Cabin Fever

by Janet Sanders

  She was feeling a little blurry around the edges this morning, and yearned with frightening intensity for her first cup of coffee, but there was still a little spark of happiness burning like a star in the night sky deep inside her chest. Looking back at yesterday’s wilderness passion, she still could hardly believe that it had happened, and that she had been involved no less! Growing up with Elsie, Sarah had become so accustomed to the mantle of the sensible sister that she had long since ceased questioning whether the title really described her. One more surprise, to file with the others: apparently she was capable of a lot more than she had ever given herself credit for.

  She sidled up to the counter and took a seat in a swivel chair, smiling at Bessie as she bustled up with a cup of coffee. It was nice to get what you wanted without having to ask for it. It was nice to be around people who took the time to learn what you wanted, so that they could be ready to give it to you. So much was nice about this place.

  “Morning, hon,” Bessie said in her usual maternal manner. “What are you going to have?”

  “Eggs. Potatoes maybe? Juice. Toast. Oh – with marmalade! Do you have marmalade?”

  Bessie smiled conspiratorially. “Someone has an appetite this morning. Were you out with a fella last night?”

  Sarah laughed self-consciously. “No. Not last night.”

  Bessie raised one eyebrow conspiratorially. Sarah knew that she needed to quickly change the subject, or else Bessie would not let her alone until she had found out what had happened. Bessie was sweet, and she made Sarah laugh, but she wasn’t ready to share what had happened.

  “Bessie, can I ask you something?” she said.

  “Of course, hon. What is it?” Bessie replied as she wiped the counter down.

  “What is it between you and Duane? I know you’re not just friends.”

  Bessie gave her an appraising look while she visibly considered whether or not to come clean. “It’s complicated,” she finally said.

  “Oh? Complicated can be good sometimes.”

  “Maybe. Maybe not. Half the time I don’t know what the answer to your question is, to tell you the truth.”

  Sarah gave her a sympathetic smile. “Are you dating?”

  Bessie grimaced and came around the counter to sit down beside her. “Not exactly. Did you know that Duane used to be married?”

  “I guess I assumed so, but I never asked. He’s not still married is he?”

  “Oh heavens no, it’s nothing like that. No, his wife Julia was a dear friend of mine since childhood, and she passed about five years back, from a heart attack. It was terribly sudden. One day she seemed fine, and the next day she was gone.”

  “That sounds terrible.”

  “It was. For Duane and me both. I still miss her terribly. We helped each other through it – the grief and what came after – and along the way I guess we started looking at each other in a new way. But then…”

  “What?”

  “Nothing! Nothing much. He comes in every day for breakfast, and we exchange a few words, but other than that, nothing I wouldn’t tell my grandchildren! And I can tell you, I was raised to let the man take the lead in this sort of thing, but I’m just about ready to call him out and make him say, one way or the other, what his intentions are. Because neither one of us is getting any younger, and I don’t want to waste any more time while the plumbing is still working, if you catch my drift.

  Sarah hid a smile. She did catch Bessie’s drift, and she found the thought of her and Duane locked in a passionate embrace to be halfway between funny and alarming. “I think you should tell him how you feel. Maybe he just needs a little encouragement.”

  Bessie snorted and, with a glance at the front window, headed back behind the counter. “He needs a quick kick in the pants, and I know just the woman to give it to him.”

  A series of sighs interspersed with muttering announced the arrival of Duane behind her, and – as he did every morning – he took the stool next to Sarah but failed to say “hello.” He was consistently rude in that way, but Sarah couldn’t hold it against him. Duane was so theatrically curmudgeonly that she suspected it was a mask he held up for the world to hide the sensitive soul on the inside. Or maybe he really was that gruff all the way through. Either way, she liked him and was willing to put up with his idiosyncrasies.

  “How’s the world treating you, Duane?” she asked sweetly.

  “The world believes that I’ve lived too long already, and has delivered that message by way of a sharp pain in my gut and a dull ache in my back.”

  Sarah shrugged in response and returned to her coffee. Duane had a new complaint every morning, and she had learned not to try to talk him out of it – grumbling was an essential element of his morning routine. She knew that Duane would soon be engrossed in his stack of newspapers, and there was no point in starting up a conversation on a topic that would be forgotten the moment he found a news story that interested or upset him.

  She did like to watch him read, though. Duane had an intense focus when he was perusing the day’s top stories that she could only compare to the way a dog stares at a squirrel in the moments before it pounces. It was the look, she was beginning to realize, of a man in his element. Duane had found his life’s work, and it felt like a privilege to witness him doing it.

  “What’s the news, Duane?”

  “War. Hunger. Political back-biting in Washington,” he muttered without looking up. “Same as yesterday.”

  “Any good material for the paper?”

  “Yes, enough. I can’t use the stuff about car-bombings and chaos. That’s too down-beat for most of my readers. But they’ll like the story on democratic reforms in the Middle East, and I can do something with the national politics story as long as I don’t write it too liberal or too conservative.”

