent need to fill it, to keep him on the line. “I just spoke to Patricia and I’ve asked for an extension. I’m going to take a break.”

  “Really?” His interest level rose a notch. “That’s great. Does that mean you’re coming home?”

  Too late, she realized she should have prefaced her announcement with an explanation. Worse was the realization that her decision had had almost nothing to do with Chris and almost everything to do with Kendall and her own need to write Miranda’s story.

  “Of course,” she hedged, trying to think how she could present this to minimize the damage. “I’m, uh, just going to stay here a little longer. Until I feel like Kendall’s OK and on track.”

  Silence again.

  “So you took time off to be with her, to help her.” It wasn’t a question.

  “Yes,” Mallory admitted. “But that wasn’t the only reason. I’ve been having a problem with . . .” She gathered steam as she finally found herself dying to tell him about her inability to write and how badly it had frightened her, but Chris was still following his own train of thought.

  “You haven’t taken a break for the thirteen years I’ve known you. No time off. No anything. But now that your friend needs help, it’s not a problem to take that break. How do you think that makes me feel?” The pain in his voice was palpable.

  “But it’s not like that, Chris. It’s just that I needed . . .”

  For the first time since she’d met him, Chris simply wasn’t interested in what she needed. His love and automatic concern, both of which she now realized she’d always taken completely for granted, were completely absent.

  “You . . . Kendall . . . your publisher . . . everyone but me, that’s what matters to you.”

  “No,” she said. “That’s not . . .”

  “I never really noticed it before; I guess I never wanted to notice it. I loved you so much and was so—honored—to be supporting your creative process that I just kind of tuned out how one-sided everything was.”

  She noted his use of the past tense and hastened to counter it. “It’s not one-sided, Chris. I love—”

  “I can’t really have this relationship all by myself, Mallory,” he continued, as if she hadn’t spoken. He spoke so quietly she had to strain to hear him. “If I wanted to be alone and rely on myself for everything, I would have stayed single.”

  “No, you’re not alone. I . . .” Mallory heard the pleading note in her voice, but Chris seemed oblivious to it.

  “I don’t know, Mal. You’re there, I’m here. It feels pretty alone to me.”

  And then he hung up the phone on her for the second time, leaving her alone on Kendall’s mountaintop with nothing but the breeze and the distant tree-topped peaks for company.

  21

  The last thing one knows in constructing a work is what to put first.

  —BLAISE PASCAL

  “Mallory, have you seen my tool belt and my One-Two-Three book?” Even from downstairs, where she’d just printed out the detailed notes and character studies Faye and Tanya had e-mailed, Mallory could hear a note that sounded perilously close to hysteria in Kendall’s voice.

  Mallory gathered the pages and added them to her own then went upstairs, where she found Kendall digging through the kitchen drawers and shelves.

  “I can’t seem to find my tools or my how-to book.” She stopped pawing through her possessions to look anxiously at Mallory. “Have you seen them?”

  Mallory set the pages down on the kitchen table and studied her friend. Kendall’s eyes darted about furtively as she frantically cast about for another place to look.

  “Yes,” Mallory replied.

  “Oh, thank goodness.” Kendall closed the drawers and cupboard doors she’d left hanging open and moved toward Mallory. “Where are they?”

  “I, um, put them away.”

  “Away?” Kendall asked, her brow furrowing.

  “Yes. You know, as in . . . somewhere else. Where they won’t distract you from your writing.”

  Kendall’s eyes narrowed. She looked less frantic, but more incredulous. “You hid my things?”

  “It’s for your own good, Kendall. I—”

  “Go get them.” There was a tic in Kendall’s cheek; a glint of combat stole into her eyes.

  “I will,” Mallory promised. “Just as soon as you’ve written the first five pages of Sticks and Stones.”

  “You’re holding my tools hostage?”

  “Kendall, it’s Saturday morning,” Mallory said reasonably. “Faye, Tanya, and I have delivered everything you need to get started.” She picked up the pages from the table and holding onto one corner, rifled through them to demonstrate their completeness. “Much as I’d like to, I can’t stay indefinitely and I’m not leaving until I know you’ve got at least the first chapter or two under your belt.”

  “You don’t think I can control my urge to . . . remodel?”

  The answer, of course, was no, but Mallory suspected that might sound a bit abrupt, even from her. “I think you have a severe fix-it fixation that you’re using in order to put off starting this book. And believe me, I know all about procrastination.”

  Kendall folded her arms across her chest. Her eyes, with their combative glint, got even narrower.

  “I’m looking at this as a form of incentive,” Mallory explained, “a carrot if you will. You write the first five pages. I give you your tools and book and you can spend the rest of the day hammering your little heart out.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “We have a conference call tomorrow with Faye and Tanya to discuss the second and third chapters so that they can start their scenes, but this first chapter is all yours.”

