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The main reason Erika was a good agent for me was that she could always make me feel bad about not writing, otherwise known as not doing the thing that generated the income we both needed to survive. Of course, that was inaccurate for a variety of reasons. First and foremost neither of us were strictly dependent on my output for our livelihoods. But in my mind, it didn’t matter that I had a day job or that–much like the cat my father named me after–I always seemed to land on my feet or even that Erika had other clients who were far more consistent than I could ever be. Both things were true but irrelevant. They paled in comparison to my need to care about other people.
Or maybe it wasn’t a need. Maybe it was just an impulse, an instinctual reaction like what the knee does when it's smacked with that little hammer the doctor uses. But regardless, I cared too much about people. In particular, I cared too much about people like Erika who looked out for me in one way or another. As my agent, looking out for me meant selling my stories, and by letting her do that, I was looking out for her. But for that exchange to work, I needed to write. She could not sell my books and take a cut of the deal if I did not produce books, so I needed to write as many books as possible. Or, rather, I needed to produce books that could actually be considered publishable, which I had done once and only once. Nothing else since then has been–in any way–promising.
But without the manuscripts, she had nothing to sell, and if she wasn’t selling anything, then she could occupy her time by pushing me to write so that she could–at some future date–have something to sell. She would make it clear that needed me to write, which I was not inclined to do. And that’s when the guilt would start. It didn’t matter that she had a bunch of other clients who were at least as, if not more, successful than I was. Nor did it matter that she also had a seemingly endless supply of young people who earnestly dreamed of being writers and a rolodex of contacts who could make that dream a reality. It didn’t matter that logic would tell me that she definitely did not put all her eggs in the basket of me and my ability to produce books. But there was a part of me that still believed the self-aggrandizing lie: that only I could make or break her life. This was a perversion of Erika’s ability to make me feel seen and special. When Erika was talking to me, I felt like I was the only jewel of her crown or that I was the prized turkey she had picked out for the Thanksgiving feast, that no one could compare to me, even if these other hypothetical writers actually existed, which sometimes I actually doubted.
After only a few years with my name on her client list, Erika also had me feeling like one of Pavlov’s dogs because the mere sight of her name on my caller ID was enough to evoke that same feeling. I would see it and realize with a deep, foreboding dread that I should be writing. I should not be doing [insert whatever task I was actually doing, like staring at my phone screen with a certain pulsating dread or just existing innocently]. Instead, I needed to be writing.
On what I now think of as a day of reckoning–the good ole 21st of June in the year of our Lord who was likely appalled at what I had become 2018–I saw the dreaded notification on my phone while sitting at my desk, at the job that I thought I was pretty good at but not doing a “pretty good” job. Most days, I was pretty good at my work, but on that day, I could not focus. And if I could not focus, I could not do anything, like write or the tasks that collectively made up the day job that I showed an unexplained devotion to.
While Erika made it difficult to focus, she was not the problem that day. In fact, until her name popped up on my phone screen, I didn’t think she would call me. She had never called me on Thursdays. She had other things to do, things that did not involve me. And I was happy about that because it was the smallest piece of evidence that her world wouldn’t end if (when) I failed to write another book of note, and on Thursdays I would not have to live in fear of her calling me to tell me (verbally or not) that I needed to be writing.
So I guess on that day she must have had a cancellation, and the best use of this newfound time was to call me and remind me that I needed to be writing. Maybe because her other clients weren’t producing enough to pay her bills, negating whatever defense I could normally muster for myself.
Or that’s what I was ready to believe, anyway. Great.
But like I said, Erika was not the problem that day or many of the days I spent not properly writing. The problem was that I was tired. I was tired because–despite what my output would suggest–I was trying to write another book. I was always trying, but writing books is hard. Writing good books is harder.
