Chapter 5
CHAPTER FIVE
Wes
For dinner, Estelle’s chef had made roast pork and pineapple with a side of roasted brussels sprouts and a chewy, fresh baguette. So chewy that Wes had difficulty speaking, which was fine, because Estelle and Maureen seemed to be hitting it off famously without him.
It had to be pork, of all things. They couldn’t have eaten chicken to give this rival less ammo to charm Estelle with. No, it turned out that of course Mo would basically have read the tarot cards of the pig they were ingesting.
“I wasn’t raised on a pig farm,” Mo clarified after the first five minutes of the discussion.
Wes couldn’t stop watching her, not even when she unselfconsciously put a bite of the former Babe in her mouth.
A tiny little Gordy covered with sauce. A delicious little Wilbur …
the more Wes spun out the thought, the less hungry he was and the more curious he was about why kids were so fascinated with pigs.
Maureen had been a little quiet at the beginning of dinner, shooting Wes sideways glances that made him wonder what she had Googled about him upstairs. Something had happened, that was for sure, but when the main course was brought out, pork talk began. And, it seemed, was never going to end.
“My mother was raised on a hog farm, and she and my dad took over the farm after my grandparents passed. So I wasn’t raised around hogs, but I spent summers with them. My parents took over the operation after I left for college.”
Wes did not interject with an anecdote about where he summered, mostly because his May-through-August periods were bougie enough to use the verb summer for.
He imagined the conjugation on a blackboard in chalk: I summered in Tuscany.
You summered in Tuscany. He/She/It did not summer in Tuscany.
We summered in Tuscany, but sometimes also in Laos or San Pedro Island. They summered near pig excrement .
Estelle was charmed by the description of a life completely unlike her own.
Rural exceptionalism, that’s what it was.
Just because Maureen was brought up on or around a farm didn’t make her somehow more moral or worthy, although Wes had to admit he couldn’t think of anyone he knew who grew up on a farm.
He represented a diverse range of clients in terms of race, sexuality, genre, and education, but he didn’t send any of their royalty checks to a soybean field.
“When I was growing up, my grandparents kept about a hundred hogs, but that’s more like two hundred today.
And my dad is in construction, always has been, so he helped build the new facility for them.
” Maureen’s voice was steady, but fifteen minutes into the discussion, even she sounded a little bored by the topic.
She pushed a brussels sprout around her plate.
“Can you smell them from the house?” Wes asked. His appetite for pork was completely gone, but both Estelle and Maureen had eaten their portions without issue. His three rounds of pale flesh stared up from a bed of cranberry dressing. Tiny Peppa covered in red sauce. He might never eat pork again.
“Yes and no. The buildings are better ventilated than they used to be. You can be within a hundred feet of the confinement and not smell anything. And it’s not like we do the processing of the hogs on-site, so there’s not—” Maureen paused.
“Anyway, pigs aren’t really a passion for me.
That’s why I’m here. Well, here , yes, but also why I’m in New York in general. ”
The dinner plates were cleared by one staff member as another put down a small cr è me br ? l é e in front of each guest. The tops were perfectly toasted to a coconut tan, and Wes tapped the top with the back of a spoon. The sugar top gave with a crack, and he dug into the rich custard.
“Does all of your family live in Iowa?” Estelle asked, her brain unwilling to move on from the topic that both Maureen and Wes were obviously over.
Maureen looked across the table from Wes with a complicated look.
In it, he read how apologetic she was about the continuation of the conversation, but also how trapped she was.
He smiled at her, chest warming. At least she realized it, and he wasn’t envious of the attention.
He knew only too well how much it felt like being consumed to have your family life picked apart.
Maureen put a spoonful of dessert in her mouth before she spoke.
She closed her eyes while she tasted, and Wes realized how long her lashes were.
When she opened them again, the spoon was still in her mouth, lightly held in her fingertips.
She pulled it out smoothly, tongue peeking barely from between her pink lips.
She did have a farm girl freshness in her looks.
That braid down her back, blonde and sweet, was something he could picture parted.
Two Pippi pigtails, braided across her shoulders.
Finally, she spoke, putting the spoon beside the custard.
“Yes. We’re sixth generation or something like that.
My parents were high school sweethearts.
To find the love of your life in a high school with a graduating class of about forty is incredible luck.
And my little sister lives about twenty minutes from my parents. She’s getting married this summer.”
“Do you get to see them often?” Gary asked.
“Not as often as they’d like.” With a forced effort Wes could see from across the table, Maureen’s brow furrowed, then smoothed again. She picked up her spoon again, angling it into the custard. “So, what is on the agenda for the weekend?”
Wes turned to Estelle. “Yes, I guess we should discuss how you plan to put us through the ringer.”
Estelle lay her spoon on top of her empty dish. “We’ll get down to business in a minute. I’m going to attend to a few needs, and while I’m gone, feel free to have a little more coffee.”
She held up a finger, and a staff member refilled her cup. Estelle and Gary left the room. The gravity of the room changed without Estelle at the head of the table. Wes shook his head at the offer of coffee.
