Chapter 24
CHAPTER 24
Nothing looked better, but it did look darker when she finally woke up. She picks her phone up off the table, looks at it and can’t believe it’s 4:45. She slept for three hours. There are several texts from her mom, and another one from Jack. She deletes that one.
Not wanting to get into what happened at work with her mom on the phone, she decides to send her a text instead of calling. She’s worried that hearing her mom’s voice will make her start crying again. Between Jack, Penelope and work it had been quite the 24 hours.
Hey, All is well, just got done with work, going to stay overnight. Will check in before I head back tmrw. Love you.
She feels a little bad lying, but there was no need for her parents to get upset. There would be plenty of time, more than plenty of time it seems, to talk when she gets back to Cranberry Harbor. Her mom writes back immediately, saying she’s glad she’s okay, and that they’d miss her. “Not for long,” she says out loud. “You’re going to get plenty sick of me.”
As soon as she says that out loud, she thinks that perhaps she is giving up too easily. She hasn’t even tried to think of other things she can do for work in Boston. Grabbing her laptop she writes an email to a friend from grad school who is a very successful freelancer, writing for papers and magazines all over the country. If he can do it, why can’t she?
Email sent, she realizes she hasn’t eaten anything all day. A diet of just wine probably wasn’t the healthiest thing in the world. Grabbing her coat, she decides the best remedy for a broken heart and spirit is some pizza from Mama Gina’s, and dessert from Gracie’s, her favorite ice cream shop. She knows she could have it all delivered, but she needs to get out and walk to try to shake off all that’s happened.
The brisk air hits her as she leaves the building. She buttons up her coat and pulls up the collar around her neck. She should have grabbed a scarf, but hadn’t. Her ungloved hands remind her of Jack saying how he was a generations-old New Englander and never remembered to wear gloves and she feels sad.
As she walks she thinks about what it would feel like to leave the city, to go back home. She has to admit it feels like failing, even though she knows it’s the industry she works in, not her work, but still, she can’t help but feel it is her fault.
Everyone walking around Somerville looks so young, she tries to imagine what it would be like to live back on the Cape in the land of retirees. Which makes her think about Jack and his good ideas. Why couldn't it be someone else, anyone else, who wants to revitalize the community? She quickens her pace as she begins to think about how she’d begun to let herself have feelings for him again, and is furious with herself. For three years she’d done a good job of putting all those feelings aside. Sort of a good job. Who was she kidding? All she’d done was push them deep inside, they were always there. And now, here she was, back where she started. No, I’m not back where I started, I’m not the same person I was three years ago. I am stronger, I am capable, I am better. She laughs a little at how she’s now sounding like a parody of a very cheesy self-help podcast.
Before she knows it she’s at Gracie’s. Anger walking often gets you places more quickly. Getting the ice cream first made sense because it was so cold outside, so it shouldn’t melt too much.
She walks in and looks at the chalkboard with the daily flavors and decides on a pint of blueberry cinnamon, and is out and on her way to get her pizza in just a couple of minutes.
Mama Gina’s is pretty busy. She orders a plain cheese, which is always amazing there, and waits. As she sits at a high-top table waiting for her number to be called, she hears her name.
“Lizzie?” Oh dear lord it’s Ed, and his new girlfriend. Seriously, could this day get any weirder or worse? It was beginning to feel like the worst cosmic joke ever.
“Ed, fancy running into you here,” she says, barely making eye contact. She looks at the woman on his arm who’s avoiding looking at her too and introduces herself. “Hi, I’m Lizzie,” the woman barely smiles and nods, and doesn’t give her name. Okay. Two days running now she’s found herself introducing herself to ex-boyfriend’s girlfriends. That has to be some type of record.
“I thought you were on the Cape for the holidays?” he asks, when she just wishes he’d go away into the night with whatever her name is and his pizza.
She nods,”Yup, headed back tomorrow, had to come in for a work thing.” She doesn’t share the work thing was being let go. Thanks to luck or divine intervention, her number gets called quicker than she expected. “Well, that’s me, see you around! Merry Christmas.”