At that point, I didn’t even WANT to write a good book. I was more than willing to settle for a decent one. Or a few decent sentences strung together in a row to make a quoteworthy block of text. That block of text would then be quoted by people who have not read the book in order to seem deep, profound, and well-read, thereby giving the book a very effective type of advertising to those around said people who will want to look as deep, profound, and well-read as this friend. Consequently, they too buy the book with every intention of reading it, but they have so many books at home that they never get around to it. Eventually, they stop thinking about that book, and it ends up on the bottom of a stack of other books that person had every intention of reading someday (ideally soon) where it waits unread until the end of time.
While that is sad for the sake of that poor object with all the aspirations and hopes that it likely had when it was first printed and bound, in this example, we are not considering whatever hypothetical feelings the book might have had. Rather, we are looking at the economics of it all. In this model, the book has already been bought, and payment has already been given. Erika and I would have already received our cuts of the sale. And that might not actually matter because I don’t care about the royalties so much, and Erika will still make me feel bad for not writing when I probably should be writing the very moment this new, hypothetical book is out.
Overall, it’s not a great strategy. But it was one I–painfully aware of my limitations–actually had a chance of realizing, and the end result would be something Erika could be momentarily content with. And so–assuming that the Pavlovian conditioning didn’t ruin my relationship with the other things that I associate with Erika like my cellphone or my fiancé’s sister who was also named Erika–I could find my own momentary contentment or something like a second of peace.
With this destination in mind, I tried to devise a sort of schedule to make both that set of decent sentences strung together in a row nestled in a book-like vehicle and the book-like vehicle itself. So every day I tried to wake up early, in order to get a sentence or two down before work. But I never did. My alarm would go off, but I wouldn’t get out of bed. The intention was there. I just needed a few more minutes. That meant hitting the snooze button once or twice, but then I would shut it off entirely because I’M REALLY, DEFINITELY GOING TO GET OUT OF BED THIS TIME, JUST YOU WAIT. But then I didn’t. I rolled over and slept until some pain of primordial panic that I would be late to my job would rip out from my gut to the rest of my body. And yes, it would jolt me away, but it would do so with the cutting abrasiveness of a cold bucket of water.
As if it were making up for that horrible wake up call, said panic would show me the kindness of waking me up with a bit of time to spare. I could have used it to get a few sentences down. Maybe I would even make it to my computer. But then my stomach would rumble, and I would have to reevaluate my priorities. When I did so, I never chose writing. I would promise myself that tomorrow would be different. I just had to eat today. So I would race out the door to a cafe or fast food place of some kind. I seldom had the patience to make breakfast in the morning nor did I usually have eggs or bacon or [insert breakfast food of choice here] in my apartment. If luck was in my favor, I’d have time to buy myself a pastry, a breakfast sandwich, an overpriced and needlessly “fancy” coffee beverage or some combination of the three with just enough time to feel guilty about the purchase, not because of the calories or the (stupidly high) price but because I was not writing when I could have been writing. And once again, this is the sort of guilt-trip that falls apart with any sort of challenge. If I had gotten coffee at home, then I could have been writing while the coffee machine was running, but what about food? All sorts of preparation require some mental energy or investment: things that writing would need to have a monopoly on if I were to try to spend that time writing.
Then I got to my job, and most days I actually did my job, the details of which notwithstanding. Then came lunch. I tried to remember to bring lunch with me every day, but I did not always (or usually). So I would go out to try to find something, but I would never know what to get. There were options, maybe too many. But eventually after I walked around and eyed some familiar signs and smelled some familiar smells, I would pick a place. And order my food at the counter. And wait for said food to be made. And then eat. All of that was more time I spent not writing.
Then I got back to my desk and worked through the afternoon, which usually included listening to the frequent complaints of Perry in the next cubicle over who spent her mornings gathering up her frustrations to spew at me all afternoon, stoking this unseen fire in my blood until it was well and truly boiling. Which of course left me feeling terrible because blood is not supposed to get that hot, particularly not regularly, so I would get home where I would try to write but surprise, I couldn’t write because it was too hot in my body for my brain to work.
