Читать книгу Diary of a Domestic Goddess - Elizabeth Harbison - Страница 9

“The thing is, I don’t think doctors actually give babies opium for teething anymore.” Kit leaned her elbows on her desk and listened to the old medical columnist’s patronizing response over the telephone line before responding, “I know it’s called paregoric, but it’s opium.” And four years ago she would have given her right arm to have some for her screaming baby, but still. Come on. It was a narcotic. “How about you just try describing more homemade remedies, like teething rings, freezing a sock, that kind of thing….” She listened on the line again. “A sock. Like, for your feet. You soak it in water, then freeze it and…” She sighed. “Never mind. Just go ahead and finish your column.”

She would edit it later.

Home Life magazine had been around for a hundred and twenty-five years, and Kit was willing to bet Orville Pippin had been writing his “Ask the Doctor” column for at least half that time. She would also bet his exploration of modern medicine stopped with whatever the Stenberg School of Medicine class of ’38 had taken away under their graduation caps.

Kit had only been the managing editor of the magazine for five years, but in that time she’d researched and written more of his columns than he himself had, thanks to all of the outdated advice he had a tendency to dole out. She had a hotline to her own pediatrician’s office to double-check just this kind of thing.

Opium.

Jeez.

“Hey, Kit!” Lucy, a young editorial assistant, barked from the hallway. “Phone, line two. Johnny’s babysitter again.”

Kit glanced at the clock. Two fifty-five. Damn. Five minutes ago it had been noon and even then she hadn’t had enough time to finish everything she had to do today. She closed her eyes and counted to five. If she didn’t pick up the phone, they couldn’t tell her to come pick him up early again. It wasn’t as if they’d put him out on the sidewalk.

She waited just a beat longer, then picked up the receiver. “This is Kit Macy.”

“Ms. Macy.” It was the director, Ellen Phillips. She always pronounced Ms. as if it contained twenty-two z’s. “We seem to have a problem.”

“Oh?”

“Yes, Johnny has been fighting with Kyle again.” Big surprise. It was like saying Churchill and Hitler had had another disagreement. “It seems both of them wanted to ride the fire engine, but Johnny refused to let Kyle have a turn.”

Kyle was a bully. Easily two years older than Johnny and at least twenty pounds heavier, the kid picked on Johnny every single day. One would have thought the facility administrator might have taken the older, bigger child to task, but she never did. Kyle’s parents were a whole lot richer than Kit, and if Mizzzzzzz Phillips had to alienate either boy’s parents, it was going to be Johnny’s every time.

And it was.

Kit took a short breath. “Ellen, look, can’t you please just separate them for the rest of the day?” She looked at the clock. Three o’clock. “It’s only another two hours or so, and I have a million things I have to get done.”

“I’m trying to do my job, too, Ms. Macy, but that’s difficult to do with these hellions creating chaos for me.”

Hellions. Man, she’d hissed it like a curse. “Well, maybe Kyle’s parents can pick him up this time.”

The phone line seemed to crackle with the chill of her response. “But you are in the building next door to ours. I would hate to ask Mr. Cherkins to come all the way downtown when you’re right here.”

Yes. Yes, she was right here. And that was the only reason she still had Johnny in the Petite Care Center. She was seriously thinking it wasn’t worth it.

If Johnny hadn’t been caught in the middle of this, Kit’s response would have been different, but she didn’t want to instigate an argument only to have Ellen take it out on the boy.

She looked at the clock on her desk. Three-oh-three. She sighed heavily. “I’ll be right there.”

“He wouldn’t let me ride.”

“I believe you.” Kit toted Johnny along the sidewalk toward the old building that had served as Home Life’s headquarters since 1948. “But I’ve told you before to avoid that kid. If he’s playing with something, you have to find something else to play with. If he’s not near you, he can’t fight with you.”

“But I was there first!” Johnny’s voice rang with the injustice of it. Obviously he’d had to explain this to Ellen, too, because his face crinkled the way it always did when he was truly frustrated.

“Then you should have walked away.” Kit heard her own advice and stopped. To hell with hurrying back to work. This was more important.

She knelt down in front of her son on the grungy sidewalk, holding his slight shoulders in her hands. “I take it back, Johnny. You shouldn’t have. You can’t walk away every time a bully tries to take something from you. You did the right thing. I’m glad you stood up for yourself.”

A dent formed in the perfectly smooth skin over his brow. “You are?” His blue eyes went dark with confusion. “But you just said—”

“I know, baby. But I was wrong. It’s easier to walk away from bullies sometimes, but it’s not always right.” She pulled him close for a hug, reveling in the soft, soapy smell of his skin and hair. She kissed the cottony-soft blond head and drew back. “Okay?”

“I don’t want to go back there.”

It broke her heart. He was there for her convenience, not because it was best for him. There was no pretending otherwise. She was best for him. And since she couldn’t be there all the time, she was going to have to find something else. Something that wasn’t Mizzzzzzz Phillips. “Remember how I told you I was going to try and put you in that Montessori school near our new house?”

