Chapter 16 #2
I nod, remembering that day quite clearly.
In my memory, I was actually pretty distracted at that lunch. Hugh was two weeks out from his latest release and the publisher
had lost their minds, going with a mere thirty thousand copies for the first printing. Consequently, and to no one’s surprise,
stores had already sold out of whatever they’d been given, leaving frustrated bookstores with readers who wanted to pay good
money, a frustrated publisher working to get a second printing underway as quickly as possible, frustrated readers trying
to hunt the book down, and of course a completely oblivious Hugh going about his business and asking the waiter if he could
order every single type of olive in the house and five glasses to perform a little test to see which exactly is the best in a dirty martini.
I was on the phone nonstop.
Oh, and it was my birthday.
Michael had promised to come home for it but ultimately decided (hindsight really is 20/20) it wasn’t worth the nine-hour
drive and he was messaging me relentlessly, each time with a new reason it would be better to back out. Which was truly worse
than just saying the inevitable bluntly, and a thousand times worse than choosing the mature route and apologizing for being
a selfish pig and taking responsibility.
But no. Instead, he spent the entire day ruining my day by backing out.
Texting me about the horrible traffic on I-75.
Texting about how he had practice on Monday, and how he hated how painfully short the trip was going to have to be.
Texting about the horrible timing with him starting to feel sick.
Working his way to backing out instead of facing me directly and just saying, “Hey, I know this is a crap move, but I’m not
going to come after all and I’m really sorry.”
Essentially pushing the move into my court until it sounded like I was selfish and a demanding girlfriend if I didn’t call it off.
And given I had told my roommates not to throw me a party they had initially insisted on, and had made reservations four months ahead of time to The Palm upon Michael’s insistence that the trendy new restaurant far out of my budget and frankly interest was our “must-do”
for my birthday . . . let’s just say, it was a day of many, many distracting calls and texts swirled into the general emotions
of angst and disappointment.
I wasn’t exactly at my best.
There’s a swoosh by my head and a flash of rhinestones as a woman glides past me and goes up the steps, the train of her black-rhinestone-studded
dress following behind her. She stops at the second piano bench, tips her rhinestone hat to the applause of the crowd around
us—a crowd getting larger by the minute—and swings her knees beneath the piano as she slides onto the bench.
I look around for multiple exits. My chest restricts further.
Ignore it, Penelope.
Tamp it down.
Tamp.
It.
Down.
Nash is oblivious. “You remember it?”
“I remember the restaurant staff getting way too invested in Hugh’s weird new conquest to determine the best olives,” I say,
“and then of course Ricky totally freaking the waitress out when he grabbed her ankle underneath the table just to see what
it would feel like in a scene he was writing—”
“I thought she was going to sue,” Nash says with a reminiscing grin.
“To his credit, he was aiming for Neena—and honestly, that would have been hilarious. And then Crystal tried to order chicken
wings—”
“Of which there were none on the menu, naturally—”
“And Jackie called the hostess aside to ask her to ‘inform the owner of the establishment that the sign saying Des oreilles en chou-fleur is actually a taunt to readers that our ears are the size of cauliflowers, as anyone with even an amateur level of French
would understand.’”
“And Gordon was still wearing his Gandalf hat,” I say. “So. Basically you saw a normal day at the office.”
“And everyone was twice as bad as the rumors that preceded them. But then there was you.”
I purse my lips.
“I wasn’t even sitting down yet and had already all but called the case closed from whatever Mark had planned. It wasn’t hard
to put two and two together—he’d hinted before at wanting me to be his replacement. I’d never given him much support on that
front, but I never pushed against him either. I realized when I got there to lunch and saw his ‘friends’ what he was aiming
at. And I knew what my answer was going to be before I even sat down.”
“You actually planned on saying no?” I say incredulously. “No writer on the planet would’ve said no.”
But I guess that really sums up what this group is about. A group of eccentric writers thinking uniquely and wholly in their own ways. I never thought about it that way, but maybe Nash truly fit in after all.
Nash shrugs as someone stops by our table and tops up our waters. “My work was hard enough at the time, and like I say, I
wasn’t particularly driven to want anything besides what I already had. Problem is, at the time I was having trouble with
just that: my work.”
“Which book was that one now?” I ask, thinking aloud. I mentally run through the titles, seeing all the covers in my mind.
“Highway to Haven?”