At the time, it was just an annoyance, but then I would think more about it. Then this interpersonal anger and the self-directed anger about my failure to actually write turned from smoldering ashes to yet another raging fire eating primed to eat me away. It was all metaphorical, of course. But even though the fire wasn’t real, it would keep me up late. And my body, desperate for sleep, would keep me in bed lost past my alarm. So I then woke up late, and the cycle continued.
Nowhere in that cycle did I get any writing done. Which sucked. I needed to get writing done. And the fact that I have internalized this need would likely please Erika for a short while. Like for half a moment. Then she will ask me why I’m not doing the thing that I know on every level I need to do. And I did not have a good answer for that.
That is a long, drawn-out way of saying pretty much nothing. Maybe there’s a few scraps of value in there, but I could also just say that I was perpetually tired, and the point would have been made. Being tired is a common thing. We’re all tired.
On the 21st of June, in the year of the Lord 2018, this state of continued exhaustion did define my life, but the day was set apart not because of how I was feeling but because Erika was calling me while Perry in the next cubicle over was yapping away on the phone in what sounded like a very personal call despite it being with our contact at the print shop charged with sending out our physical advertisements.
This left me with two options (neither of which was writing), I could continue listening to this increasingly personal phone call made by someone I did not particularly like whose very voice was a prolific irritant, or I could take this phone call from Erika who was more of a mixed bag. Plan A and B, respectively.
The problem with Plan A was Perry and all my issues with her, which were numerous and things that I had been reminded of during a meeting that morning that could have been an email.
The problem with Plan B was that I was not writing and Erika always made me feel bad for not writing, even if there was a practical reason I wasn’t.
But on the other hand, the other reason that Erika was such a good agent for me was that she made me feel safe(r).
When we first talked on the phone, before the contract was signed and my first and only book sold for way too much money, Erika and I were discussing our possible relationship, and she asked me what I wanted in an agent. Now, that is an important question. Different agents have different ways of agenting, and compatibility is incredibly important in every relationship you will ever have in your life. In this case, you and your agent have to be a coherent team, so if you did not ask yourself that question and compare your answer to the type of agent they are, then you’re gambling with your career.
“Well,” I said. “I should probably tell you that I am a shy, scared little marshmallow. When I was a kid, I got chased by a chicken on my grandpa’s farm, and that’s stuck with me. I’m literally afraid of chickens, Erika. That is a problem. You should also know that there are days when I am on the verge of tears for no reason, and that a part of me doesn’t want to do this. I’ve always wanted to be a writer, but I’m also scared of being a writer. And I don’t know why.
“So a backbone, I guess,” I finally said. “I think I need an agent who can be a prosthetic backbone because I do not have one, and I clearly need one.”
We were having this conversation on the phone, but I always thought I knew what her expression was when I said that. Maybe it was a psychic vision or maybe I just knew what I wanted Erika to look like right then. Regardless, I imagined that Erika met my confessions with a sympathetic look because she recognized how pathetic that whole speech was. She didn’t give that look all too often. It didn’t suit her. And yet, it came up more than a few times when she was talking to me.
Right then and there, Erika promised to be my backbone if I signed with her, and that promise was enough for me to do it. Mostly because I didn’t have the heart to push back. I was so confrontation-averse that once she had me on the phone, she had me as a client simply because I was afraid to say no.
But that’s why my first book–written at the ripe ole age of 21–was sold for six-figures, a rare achievement that Erika miraculously pulled off in a way that was wholly beyond my understanding. After all, I didn’t think the book was any good. It was just a veiled attempt at me hashing out the many issues I had with my parents. And who wants to read someone’s grievances with their parental units when we each have our own to deal with? But the book sold to a publisher at a high price, and then it sold to the public at a high volume. And then the movie rights were sold for a hardy sum to a well-respected studio I would have never thought to approach. This all happened because Erika, my agent and backbone, handled everything and knew exactly how to pitch it. Which apparently meant pointing out that it was the ideal book club read: “emotional but not graphic or fetishistic,” “a digestible encapsulation of the human experience,” and “a perfect fit for the bestseller list.” All of which turned out to be true.
