Chapter 8 Jack
Jack
The housing authority story was coming together. I spread the documents across my desk. Invoices, contracts, a memo someone had been careless enough to throw in the trash instead of the shredder, and looked for the pattern I knew was there.
Three construction companies, all with the same post office box listed for correspondence. Two city councilmen who’d voted to approve contracts worth six figures each. And a paper trail that led, if I was reading it correctly, straight to the mayor’s office.
The newsroom hummed around me with its usual morning chaos.
Typewriters clacking, phones ringing, someone arguing with an editor about headline placement.
The smell of burnt coffee and cigarette smoke hung in the air like fog, so familiar I barely noticed it anymore.
Markowski was shouting at someone in sports.
The police scanner crackled with static and dispatcher shorthand.
In the far corner, Peterson was asleep at his desk again, newspaper over his face, having clearly pulled another all-nighter chasing a story that probably wouldn’t pan out.
This was the part of journalism I loved.
Not the interviews or the deadlines or the adrenaline of breaking news, but this, the quiet work of connecting the dots, of finding the story hidden inside a stack of boring paperwork.
Most people thought reporters spent their time chasing sources and typing frantically while editors shouted.
The reality was more like being an accountant with a notebook.
Follow the money. Always follow the money.
I’d learned that from Danny, in a way. He used to write me letters from basic training, and later from Vietnam, full of observations about the gap between what people said and what they did.
“Watch the hands, not the mouth,” he’d written once.
“The mouth lies. The hands tell the truth.” It wasn’t journalism advice, exactly.
It was survival advice. But it translated.
“Cavanaugh.” Ed appeared at my elbow, coffee cup in hand, his tie already loosened at ten in the morning. “You see this?”
He dropped a clipping on my desk. Wire service pickup, my story on the permit scandal from last month, reprinted in the Chicago Tribune.
“When did this happen?”
“Yesterday. Davis called this morning to let us know.” Ed was trying not to smile, which meant he was pleased. Ed showing pleasure was like watching a glacier express enthusiasm. “Said he’s been following your work.”
“Davis from the wire service?”
“Davis from the Times.”
I looked up. Ed was definitely smiling now.
“The New York Times,” I said, just to be sure.
“Unless there’s another one I don’t know about.”
The Times. The paper of record. The place where careers went to become legendary or to die spectacular public deaths, depending on whether you could handle the pressure.
I’d dreamed about working there since I was fifteen, reading my brother’s copies of the Sunday edition and imagining my byline on the front page.
“What did he want?”
“Didn’t say. Just asked me to have you call him back.” Ed set a phone number on my desk, written in his careful blocky handwriting. “Sooner rather than later, he said.”
I stared at the number. New York area code. This was either very good or very bad, and I couldn’t tell which.
“Well?” Ed raised an eyebrow. “You going to call him or frame that piece of paper?”
“I’m going to call him.”
“Good.” He clapped me on the shoulder, the closest Ed ever came to physical affection, and headed back to his desk. “Let me know how it goes.”
Jim Davis had a voice like gravel and honey, the kind of voice that made you want to tell him things. Dangerous, for a journalist. Useful, for an editor.
“Jack. Thanks for calling back.”
“Mr. Davis.”
“Jim. Nobody calls me Mr. Davis except my mother-in-law, and she doesn’t like me much.” A dry chuckle. “I’ve been reading your stuff. The housing authority series, the permit scandal, that piece on the school board last fall. You’ve got a good eye.”
“Thank you.”
“How long have you been at the Globe?”
“Three years.”
“And before that?”
“BU, then a year at the Herald.”
“You like Boston?”
I thought about the question. Most people asked it rhetorically, expecting the obvious answer. Jim asked it like he actually wanted to know.
“It’s home,” I said. “But I’m not married to it.”
“Good answer.” Another pause, longer this time. “I’m going to be direct with you. We’re looking for investigative reporters. People who can dig, who don’t mind spending six months on a story that might not pan out. Your clips suggest you might be that kind of reporter.”
My heart was beating faster than I wanted it to. I kept my voice steady. “I appreciate that.”
“I’d like you to come to New York. Meet some people, see the newsroom, talk about what we’re looking for. No promises on either side, just a conversation.”
“When were you thinking?”
“Sunday, if you can manage it. Stay through Wednesday. We’ll put you up at a hotel, cover your expenses.”