Maureen asked, “Decaf?” The server shook her head, and Maureen said, “Thank you, Angie. I’m okay.”
Angie left them alone in the dining room, the first time they had been alone since the car. “Do you know her?” Wes asked.
“She has a name tag, and that means she has a name.”
“I know she has a name.” Wes knew he sounded defensive.
He shouldn’t be embarrassed that he hadn’t taken note of the staff members’ name tags.
Should he? He realized, suddenly, that Maureen had not looked at him more than twice the entire meal.
This lack of eye contact only made itself known now that they were alone.
“You don’t need to know everyone’s names. ”
“If we’re going to see Angie all weekend, I’d like to use her name,” Maureen said primly, examining her mug.
In the bustle of the past few hours, Wes had barely had time to consider his impression of Maureen.
Not really a first impression, since he had fallen for her manuscript two years ago, but a book isn’t a person.
He found himself curious about this woman who followed him on LinkedIn and shipped Sam and Frodo; this woman who had grabbed onto the dry-cleaning bar in his car for dear life an hour ago and was now staring into what he knew to be an empty mug in her hands.
“No coffee past six PM for you, huh?” he tried.
“I don’t want to have more reasons to not sleep. I’m just—”
“Just what?”
She glanced behind her, probably checking for Estelle. When it was clear they were still alone, she spoke. “I’m mad at you.”
“Me!”
“Can you blame me? You could have said something in the car that we were up against each other.” She had no issue looking in his eyes now.
“I don’t represent the estate anymore, if that’s what you’re worried about. As of this weekend, my boss took that position over. I’m in the same situation you are.”
“Oh, sure,” she said with heat. “A publishing insider with a famous mother, a close connection to the estate, and a large social media following versus the pig girl. Absolutely square.”
“I can’t help any of that.”
“I thought this was a one-on-one type of thing, not a Hunger Games situation.” Mo laughed coldly. “Not that I’m going to go shooting you through the heart or anything.”
“Maybe a little competition is a good thing. I’m not nervous,” he said, finding it was true. “I am anxious.”
Mo scoffed. “Same thing.”
“Oh no. One hundred percent not.” He was on firm ground in arguing semantics. “Nervous implies some amount of control over the situation. Anxiety is an acknowledgment of your lack of control.”
She hmm -ed. “Well, I’m not good at not being the one in control.” Her voice was suddenly low and rough.
“I prefer someone else to be in control,” he said.
“Seems like a strange temperament for an agent.”
“Oh,” he said, “being an agent means being able to accept how powerless you really are. I’m good at making that personal connection and marketing projects, but I’m not sure I could ever be an acquiring editor. Or a politician.”
“Are those two jobs so alike?”
Her heard the thaw in her voice, wanted to keep it going. “Well, both jobs have to get used to asking for more money and disappointing people, so I’d say yes.”
“Agents disappoint people all the time.”
“Fair,” he said. “But publishing on the agent side doesn’t raise my anxiety like publishing on the writing side does. This is—well—torture paired with a nice dinner.”
“It is, right?” She bit her lip, glanced at the door again. “My roommate gave me some weed gummies. I don’t know if they will make things better or worse. I’ve never tried them.”
But before he could reply to that interesting bit of information, Estelle rejoined with Gary in tow.
She placed herself at the head of the table again, and Gary sat in the empty chair to Wes’s left.
Their appearance on the scene was like being given a new script to read from.
The tension shifted. Wes wondered what it was like to be on a reality show, suddenly.
If sometimes there was real banter between the contestants that went unfilmed.
Gary tapped a folder on the table and smiled.
His graying beard was neatly trimmed, and so was his jacket.
“All right, procedures for the weekend,” he said, handing each of them a printed formal agenda from the folder.
The top page held a schedule of events for the next two days, including what appeared to be the dinner they had finished eating.
In fact, the conversation they were having was included on the schedule as an “introductory session,” and like a chess piece laid on the board, he sensed himself being moved against his will.
Wes skimmed the paper until he got to a three-hour block after breakfast the next day. Another block after lunch, then dinner. “Wait,” he said, “these are marked as readings?”
Estelle nodded. “You will read portions of the book out loud. I am an avid reader, but I can’t finish two novels in a weekend. You’ll leave a copy with me after the weekend ends to enjoy in their entirety.”
“These post-meal readings are an audition?” Maureen’s voice was small.
“Of a sort,” Estelle said. “After breakfast, you will read your first chapters. The first, say, twenty pages or so. After lunch, you can select any middle chapter you’d like to share, and after dinner, the ending,” Gary explained. “We have tea and lozenges on hand if your voice gets tired.”
“I can talk,” Wes said. “That’s not the issue. My issue is that reading random chapters spoils the ending!”
Estelle only smiled. “It shouldn’t if you did an adaptation right. I’ll still be surprised by the journey.”
Wes had been surprised by this journey so far, that was for sure. If only he knew how it was going to end.