I have no complaints about that part. Really. I just hate it when my backbone makes things inconvenient for me. Being jelly isn’t great, but it’s a style of living that has worked out for me thus far. Going with the flow is easy. On the other hand, resistance is challenging at first and then leads to other challenges, which then have challenges of their own, and it’s like a generational tree of things I then have to deal with because of that first seed. But when it came to my book, Erika could handle a lot of those aforementioned challenges for me, and she did so well that the tree never got overgrown. But when it came to the fact that I was not writing, Erika could not take that responsibility away from me. So that tree got messy, and Erika could try to prune it, but really, only I could fix that mess, and I was not writing.
Consequently, Plan B was infinitely more complex, but in that complexity was a chance that things would not go poorly. Also Perry was not involved. So I liked that one better.
By then, Erika’s call was about to be sent to voicemail, so I quickly answered it. And before her cheery and half-hearted pre-riot-act greeting could be uttered, I spat out, “Give me, like, two minutes.”
Before she could deny me that, I hung up the phone and left my desk, which meant Perry had to actually pay attention to what was happening around her now that I could not field the imaginary visitors that would certainly come calling to our cubicle bay any day now (just you wait). For this, I received a dirty look as I walked away. And I felt the piercing of her eyes into my back, but I could not be bothered to care about it. It didn’t actually do anything. And she already hated me.
Without another word, I scurried away. I wasn’t walking, but it wouldn’t be fair to call anything I do running. Running requires a degree of coordination and ability that I simply did not have, even at its most basic level. And yet, I was trying to do it. I had to. The two minutes I had asked for was not going to be a full two minutes, which is what it would have taken me to get to the break room if I walked more leisurely. Rather, it was going to be about thirty seconds before Erika called again.
For all her charms, she did not have a great concept of time as the clock described it, which I suspected was a part of being an agent. Being a good agent meant striking when the iron was hot, and the iron was going to heat up according to some calculations a normal human could not fathom and not according to the hands of the clock. Erika was good at reading any and all invisible signals, but this detracted from her ability to coordinate with the time pieces the rest of us relied on.
That left me running into a breakroom that fortunately was empty when I arrived. I had no way of knowing it was empty when I made the decision about where to take this call, but sometimes you get lucky. Sometimes there’s a meeting involving the two departments whose members hog the breakroom that just so happens to line up with your agent diverging from her usual schedule to call you on a Thursday. And sure enough, sometimes you get even luckier and your terrible, not-trained-in-even-the-basics limbs manage to get you to that break room in the thirty second window between when you hung up on your agent and when said agent called you back because that’s what she thinks two minutes is.
In what felt like a moment of brilliance, amidst the bland and scuffed up break room setting where the white walls are chipped to reveal a different and less appealing shade of white paint underneath, above a carpet that bunches up and a countertop that may or may not be dirty, I picked up the call on the first ring and immediately regretted it.
“Why did you hang up on me?” Erika asked with clear irritation in her voice.
Which was not an unfair question, in her defense.
I explained, “Because I needed to run to the break room. But I am not good at running. In fact, I am very, very, very bad at it, and I wanted to hide that from you.”
“Really?” she asked incredulously.
“Yes,” I replied plainly and simply.
We paused. In hindsight, I can see that Erika could have taken the conversation in one of two directions. She could have pointed out (rightfully) that my logic was not actually logical but a mere placeholder for such a thing because over the phone she could not have seen how bad I was at running. At worst, she could have only heard it in the frantic and broken nature of my breathing, which would have then been solved by placing a hand over the mic. Really, the one point when she would encounter my inability to run was when the conversation started, and I would have been winded because I had just been running, but that says nothing about the quality of the run.
That was one option. On the other hand, Erika could have tried to offer me some consolation. She could have tried to lift me up rather than pointing out any one of the numerous flaws in my logic.