Nash lets out a breathy chuckle. “Of course you recall it. It’s incredible how you juggle all of our books in your brain.
Anyway, yes, it was. I may not have remembered the title, but I do know where I was stuck at the time: forty thousand words.”
“Everybody’s stuck at forty thousand words.”
“Not like this. I was stuck-in-the-mud stuck. Knee-deep-in-quicksand stuck. I wasn’t going anywhere, and hadn’t been, for five months.”
“Five months?” I say, giving a low whistle. “When was the book due?”
“Two months later.”
I shake my head. I’d heard all the author woes over the years. Two months to write half a book while in the middle of a creative
freeze was no place to be.
“And you’d tried it all, I’m assuming.”
“Drafting poorly to throw words on the page. Setting alarms. New scenery. Morning work. Evening work. Reinforcement therapy.
Punishment style. Everything. All it got me was twenty thousand words in the wrong direction that needed deleting.”
I wince.
“Twice,” he adds.
I wince again. “Ouch. So how’d you get out of your slump?”
“I’m getting to it,” he says with a twinkle, his blue eyes flickering in the dim light. He rubs his hands together as if he’s
warming himself over a hot fire. He can say what he wants, claim he could switch careers at a snap, but Nash is a true writer
at heart, a man who delights in telling stories—even the true ones.
“So I’m sitting there at the table with this group of people who are acting like they’ve escaped the mental ward, next to
Neena currently asking me out—”
“She didn’t.”
“She did. And then you stalk in.”
I rub my face. “You mean glide, I’m sure.”
“Oh, I mean stalk.” He grins. “You stalked right in just like you always do”—he waves a hand at me—“the little five-foot twenty-four-year-old
surrounded by a bunch of literary giants in one of your bookish cardigans and ballet shoes, and you take one look around,
snap that phone of yours into your back pocket, and slam your hand on the table.
“Took you no more than ten seconds before Ricky was back in his seat, the table stopped shaking, Neena let go of my collar,
Jackie had apologized to the owner of the establishment while providing only two more offensive remarks in the process, Crystal
was satisfied with an order of some sort of breaded fish, and Gordon put away his hat. Even Hugh popped all the olives into
his mouth at once and slid away the glasses like he didn’t know where they came from.
“Then next thing I knew you were sitting next to me, snapping a napkin and setting it on your lap like this was just another
day in the life. I’m not even sure you realized just how much of an impact you made on everyone.”
“Oh, I did,” I say, recalling. “It was a particularly trying day. I did.”
“But then you really shocked me.”
My brain is flying through that day, but nothing comes to mind.
“You were talking to the waiter and said something to the effect of, ‘I’ll take the fish, and oh, by the way, Hugh, I’ve been
thinking about it and I think you need to reveal the secret about the Roman dodecahedrons on page one hundred sixty-two. I
think, but I’m not certain, that might give you the final zip you’re after.’”
I laugh.
It’s nice to be reminded of small victories.
“You remember that?” Nash continues.
“I do,” I say, nodding. It was a good moment in a bad day.
“Hugh dropped his napkin so fast. He spent the rest of the meal over his laptop like a toddler tapping at an iPad, and bought—”
“A dirty martini for the whole restaurant to celebrate,” I finish. It was a victory indeed.
“You saved his book.”
I shake my head, but the kindness was a bright spot in an otherwise miserable day. “He was stuck. It was my job to help him
with his research.”
“Your research, sure. But the creative punch? To give him the thing that made that book outshine the market? You were far more than an assistant.
You were a writer.”
I open my mouth to interject, but he beats me to it. “And then not thirty minutes later, you fixed me.”
“What?” I say incredulously. “No. How?”
“I saw what you did, and I did something I’d never done before. Not even with my editor. I told somebody about my book. I
told you.”
I remember that. I remember him breaking it down for me, first meeting.
It was the distraction I needed at the time, actually. The thing that mellowed me from my skyrocketed blood pressure of a
day with Michael. Something to listen to. Something to weigh in on.
Nash continues, “I told you all about it, which was no big deal to you, but to me, it was everything. And it was . . . well,
it was such a different feeling. Sharing about something I habitually keep close to my chest until the very end, and how you
responded. You seemed interested. You looked genuinely interested.”
“I was interested.”
“But enough to listen to me talk like that, sharing the entire plot’s breakdown—”