“It works well for now. Thanks, Mom.” I watched her drive off and headed into Espresso Yourself. There was a line at the counter, but Makayla greeted me as I walked through the door.
“I saw your mama’s darling turquoise truck outside,” she said, holding out a cup. “Here’s your latte.” She then lowered her voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “Much as I’d love to, I’m way too busy to look at any of Marlette’s journal today. Got a nice little catering order to fill and inventory to do.”
Each morning, if Makayla had time, we’d examine an intriguing piece of writing or drawing from Marlette’s journal. I had taken the photocopies I’d made of the original and placed them in a three-ring binder. The cover featured a print of monarch butterflies and blue hummingbirds hovering over the uplifted face of a gold chrysanthemum. The nature theme reminded me of Marlette. Still, I missed the pine-scented pages and the texture of the dried flowers and scraps of paper he’d pasted into his diary.
“No worries. Next time,” I said. “I have a pile of work to do, too.”
I had just turned my computer on when a young police officer appeared at my door.
“Are you Lila Wilkins? I was told to pick up a book or journal from you.”
“Oh, I thought Officer Griffiths was coming to get it.” I tried not to show my disappointment. From my desk drawer I removed the envelope containing the enigmatic book and handed it to the policeman. He dropped it into an evidence bag, his movements conducted without the slightest hint of care. I held back a complaint about his indelicate treatment of Marlette’s most precious possession.
But then I remembered that not everyone understands what it means to reveal one’s most intimate thoughts through lines of writing or meticulously detailed sketches. Not everyone is aware of how many emotions can be tucked away in the cursive loops and curves of a proper name. They don’t know how a few scant lines of pen or pencil can represent a childhood memory, a strange and wondrous dream, or a desperate hope for the future. These feelings and so many more existed in Marlette’s journal, and though I studied it each night before bed, I’d made no further progress in extracting a tangible clue.
Marlette was never far from my thoughts, but I have to admit that I quickly became too busy to devote as much time to his journal as I’d have liked. The queries and proposals kept pouring in. The moment I felt I’d made headway on electronic queries, the mailman would jog up the stairs, whistling to announce his presence, and I’d end up with a sack load of letters. They’d populate the corner of my desk, their colorful stamps and return address labels staring at me hopefully, then accusingly, then angrily as the hours passed.
“This must be how the post office feels when the kids start mailing off their letters to the North Pole,” I murmured as I scrutinized the dozens of paper cuts on my thumb and forefinger and resolved to pick up a letter opener over the weekend. Thank goodness I didn’t have to lick the endless envelopes filled with rejection letters I mailed out each day. If it hadn’t been for self-stick envelopes, I would have had to use a sponge.
At this point, it became clear that the final workday of the week would once again be the most memorable, as my first email of the morning read,
I received your form rejection letter yesterday. You couldn’t take five minutes of your precious time to tell me why you were passing on such a unique idea? It took me five years to write this book, but you can’t be bothered to give even a single sentence of feedback? I will be sure to tell all of my many writer friends to forget about querying your agency because you clearly don’t recognize talent when you see it.
That email was better than the one that came next, which was much more direct in its hostility:
Dear Ms. Wilkins,
Thanks for nothing, you stupid bitch.
Instinctively, I reached out to delete the message and then paused. I needed to add these two writers to my Agents Beware file. Shaking my head over their lack of professionalism, I printed out copies of their emails and stuffed them into my red file folder. Zach caught me frowning as I dropped the folder onto the surface of my desk.
“Zach Attack!” he shouted and leapt across the threshold, his arms outstretched as though he expected applause from a studio audience. “What gives, Pretty Woman? Writers be-having badly?”
I nodded and gave the folder a dismissive wave. “I’m immune to these kinds of snarky comments. I have a teenage son.”
Zach laughed. “Cool. I’ll have to take him to a hoops game this fall. Is he into sports?”