A third reason why Erika was such a good agent for me was that she always defaulted to the latter.
“Mia, Sweetie, Darling,” she began in an almost cartoony grandeur that she used when beginning conversations with all her clients. “Me? Judge you? Never!”
I paused before answering. “Okay, so are we going to pretend you mean that? What’s the game plan here?”
Without skipping a beat, she replied, “There’s no game here. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
She knew exactly what I was talking about. She was just determined to push on without addressing it.
I sighed. “Okay, not the important question, anyway. I should be asking why you are calling on a Thursday when you never call on Thursdays, and that’s–like–a thing that I place my trust in because I have so few things to place my trust in. But you seriously expect me to believe that you don’t judge ME out of all your clients.”
Before I could recite all the pieces of evidence that ran counter to her assertion, she deadpanned, “Writers can be eccentric. I accept that. And since none of your eccentricities are really that harmful... Bada bing.”
Fair enough.
“Right, okay then. Well, I’m at work, so can we make this kind of, sort of quick?” I asked.
I heard a frustrated sigh on the other end of the line followed by furious typing. Erika seemed to really abuse her keyboard. I felt sorry for it, insofar as one can feel pity for an object.
“How much of an advance do you need to quit that job?” she demanded in a harsh, dark, and cutthroat tone so wholly unlike the one she had just been using.
Her ability to tone shift was almost impressive. It had caught me off guard at first, but I was used to it now. So instead of flinching or pulling back. I just groaned.
“I’m not the only one asking, Mia,” Erika added in a sweeter sing-songy voice.
I flinched. And then I chastised myself for said flinching because I should have seen that turn coming. We kept coming back to this point, to a question I had no answer to. Erika thought so many of my problems could be solved by me writing full-time, and I did not see how I could write full-time when I couldn’t even manage the occasional sentence while writing part-time. And that was the real issue. Once you accept an advance, you have to write something. There’s no way out of it. Or at least, I was too scared to look for one.
“I don’t need any more money,” I answered, just like I had before. “I’m just not ready to leave this job yet.”
I could have also mentioned that this job had free coffee, which from Erika’s perspective could have saved me money. A lot of money. She knew I loved coffee. It’s a stereotype of writers that I fit rather nicely into. For the full effect, however, I had to leave out some of the details. Like how it was that single serve coffee that generally wasn’t great and how the only flavors provided were pretty dull, so I personally bought some better ones and anonymously left them in the break room. Which had cost me quite a bit of money for absolutely no credit or other discernible benefit. However, it made people happy. One person in particular. So I personally thought it was a good deal as long as Erika did not know about this. Because I did not want Erika’s opinion on this.
As I stood there, immersed in this conversation, those fancier coffee pods were suddenly on my mind. I glanced over at the box of vanilla flavored capsules. From a first and somewhat distant glance, it looked empty, so I stepped closer and reached for the box. Once I picked it up, I could see the box was actually half full. But its contents had been pushed out of sight. Crisis averted.
While I adjusted the box and its contents, Erika charged on. “Look, I’m trying to help you here. That job is cutting into your writing time.”
“And so is this conversation,” I pointed out, deliberately not mentioning that even when I did have writing time, it was time spent not writing.
Regardless, that was one point in my column, Erika’s silence seemed to say, but that is not what it actually said. Instead, she sighed and replied, “Look, that’s not why I called, and maybe we need to get back to the point.”
Which was reasonable, but even after she said that, she didn’t get to the point. She paused. A tension seeped into the air during the silence. “I have no idea how to break this to you, but I think you need to hear it from someone you trust.”
And I’m fired as a client, I thought. My heart sank beneath the weight of the failures I had hitherto been ignoring but also not ignoring. But as the thought cycled through my mind again, I realized there was a gap in my knowledge. What do you do to clients? Verb-wise, I meant. Do you fire clients or do you drop them? What’s the verb? ‘You [blank] clients,’ I quickly repeated to myself, trying to find a word my mind wanted instinctively to put into the space, but nothing came to me. This was the sort of question I would normally ask the internet because as a semi-professional person who strings words together, I sometimes lose track of said words and need the internet’s helpful guidance to find what I had lost.