  She smiled. “That’s cool, the way you take in the news and send it back out. It’s the same information, but you know how to package it for your audience.”

  He shrugged. “It’s no big deal. I’ve been doing it for a long time. I don’t need to think about it anymore, I just do it.”

  “It’s nice. You’re doing this town a service. They’ll really miss you when you retire.”

  He sighed. “They’ll get used to it, I suppose. People adapt when they have to.”

  “So how long until you turn out the lights? Any chance that there will be someone to take over when you do?”

  He shook his head. “I tried to line someone up for a while, but I couldn’t get any takers, and now there’s not enough time to bring someone in. I’ve got to the end of the month and then I’m done.”

  Sarah blinked in surprise. “The end of the month! That’s in less than three weeks!”

  Duane nodded, clearing a space before him as Bessie showed up with his daily plate of eggs and toast. “Yeah. At first it seemed like it would never happen, and now it’s coming up really fast. Every now and then I think about sticking with it for a little longer, but then I remember that I wanted to retire two years ago. I kept it going because I didn’t want the paper to die. Now I don’t have a choice. There’s nothing left in the tank. It will be a little sad when the day comes, but it’s time.”

  Sarah shook her head. “I’m sorry” was all she could think to say, but she felt the need to lighten the mood. She gave Bessie a significant look. “Duane, Bessie and I were talking about you this morning.”

  He looked from one of them to the other with a look of concern on his face. “I don’t like the sound of that at all.”

  Bessie shot her a look that clearly said to keep quiet. “It was nothing, Duane,” she said. “We were just swapping stories about the foolish old men we’ve known.” With that she was gone, leaving Duane more confused than ever.

  Sarah watched her as she left. “I love Bessie. Don’t you just love Bessie?” she asked playfully.

  Duane gave her a narrow look. “I like Bessie just fine.”

  “Is that it? You like her? Or do you maybe feel so
mething else?”

  “I don’t know what you’re getting at,” he muttered, snapping open the pages of his newspaper.

  “She’s not going to wait forever, Duane.”

  He looked back at her with the expression of a boy with his hand in the cookie jar. “Who says I’m keeping her waiting for anything?”

  “You two could not be more obvious, Duane. Why make it such a secret?”

  He clearly had no interest in discussing the topic, but he also didn’t have much choice. “It’s not a secret that I think the world of Bessie. It just … it doesn’t feel right.”

  “What doesn’t?”

  “Chasing after another woman’s skirt so soon after my wife passed.”

  “I heard that she died five years ago.”

  He gave a glance in Bessie’s direction. “So the two of you have been talking.”

  “A bit. She’s waiting for you, Duane, but she’s getting impatient.”

  “I know she is,” he said, feeling tired. “And I don’t want her to wait forever, for me or anyone else. It just feels disrespectful of Julia’s memory.”

  Sarah squeezed his arm. “I’m sure your wife loved you very much, and I’m sure that the last thing she would want is for you to be alone the rest of your life out of respect for her memory. She’d want you to be happy, Duane. Be happy.”

  Duane didn’t reply, but he gave her a bit of a smile, as if to say “thanks.” She didn’t want to push it, so she let the matter drop.

  The two of them chatted on about this and that as they ate their breakfasts, but inwardly Sarah found herself thinking about one thing: what would happen to Tall Pines when it no longer had a newspaper. The people who lived in these parts could get their information from other sources, of course, but deep in her heart Sarah believed that a local paper plays an important role in communities. A newspaper is like a water cooler in an office, it helps build a sense of shared identity. It would not be good for the town when the paper was gone, and she could only imagine the number of small towns throughout the country that were facing the same problem. Sarah’s eyes had been opened to a problem she had never seriously considered before, and she had a hard time thinking for long about anything else.

  22

  Lying in bed that night Sarah was still thinking about the problem. To her it was as plain as day. The country needed its newspapers, and newspapers were dying. She had no doubt that some publications would survive. The New York Times wasn't going anywhere, and as long as there were stockbrokers there would be a Wall Street Journal. But what about the rest? What about the small-town papers that had razor-thin margins even in good times? Sarah saw no prospect of them making it through, at least not unless they had wealthy benefactors. Soon it wouldn't be just a few newspapers going under, soon it would be normal for a town to have no paper, and something deep inside told her that this would be a catastrophe.

  She was lying under the covers, and she had long since put her iPad away, but the light was still on and she wasn't even thinking about sleep. Instead she stared at the knot-holes in the ceiling and thought about what might be done. It was obvious that the economics of the newspaper business no longer made sense. Sarah was far from an expert on the topic, but it was clear to anyone who looked that things just didn't work the way they used to, now that CNN and Fox News and the entire Internet were just a click away. The newspaper model was built during a period when network television and radio were the only competition, and those days were gone for good. What the country needed was a newspaper model for the digital age.

  Sarah knew that a website wasn't the answer. Most major papers had a website already and they were still struggling. Not everyone had a computer – especially if they lived out in the country – and those who did wouldn't necessarily want to use it for their daily reading. Sarah read almost everything on a screen, either her laptop or her iPad, but she knew that the next time her father had probably never read something longer than an email on a computer screen. In the world there were far more people like him than there were digital natives like Sarah, so any business plan for newspapers would need to be designed for the larger group.