“School?” His eyes lit up. He was enamored with the idea of school in the way only a person who had never been could be.

She nodded, but fear surged in her heart rather than the hope she saw in his. What if it didn’t work out? It didn’t bear thinking about. “Well, the application came in the mail today and I’m going to send it back to them this afternoon. Well, tomorrow afternoon.” After she was paid. The seventy-five-dollar application fee was nonnegotiable.

She knew because she’d tried to negotiate it.

“My new school,” he said with a small nod and the kind of smile that made her determine right there and then that she’d get him into the school even if she had to rob a bank to do it. “And Kyle Cherkins won’t be there, right?”

“No, he won’t.” She stood up again and took his little warm hand, leading him into the office. “Okay. Here we are. You know the drill. Sit quietly and color. No talking, no running, no interrupting me when I’m on the phone and no asking why Miss Pratt’s ankles are so wrinkly. Got it?”

“I know, I know.”

“Mommy! Mommy, Mommy.” Tap, tap, tap on her arm. “Look, Mommy.”

Kit held her hand over the mouthpiece of the phone and shot Johnny a shut up look. She returned to her call. “So you’re saying you lost all of the documentation?”

The bank official on the other end of the line cleared his throat. “Your former loan officer left in something of a hurry. We don’t know exactly where she put all the files she was working on. It’s caused quite a backup, I must say.”

Kit’s heart lodged in her throat. “I’m not going to lose my interest rate, am I?”

“I sincerely hope not.”

Kit’s stomach dropped. “Wait. Sincerely hope not isn’t good enough. I need to know.” Or what? Or she’d go to another company? Although her credit was good, there were a few tiny glitches—a forgotten department store credit card that she’d once been thirty-one days late in paying, a collection effort on the part of Big Jugs magazine for a subscription she’d never ordered—that she’d had to clear with Best State Mortgage. She did not want to start the process over again.

“We’ll do our best, Ms. Macy. If you could just get your bank statements, tax forms, W-2’s and employer’s statement to us, we’ll get right on it.”

“Employer’s statement?” Unbelievable. They needed something new every single time she talked to them.

“Just something stating your year-to-date earnings and projected income.”

“Okay.” She glanced at Johnny. Maybe it was a good thing she’d already gotten him, because now she was going to have to stay after and hope the editor, Ebbit, had time to write something up. “Anything else?”

“It’s all on the checklist.”

There was a beep on the line. The phone said it was in-house. Ebbit himself. “Okay, Mr. Black, I have copies of everything else, so I’ll just overnight them to you again.”

“No need to hurry.”

“No need to hurry?” Her voice leaped toward hysteria. “I’m supposed to close on the house in twenty-eight days.”

There was a nerve-racking pause.

Then the sound of papers shuffling on the other end of the line. “I’m sorry, did you say twenty-eight days? I have you down for September.”

Johnny tapped Kit’s arm and she pulled it away, turning her office chair around. “No, it’s this month. July 30.” It was all she could do to stay calm. If this stupid company prevented her from getting her house because one person screwed up, she’d—

“I’ll make a note of it,” the loan officer said noncommittally.

Kit’s phone beeped again.

She thought her head might explode.

“All right. I have to take this call, Mr. Black, so I’ll just collect the information and you’ll have it in the morning.” She clicked over to the other line.

“We have an urgent meeting this afternoon at five,” Ebbit Markham told her.

“Okay.” She glanced at Johnny. There was going to have to be some serious bribery involved in trying to keep him sitting quietly in her office during an editorial meeting. “Actually I’m glad you’re staying a little late because I need you to give me a written statement that I work here.”

Silence.

“Ebbit?”

“Why do you need that?”

She tapped her pen on the desk. “It’s not a big deal. The mortgage company just wants proof that I’m employed.” She gave a casual laugh. “You know how it is—they don’t want to lend you money until you can completely prove you don’t need it.”

Again nothing.

“Oh! Yes, yes, well…” What was with him? He sounded as if she’d shocked him out of sleep or something. “I’ll just, uh, I’ll see you at five.”

“Okay.” She hung up the phone thoughtfully.

“Mommy.” Johnny tapped her again. “Are you off the phone now? Look at my picture.” He produced her May bank statement, replete with indelible ink scribbles. “It’s our new house. Do you like it?”

“Yeah, honey, that’s nice,” she said, distracted.

Johnny tugged on her sleeve. “You didn’t look at it. You have to look at it!”

She looked.

Oh, no. Oh. No. No, no, no. The bank statement. All those numbers.

In her mind’s eye she saw herself spending the evening with a bottle of Wite-Out, removing every line he’d added. And even then she ran the risk of it looking as if she’d somehow doctored her books.