  Kendall continued the flinty-eyed stare thing; Mallory soldiered on. “I figure we do this for the next few days until you’ve made a good, strong start, and I know you’re comfortable with how we’re all going to interface and where you’re going with the story.”

  Kendall uncrossed her arms, but she didn’t surrender. “This is ridiculous.”

  “No,” Mallory said, equally determined. “This is tough love.”

  “Tough love!” Kendall snorted. “Like I’m some sort of addict or something.”

  Mallory raised an eyebrow, but she didn’t back down. “Well, I’m not aware of any halfway houses or twelve-step programs for rabid remodelers, but if the shoe fits. . . .”

  Kendall turned her back on Mallory and huffed over to the coffeemaker, where she poured another cup of coffee. “You can’t just snap your fingers and expect me to write something brilliant.”

  It appeared arguing was also preferable to wri
ting, but then Mallory knew all about that, too.

  “It doesn’t have to be brilliant, Kendall,” she said, when her friend finally turned around to face her. “Not yet, anyway. That’s what polishing is for. You just have to get it down on paper so we can all move forward.” She met Kendall’s glare. “I’m going to have to go by the end of the week.”

  Kendall’s features shifted from belligerent to stricken.

  “I promise I won’t leave until you’re ready,” Mallory hastened to reassure her. “I’m completely committed to your project. In fact, I’ve asked for an extension on my deadline so I can focus on it. But I have to get back to New York.” She looked away, not wanting Kendall to see the panic in her own eyes. “Chris is kind of upset about how long I’ve been gone.”

  “Oh, Mal. I’m sorry.” A lot of the fight went out of Kendall. “I didn’t realize. . . .”

  “I’m sure it’ll all be fine. And I’m really into Sticks and Stones. I think it’s a winner, Kendall. But I’m going to have to get back and I don’t want to leave you until I know you’re back on track.”

  Kendall cast a last longing look over Mallory’s shoulder toward the hall closet where her tool belt normally resided.

  Mallory shook her head. “Don’t bother. You could spend the rest of the morning looking and still not find it.” Sensing Kendall’s capitulation, she smiled and took her friend by the shoulders to lead her to the kitchen table. Gently she pulled out a chair and pressed Kendall into it. “Or you could sit right here and get to work and be finished with your pages in a couple of hours. What do you say to that?”

  There were a lot of things Kendall could have said to that, none of them civil, Kendall thought as she settled into her seat ready to grumble some more. Or suitably grateful.

  The thought filled her head, cutting off the complaint before it left her lips.

  Mallory had left her husband and her own work to come rescue her. She’d already been here for ten days, she’d gotten Faye and Tanya to come, too, had set up the brainstorming, had forced Kendall to see a lawyer. If it weren’t for Mallory, she’d still be curled up in a fetal position in her bed or sitting like a zombie on the deck. Or, possibly, gutting and remodel ing this house with no hope of ever making her deadline.

  “OK,” she said, not wanting to appear to give in too easily. “You win. You want five pages, you get five pages. But there’s every chance they’re going to suck.”

  “I’ll take my chances.” Mallory gave her shoulders a final squeeze and took her coffee and laptop out onto the deck, where Kendall saw her settle into her favored position.

  For a time Kendall just sat. Her mind swirled with too many thoughts to put into any recognizable order: the blue jay on the far branch; the sun streaming through the morning fog to reflect off Mallory’s hair; Anne Justiss and the Green Giant’s balls, Calvin and his Realtor, the kids, Plain Jane, Lacy Samuels.

  “Enough.” Kendall pushed all of these fragments of worry from her brain. She actually spent some time visualizing them leaving, wiping out one image at a time until she reached a blank slate on which she could write.

  They had discussed where the story should begin when they were together. It was the most critical choice an author made. Start too soon with too much backstory and you could lose the reader. Start too late without any backstory at all and you ran the same risk. The writer had to pull the reader in with the first sentence and then hang on for dear life.

  Kendall had spent the week laying out her character, Kennedy Andrews, in her mind and on paper. Kennedy had a cheating husband, a close circle of writer friends, twins who’d just left for college, and a career that was crumbling, unexpectedly, around her. She had come as close to her own reality as she possibly could without having to label this an autobiography.

  To make Kennedy the primary point-of-view character, Kendall would have to set her up, get into her head, and stay there long enough to give the reader a chance to identify with her. Faye, Tanya, and Mallory’s characters would also appear in the first chapter, but it was Kennedy who would have to draw the reader in, Kennedy’s eyes that she’d have to make sure the reader could see through.

  Kendall sighed. It was generally accepted that to grab the reader right away, it was important to begin just before the moment of change. For Kendall this had happened at the WINC conference the night she failed to win the Zelda Award on which she’d pinned all her hopes. But she couldn’t start at the awards ceremony because the reader wouldn’t understand who Kennedy was and why the award was so important. This meant backing up to Friday night when she was worried but still hopeful.