But I seemed to be losing the plot because the moment when I was being fired/dropped/discarded by my agent was not the time to debate the exact verbiage of that sentence. She’d probably say it in a second, when she actually dropped the news. I just had to wait.
Normally, there wouldn’t be much of a wait, but Erika was being uncharacteristically hesitant in whatever she was about to say. That wasn’t like her. And in a conversation that had hit all of our usual talking points, I was further unnerved by the deviation. I paced the tight space and felt no better from the movement.
When Erika finally spoke, her voice was a bit uneasy at first, but then it regained its strength as she fell back into herself, into the familiar role of leader and director of any and all storms or other crises. “I’m just going to start at the beginning,” she explained. “You know how at J & J, we’ve been running... more extensive background checks on all our clients.”
How could I ever forget? One of the agency’s clients had a massive scandal the year before. The things he did were so bad that no one felt comfortable even saying his name anymore. We just called him That Shitty Guy, and everyone even vaguely affiliated with the Jean & Jones Literary Agency knew exactly who you were talking about from that moniker. In terms of purging him out of our shared existence, I think everyone handled it rather well: him being a shitty guy who abused the teenage girls in his family was revealed, he came up with a just as shitty affirmative defense along the lines of “of course I did it because it was fine to do,” and the agency banished him as far as they could and even had books pulled from shelves and pulped.
Really, the only problem left for the agency heads, Erika and Renold (or was his name Rony?), was that everything That Shitty Guy was accused of happened before he signed on with them. It was already written into the tablet of his own personal history, but somehow they hadn’t read that stone. And by “somehow” I mean, the passage of time hadn’t given them a reason to look that far back.
And it’s not that anyone held this not knowing against them. There was this sense in which it was obvious that they had no way of knowing, and had they, they would have responded appropriately the moment they did. After all, if people like That Shitty Guy made their shittiness known, we’d have weekly bonfires in the street. It was more like Erika and Renold (or was his name Rony?) couldn’t forgive themselves for the association, which is not the standard reaction, but I understand it. We’d like to think we can see the truly terrible for what they are from moment one. We don’t want them around us, and Erika and Renold (or was his name Rony?) both had children in the form of nieces and nephews whom they loved dearly, more than some parents love their actual children, and from that love and the blurring around the personal/professional lines in their lives, the stakes were raised, compelling them to take even greater measures than what was professionally expected. So that led to all of us who wanted to stay on as clients of J & J getting background checks done. Not just credit checks and police records but investigations done by a full-blown private investigator who I guess went around asking every neighbor you ever had questions about you.
I still don’t quite know exactly what they wanted their investigators to do. It wasn’t something I ever asked about. Once Erika told me I didn’t have to interact with the investigator at all (and probably shouldn’t), I was fine with it and happily signed all the paperwork/releases she gave me, which somewhat pressured everyone else to do the same.
But during that unexpected Thursday phone call, I found it odd that she would bring it up again. There was nothing concerning in my past that needed to be discussed. Emphasis on the “my” part because yeah, my dad had his moments, but it wasn’t anything illegal. Or surprising, from Erika’s perspective. We had already talked about it. There were cocktails involved.
“And Phil–that’s your PI by the way, his name is Phil, really nice guy–stopped by the cemetery where your grandparents are buried.”
“Odd but okay,” I replied.
And then Erika broke character again and let the conversation drop. The silence was uncomfortable and made more so by how unfamiliar it was, but I found a way to cope. Coffee–specifically the prospect of making it–kept me occupied. It gave me something to focus on that wasn’t the looming sense of dread building up inside of me. So I put a capsule into the machine and started it up, one-handed, which was quite the feat given how much the various components liked to stick together.
