I thought, If I could find a home tall enough to get the job done, I’d throw myself off the roof and kill myself.
“Of course,” said Frieda, “I understand that coming here wasn’t totally your idea—Mr. Magnuson explained that to me—but I think you’re going to find working here very fulfilling. We do a lot of important stories here, and you should know that Home! is one of the biggest revenue producers for the paper. We have advertisers lined up to get into our pages, and many weeks we have to turn them away. There simply isn’t any more space for them. The presses can’t handle a section that big. Did you know that?”
“Wow,” I said. “I did not know that.”
“I’ve had this story idea percolating for a while, and haven’t had anyone free to do it, but now that you’re here, I’d like to give it to you, because you have the kind of skills, I think, to run with it.”
I steeled myself.
“Linoleum,” Frieda said. “There are so many angles, I’m thinking along the lines of a series, not just one article. What advances are being made, scuff resistance, design choices, whether the linoleum is being made here or whether we’re going overseas to get it. Is this country hanging on to its linoleum jobs, or giving them away to Mexico?”
“So it would have a political angle,” I said.
Frieda nodded enthusiastically. “I can see you’re thinking already. That’s great. Listen, why don’t I leave you to it, if you have any questions you can ask, and don’t forget that at three, we traditionally have a little biscuit break.”
I glanced up at the clock. “Gee, six hours,” I said. “I may not be able to wait.”
Frieda smiled and touched my arm before departing. I sighed and slumped in my chair. I was more than depressed. I was tired. I’d barely slept the night before. And not just because Sarah wasn’t speaking to me. There’d been a wild electrical storm around midnight. Flashes of lightning filled our bedroom with light, just long enough to see Sarah’s back turned to me. The wind came out, and I lay awake wondering whether any of the stately old oaks that surrounded the house would come crashing through the roof. Briefly, the power went out—the wired-in smoke detector chirped once, and when I glanced at the digital clock radio, it was flashing 12:00.
According to the morning news, some parts of the city had lost power, some for several hours. A great many limbs and a few entire trees had come down, taking power lines with them. But when I looked out in the morning, all I saw were a few twigs and short branches scattered across the yard and the street.
“That was some storm,” I said in the morning, trying to make conversation while I poured Sarah her coffee. She said nothing.
“Look,” I said, “I know I’ve fucked up, big-time, but it’s not like Magnuson made it out to be. I wasn’t trying to keep that guy from doing his story, I had no intention of doing that, and I’d said to Trixie that—”
“Just what did you say to Trixie?” Sarah said. It was the first time I’d heard her voice in maybe eighteen hours. “What do the two of you talk about? When you have your little lunches, your little meetings, your rendezvous?”
“‘Rendezvous’?” I said. “Why not ‘tryst’? There’s a word we don’t hear much anymore.”
“It’s a tryst?”
“Listen, I had lunch with her the other day, she told me she had this problem, I told her I couldn’t help her out with it.”
“Is that how you weren’t helping her out with it? Going back out there to talk to that reporter, to get him to give up his camera?”
“All I did was tell him Trixie was afraid to come into the diner unless he gave up the camera. He’d been trying to sneak a pic of her and—”
Sarah, screaming: “And what do you care! So what if he does! What is that to you? Since when did you become her protector?”
Her voice echoed off the kitchen walls.
I didn’t say anything for a moment. Then, “You’re right. It’s her problem. It’s not my problem.” I paused. “It’s not our problem.”
Sarah took one last glaring look at me, then turned and went back upstairs to get ready for work. The coffee I’d poured for her sat neglected on the counter.
Angie, who’d been coming down the stairs as Sarah was going up, appeared. “I don’t know what you did, Dad,” she said, “but it must have been bad, even by your standards.”
I was ready with something sarcastic, then said, “Yeah. It was.”
And as I sat in my new! desk! in! the! Home! section, I tried to sort out which was the worst of my crimes. It hadn’t been getting myself demoted to one of the paper’s soft sections, and it hadn’t been nixing Sarah’s chances at becoming foreign editor, although that one was up there.