  Kendall lifted her fingers above the keyboard but was afraid to hit the first key. There was nothing more important than the first line. Nothing.

  Quickly, before she could chicken out, she typed a sentence, read it on screen, then backspaced it into oblivion.

  Her stomach churned with anxiety. What if she couldn’t do this? What if she couldn’t even come up with a first line worthy of the story? What if . . .

  No!

  She tried again, typing more tentatively, but when she read the words they were too self-conscious. The next were too clever, not at all capturing how she’d felt or who she’d been. Things had not been good, but there had still been that glimmer of hope.

  “Just write it,” she whispered to herself. “Stop being such a wuss and just write how it felt.”

  Kendall drew a deep breath and with her gaze fixed to the screen, she began to type. She watched the words appear, letter by letter, as if by their own volition.

  “Kennedy Andrews’s writing career was about to go down for the count on that Friday night in July as she hurried down Sixth Avenue toward the New York Hilton.”

  Yes, she thought. Yes. Enough to grab on and draw someone in without giving everything away. And the boxing analogy felt right. Kendall typed on, playing with the imagery. As she typed she saw herself at the New York Hilton waiting at the lounge entrance, saw Mallory moving toward her, saw her friends waiting to toast her.

  And then she stopped seeing and began feeling as her fingers moved with growing assurance over the keyboard.

  22

  The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shock-proof shit detector.

  —ERNEST HEMINGWAY

  “Good God, Trudy, why is it that you can act like a responsible adult when you’re dealing with Brett and as soon as I’m back, you turn into a damned pain in the ass?” Tanya’s disappointment pressed down like a load of concrete, infusing her words with a bitterness she normally kept in check. She felt stupid, too, because despite a lifetime of evidence to the contrary, she’d actually allowed herself to hope that her mother might actually be changing.

  Trudy just looked at her, though Tanya wasn’t sure how much she could see through the bloodshot eyes she peered through.

  “He expects me to,” she slurred. “You know me better.”

  “Well, I wish to hell I didn’t,” Tanya muttered as she dumped the empty whiskey bottle into the trash can and shoved the other garbage over the top of it. “Why don’t you go on to bed?”

  It was 1:00 A.M. and the girls were asleep. Tanya had been making notes on her laptop, having just finished reading Kendall’s first chapter, when Trudy staggered out of her bedroom with the empty bottle in her hand, looking for more. The chapter was good, damned good, and Tanya had jotted down some thoughts for the conference call Mallory had scheduled for the four of them.

  “I can’t sleep,” Trudy whined.

  “You know that alcohol is a stimulant, Mama. Drinking it before you go to bed is a bad idea.” She glared at her mother as she went back to the kitchen table to shut down her computer then tidied up her notes and files and put them where she could grab them to take with her in the morning. “Oh, wait. Seems to me I’ve mentioned that before. Though I have lost count of how many millions of times we’ve had this exact same discussion.”

  “You don’t know shit.” Trudy sat in
a heap on the couch, her chin on her chest while Tanya bustled all around her. “You just don’t know.”

  “Oh, Mama.” Tanya groaned. “I’ve been watching you do this to yourself my whole entire life. Thirty-five years of watching you destroy yourself. You’ve got to be as tired of it as I am.”

  “I am tired. But I can’t sleep.”

  Tanya sighed and rubbed her eyes. If she didn’t get in bed right now she’d be a basket case in the morning and Belle had already cut her all kinds of slack.

  “Come on. I’ll tuck you in.” Tanya reached down and slid her hands under Trudy’s armpits then lifted her up from the couch like she’d done a thousand times before. There wasn’t a lick of meat on her mother’s bones.

  “No point. Can’t sleep,” Trudy observed, though she didn’t resist.

  “Well then, you’ll just lie there and rest your eyes.” Tanya propelled her toward the back of the mobile home, though propel was maybe the wrong word; it was sort of like herding a wet dishrag.

  In Trudy’s bedroom, Tanya pulled back the ancient comforter and smoothed the rumpled sheets. She plumped her mother’s pillows then helped Trudy down into a sitting position.

  “You don’t want to let Brett get away. He’s a good man,” Trudy said as Tanya tucked her under the covers.

  “Oh, Mama. How would you know that?”

  “Just ’cause I ain’t ever had one don’t mean I don’t recognize one when I see him. I ain’t never had a million dollars either, but I’d recognize all them zeros if I came acrost ’em.”

  Tanya pulled the covers up to Trudy’s chin and turned off her bedside light. Despite her protests, Trudy’s breathing was already turning shallow and even. “I been wrong a lot, Tanya, I admit it,” she said.