  Sarah seized on that thought and followed where it might lead. If she was designing a newspaper for her father, what would it look like? For starters, it wouldn't be printed on paper, because simply thinking about negotiating contracts with the printers and buying up that much newsprint and getting it delivered to the right addresses – each and every day of the week – gave her a headache. Whatever her newspaper of the future was, producing and delivering it would have to be a lot more streamlined. She toyed with the idea of a print-at-home option, but that didn't seem like it would work much better. If there was one thing that made her father furiously angry, it was how much he had to spend for the ink cartridges his printer required. Printing a paper at home would mean buying a lot more of those insanely expensive ink cartridges, and it wouldn’t be long before her father simply quit doing it.

  So what did that leave? If the newspaper wasn't going to be printed and delivered in the traditional style, and if it wasn't going to be emailed to subscribers for them to print themselves, where else could it go? Sarah was just at the point of giving up on the question when she suddenly had a vision of her father, standing in his kitchen and making a cup of coffee. While he waited for the water to boil, he had his cell phone in his hand and was checking the sports scores.

  His phone. His phone!

  Her father was anything but a techie, but he was never without the thing. Sarah's heart began to pound. She felt that familiar rush of adrenaline, the one she got whenever she caught the glimpse of a solution to a difficult problem. This was no time for sleep. There would be plenty of time for sleep later, after she had captured this idea and ensured she wouldn’t forget about it later. She threw the covers aside and went for her laptop.

  Four hours later, she was sipping down the cold and bitter dregs of her third cup of coffee and the gist of a business plan was beginning to take shape on her laptop screen. It wasn't ready to shop around for funding yet -- it was still rough around the edges, and there were many details to fill in, but deep in her gut she knew that the core of the plan was solid, and it might even be revolutionary. At its heart, her plan called for headlines and story copy to be delivered in an easy-to-read format to mobile phones, but readers who had iPhones or something equally capable could also share stories, discuss them, and even organize meetings and activities around shared interests. The plan asked very little of the customer – people like her father – in terms of technology or sophisticated use of the tools, but it was there for those who wanted it and provided a graceful means of scaling the service over time. In short, Sarah's plan started with a newspaper but was prepared for a future in which everything might be different, and probably would be.

  Sarah leaned back in her chair, stretched her stiff back, and gazed with some bemusement at her work on the screen. She had come to Tall Pines because she needed some direction in her life, and for weeks she received absolutely nothing by way of inspiration. And then, right at the moment when she had forgotten what she was looking for, it came to her, out of the blue, as if postmarked from heaven.

  Everything was different now. It was as if she had pulled the curtains and noticed that the color of the sky had shifted from blue to green. Part of her wanted to jump in her car and drive straight to San Francisco, but she knew that she had a lot to figure out before she could make her way back to the city. Her business plan wasn’t complete, but it was more than that. There was a lot that she wanted and needed in the Bay Area, but Brad wouldn't be there, and she needed some time to figure out how much she wanted and needed to be with him.

  23

  The next day she found Duane in his office, looking even more rumpled than usual. He had taken off his jacket and rolled up his shirtsleeves, while his tie was nowhere to be seen. Sarah paused at the doorway to take in the tableau. Duane's impression of Lou Grant was so good that she started t
o think that maybe Ed Asner had been doing an impression of Duane all those years ago.

  She was here on business, though, so after a few self-indulgent moments she stepped into the office and walked up to Duane's desk.

  His first glance at her was full of irritation at being interrupted in his work, but then looked back a second time. “Sarah,” he said appraisingly, clearly wondering why she was there.

  “Duane,” she answered, pulling up a chair and sitting down.

  “To what do I owe the pleasure?” he asked with a notable absence of pleasure, and he didn’t put down the pen he was holding or lean back from the papers on his desk. Clearly he didn’t expect her visit to last long.

  She decided to get right to the point. “I’m here for a job.”

  He snorted. “Not many of those to find around here. Maybe Bobby down the street could use some help with his filling station. Seems like there will always be people who want to buy gasoline.”

  She shook her head. “No, Duane. I want to work here. With you.”

  He leaned back and looked at her curiously. “And why would you want to do that, when I told you just yesterday that I’d be shutting the paper down in a few weeks? By the time I got you trained there wouldn’t be any work anymore. Not that I have any money to pay you.”

  “I don’t want money. And I know that you don’t have much to offer me, in terms of time or on-the-job experience. But still, I want to learn whatever I can from you before you close the paper. I want to be your apprentice.”

  He looked at her the way he might look at an inmate of an asylum. “And why on God’s green earth would you want to do that? You’re on vacation! You should be enjoying yourself.”

  She shook her head. “No, this was never a vacation. I came to Tall Pines because I needed a break, sure, but mostly I came to clear my head and figure out what the next thing for me was. And last night I figured it out. It’s the newspaper business.”