As she walks back home with her pizza and ice cream she realizes there is no escaping your past no matter how long you’ve lived someplace. And what the heck? How could Ed already have found another girlfriend? He doesn’t even like dogs!
After eating three pieces of pizza, and settling on rewatching Elf for probably the one thousandth time, she pulls the ice cream out of the freezer, gets a spoon, no dish, and digs in. Why is it when your heart is broken that the perfect remedy is cream and sugar, and the magic that happens when you freeze it? It’s a classic cure for a reason, it may not make the pain go away, but it does numb it for a while. Was there something inherently unlovable about her? Was she just a bad chooser? She knew Ed wasn’t the right person for her, but him moving on so fast still stung. She was teary as she kept eating her ice cream.
Mid-pint her phone alerts her that she’s got an email. It’s from her freelancing friend.
Good to hear from you! So sorry about the job, that sucks. I’m afraid I can’t be of much help with the freelance gig. I gave it up last year and am working at a bank. Real exciting, huh? I am writing, working on a book, but my advice is get something steady, and don’t rely on freelance, it’s way too much pressure and not dependable.
Sorry to not give you better news,
Hope to see you in the New Year, wherever you land,
Jon
She puts down her phone, and picks up the ice cream. Okay, looks like the Cranberry Harbor Gazette and home it is.
Thanks to a three-hour nap and a lot of carbs and sugar she is still wide awake after midnight. If she is going to go to work with her dad she needs to have a plan of action. She takes her laptop off the table, swings her legs around to the length of the couch, and opens it up.
Going straight to Google Docs she creates a new folder, “Cranberry Harbor Gazette Reboot” and starts typing out ideas.
Number one is building a strong online presence as well as keeping the print edition going. Engaging younger readers means having a strong web edition and utilizing social media, especially Instagram. Her dad had been resistant for years to having people read the paper online, insisting that the only true way to read a newspaper is to get actual ink on your fingers. But times have changed, and so many people now only get their news online, it’s important to be a positive, reliable source in the endless stream of shoddy and unverified information.
Number two was making sure to have a lot of diverse voices in the paper. She immediately thinks of Jay and Anika Patel at Tall Tale Books. They both had such impressive backgrounds she had no doubt they could add a lot to the paper with a monthly column. The same with Leah, Hope’s granddaughter, with her passion for the environment and a keen eye on meshing being environmentally responsible and a good business person, she knows she could offer a lot as well. She wasn’t sure how to pay them right away, that was something they’d have to figure out, but where there is a will there’s a way. She would not expect people to write for free.
Next would be future-building for Cranberry Harbor. Whether it is housing, jobs, businesses, or protecting the community from being harmed by climate change, it is important to have voices that are letting people know about the real risks and what can be done right now. Alexis would be the perfect person to put on this topic, her background and studies in community planning will be ideal.
As she continues to write she finds herself getting excited. More excited than she’s been about her work in a really long time. Rather than being a cog in a corporate machine where she has no say or control over anything she writes, this is a chance to have control and a stake in what she’s doing. She knows her dad will certainly listen to her, but she also wants to respect that this is his paper, his business, that he's kept going for over thirty years. She needs to be cautious and not come in pretending she has all the answers and disrespect what he’s been doing successfully for a very long time.
In terms of her own writing, she thinks she could perhaps bring the perspective of a local coming back and wanting to make a go of it, and how the community needs to be welcoming of new ideas and things they might not have considered before. Like Jack’s ideas of someday re-utilizing the old, abandoned base down-Cape, and looking at the benefits of employment that goes beyond the traditional Cape service industry jobs which aren’t well paying and are seasonal. Then she writes a segment, a fairly decent sized one, arguing against the Norman Rockwell angle–the ‘we can’t change anything that removes any amount of quaintness and that picture-perfect-postcard facade’. But, people don’t live in postcards, they live in real towns, and have real bills, and need real houses, not one Edward Hopper painted decades ago. She wants to help Jack get his housing idea approved by the town, no matter what her personal feelings are.
By the time she’s written most of her proposal it was near two o’clock. She closes her laptop, pulls the afghan on the back of the couch over her and drifts off to sleep thinking about how maybe the worst thing that could have happened may end up being the absolute best thing.