But Johnny looked so proud, so pleased with his work, that she couldn’t bear to let out the anger that bubbled in her chest. “It’s good,” she said in a tight voice. “But, honey, next time ask me for paper, okay? Don’t write on something that already has writing on it. That’s really important, got it?”

“You don’t like it?”

She took a long breath. “Yes, I do, it’s just…” She sighed. “It’s just great.” She produced a pile of paper from her printer tray, looked at it and added a few more sheets. “Here. Do some more. I’ve got to go in the room next door for a meeting in a little while, and you’re going to stay here, so why don’t you draw all your very best friends for me. If you run out of paper, get more from there, okay?” She pointed to the printer tray.

He barely glanced at it, said, “’Kay,” and set about drawing immediately.

She looked at her clock again.

It was four-forty.

Kit always thought that if Samantha Stevens had twitched her nose and turned an old basset hound into a man, she’d have ended up with Ebbit Markham. Today he looked even more basset houndish than usual, his face drawn and white.

The staff of Home Life was collected in the conference room. Ebbit’s lifelong secretary, Miss Pratt—no one was sure of her first name—was handing out coffee in foam cups, her shaking hands sloshing the hot liquid onto laps, shirts and the floor.

“What’s going on?” Kit asked her friend Joanna Sadler, aka Joe Sadler, Mr. Fix-It, another monthly columnist as well as the permissions editor.

“Don’t freak” was Joanna’s first response.

Kit quirked her mouth into a smile, belying the nervous tremor in her stomach. “Okay, now that I know it’s freakworthy, what’s going on?”

“I think the magazine’s been sold.”

“What?”

“It’s just what I heard. I could be wrong.”

How could this happen without her knowing something was up in advance? “Who bought it?”

Joanna shrugged. “Some idiot who wants a century-old monthly that’s hopelessly outdated and losing readers by the score every day, I guess.”

It was a fair assessment, Kit knew. The once venerable publication had become so desperate for readers that it offered subscriptions for the cost of postage. Every time she’d suggested to Ebbit that maybe they should become a little more contemporary, he gave her a lecture on tradition.

Lucy came up next to Kit, her small, tanned face tight with worry. “They sold the magazine? What’s going to happen to us?”

“Hang on—we don’t know anything yet,” Kit said, trying to inject reason. “As far as we know, this is just a regular editorial meeting.”

In her gut she knew it wasn’t.

The door opened and a tall, slick-looking man with dark hair, light eyes, a square jaw and a suit that probably cost almost as much as her monthly salary walked in.

Everyone made their way to their seats around the conference table and turned to face Ebbit at the head of the table like obedient schoolchildren.

He stood behind his chair rather than sitting down. “As you all know,” he began, clutching and unclutching the back of the chair with gnarled hands. “I have been working for Home Life for over fifty years. I began in the mail room and worked my way slowly but surely to where I am now.” He glanced at the man with him. “Or, that is, where I was until today.”

This was not good.

Ebbit mustered a smile. “Home Life has been sold, along with her sister publications, to the Monahan Group. If the name sounds familiar to you, it’s because they own and operate such publications as Sports World, Kidz and Celeb Dish magazines.” He looked at the man with him. “With the new management comes a new direction for all of us. As of today, I am entering into that wonderful state called retirement.” His voice wavered over the word retirement. “I plan to do a lot of fishing and gardening and generally get on Connie’s nerves.”

There was a small wave of polite laughter in the room.

“Anyhoo,” Ebbit said in his wrapping-it-up voice, “this is Cal Panagos.” He gestured toward the man. “Cal is the former editor of Sports World. Now he’s the new executive editor of Home Life.”

Ebbit stepped aside, and Cal Panagos stepped behind the chair as if it was a grand podium. “Thanks for the welcome,” he said, giving Ebbit a stiff but technically courteous nod. His bearing was positively regal. His looks were as strikingly sultry as one of the Calvin Klein underwear models who routinely looked over Times Square with long-lashed bedroom eyes. But it was his air of confidence that struck Kit the most.

He set his expensive-looking leather briefcase on the table and opened it up. “I know this is a surprise to many of you.”

Kit’s stomach turned over. Her heart pounded as if a boxer was caught in her rib cage. This couldn’t be happening. Yet it was.

She was losing her house.

Cal continued. “Personally I’m excited about the challenge this presents.”

Kit noticed he tensed his jaw for a moment. It was a gesture that hardened the planes of his face and made him look even more manly.

“My plan is to start this magazine over from the ground up, and I’m bringing in my own people for the task, so…” His expensively clad shoulders rose a fraction of an inch, then dropped. “I thank you for your years of service to Home Life and, if you’ll make your way to Ebbit’s former office, you’ll find your severance packages waiting for you.”

The room responded with silence. No gasps, no objections.

“I believe you’ll find the terms generous,” Cal finished. “Thanks for your time and your service to the magazine.” He gave a brief—and Kit thought insincere—smile.

And with that he turned and left the room.