I thought about Maggie. About the plans we’d made for the weekend. About the way her voice had sounded on the phone yesterday, warm and present in a way it hadn’t been for months.
“Sunday works,” I heard myself say.
“Excellent. I’ll have my assistant send the details. Looking forward to meeting you.”
“Likewise.”
I hung up the phone and sat very still at my desk, the newsroom chaos swirling around me like I was the eye of some improbable storm. The Times. They wanted me to come to New York. They were interested in hiring me.
This was everything I’d worked for. Everything I’d wanted since I was old enough to want things professionally.
So why did it feel like I was standing at the edge of a cliff, trying to decide whether to jump?
Ed materialized again, as he always did, right when you thought you were having a private moment. He leaned against the partition of my cubicle, arms crossed, reading my face with the same ruthless efficiency he applied to first drafts.
“Good call?”
“They want me to come in. Sunday through Wednesday.”
“And?”
“And I said yes.”
“So why do you look like someone canceled Christmas?”
I rubbed my face with both hands. “It’s complicated.”
Ed snorted. “It’s a woman. It’s always a woman when a reporter makes that face.”
He took a sip of his coffee, studying me over the rim. “This the one who had you moping around here like a kicked dog all winter?”
“I wasn’t moping.”
“You rewrote your lede fourteen times on the permit story. Fourteen. Your average is three.” He set his coffee down on my desk, which was how I knew he was being serious. Ed never put his coffee down. “What’s the situation?”
I shouldn’t have told him. Ed was my editor, not my therapist. But something about the way he asked—direct, no judgment, just the facts—made me answer.
“She’s different, but I don’t know if I trust it.”
Ed was quiet for a moment. In the newsroom, that was unusual enough to notice.
“You know what I’ve learned in thirty years of journalism?” he said finally.
“People lie with words all the time. But they don’t lie with patterns. If someone changes a pattern—a real pattern, not a performance—you pay attention to that. Because patterns are hard to break.”
He picked up his coffee. “You’ve been watching this woman for how long?”
“A year. Give or take.”
“And the pattern changed?”
I thought about Maggie at dinner. The way she’d started to deflect, and then caught herself. The way she’d turned down the conference. The way she asked about my work like she actually cared about the answer.
“Yeah,” I said. “The pattern changed.”
“Then stop running the same story and write a new one.” He straightened up, all business again. “And call Davis back if you forgot anything. Don’t blow this because you’re in your head.”
He walked away, and I sat there with the phone number still on my desk and something loosening in my chest. Ed wasn’t a sentimental man. He dealt in evidence. And he’d just told me, in his own blunt way, that the evidence was worth trusting.
The apartment was quiet when I got home. I put on Coltrane—A Love Supreme, one of Danny’s records, passed down to me after the funeral because our mother couldn’t bear to look at his things—and let the music fill the space while I changed out of my work clothes.
The letter was still on my desk.
I’d moved it three times in the past week. I couldn’t seem to commit to keeping it or destroying it. Some part of me was waiting for evidence, I suppose. Proof that I’d been wrong about Maggie, or proof that I’d been right.
I picked it up now. Read it again, even though I knew every word by heart.
Dear Maggie—
I’ve started this letter a dozen times. I keep hoping I won’t have to send it.
I love you. I’ve loved you since the night we argued about Hemingway and you called me a “tragically literal thinker.”
But I can’t keep doing this. I can’t keep being the one who shows up while you decide whether I’m worth the risk.
I deserve someone who’s sure. Someone who chooses me.
You’re not that person.
—Jack
I’d written it the day after my father told me about Danny and the girl who got away.
We’d been at his house in Dorchester, the house I’d grown up in, eating leftover ham and pretending we had anything to say to each other.
My mother had been dead for three years by then, and without her to mediate, my father and I had settled into a kind of armed neutrality, polite enough to share holidays, distant enough to avoid any conversation that mattered.
But he’d been drinking that night. And when Frank Cavanaugh drank, he talked about Danny.
“There was a girl,” he’d said, staring at the photograph on the mantel, Danny in uniform, grinning, immortally twenty-two. “Before he shipped out. Pretty thing. Red hair. He was crazy about her.”
I hadn’t known this. There was a lot about Danny I hadn’t known, being nine years old and mostly interested in baseball cards when he left for Vietnam.
“What happened?”