The machine let out this strangled cry before it settled in. And I took that as an icebreaker of some kind.
“Erika?” I asked. “Is everything–”
“You have a sister,” she finally choked out with no regard to my half-asked question.
“Two,” I corrected. “I told you about Leah and Charity. I told you that my dad had three daughters with three different women, remember? We were out for drinks, but I don’t usually drink, so I was already tipsy after one rum and coke. And we bonded over the ensuing ‘men, am I right’ moment?”
“No, Mia. I’m not talking about them.”
The wheel in my head started to turn, but I resisted it the best I could. After all, it was clearly and most definitely going to run me over if I let it get any traction. “Then who are you talking about? I only have two sisters,” I meekly choked out. “And they both hate me.”
To clarify something in my own defense because my response might sound stupid, I did have an inkling about what she meant. Three daughters from three different women is a pretty distinct pattern that made a fourth one possible if not almost inevitable. I just wasn’t ready to fully commit to the idea, and in this state of crumbling denial, I clung to what I knew to be true: that my dad had only ever mentioned having two other daughters from his two other marriages.
“Phil went to the cemetery to talk to the groundskeeper, right? Where your grandparents are buried,” Erika started as she began to weave a tale of her own like all of her clients did.
“Right,” I said in a drawn-out way, trying to delay the inevitable.
And for once, Erika wasn’t rushing. She took her time, slowly and carefully trudging through this unfamiliar ground. “Well, there was this woman there, and she had this guy and a kid who must have been her kid. Maybe a teen or preteen. It’s hard to say. But Mia, the kid looks just like you. The woman too, but this kid is practically your clone. Even those TV preachers would say God got lazy when he made that kid and just copied you but took the Filipino out to make it less obvious.”
To be fair, there was a lot less than the expected amount of Filipino in my features despite my mother being a full-blooded Filipina who spent her life on the islands until she married my dad. His genes held their own against hers, which had seemed impossible until it happened. My maternal family had sworn before I was born that Filipino genes are some of the strongest, but I blew that belief out of the water when I came out the way I did.
Erika went on, “She was asking about your grandparents because, as she said, they are her grandparents too. Which seemed odd to me. Like what does she want to know? How well the decay process is going?”
“It’s a small town,” I explained. “The kind of town where people stay their whole lives. Cradle to grave all within fifty miles. Everyone knows everyone.”
Erika realized her mistake but before she could apologize I stopped her.
“It’s the sort of place you ran from, remember? Purged it from your memory and all that. No shit you would have no clue what it’s like there.”
“Well, the groundskeeper remembered you. And he told her that she had three sisters who were,” Erika began. I heard the rustling of papers as she tried to find the exact line that was used. “Two who are ‘pukes of shit.’” She paused because of course she did. That’s a bizarre phrase but common in that specific town. “And one who's worth knowing.”
“I hope I’m the one who’s–” I started.
“He said you were the one who was worth knowing.” She finished with a sigh. “Phil thinks he saw the guy give this woman your number.”
“Yeah,” I whispered in the sort of way that doesn’t actually mean anything.
“Does he have your number?”
“Yeah, there was this thing... with the headstones... It got complicated, and it was going to take too long. He told me he’d oversee the whole process, promising he’d call me and send pictures of it when it was done. And he did. Did Phil tell you about it? Because that’s a... That’s a... That’s a beautiful headstone, Erika. I think I have the number of the guy who did it. Are you looking for a headstone guy? Because I have a headstone guy.”
“Mia, this is not about the headstone,” she replied in a low, serious voice.
“No, it’s about something I don’t think I want to talk about right now. I thought that was obvious.”
Erika sighed again. Or she just felt like she couldn’t breathe and needed to compensate. I wouldn’t know which it was. “She’ll probably call you soon. At least this way, the shock is out of your system when she does.”
“Yeah, I guess. Look, I have to go,” I hurriedly said, trying to slip away.
“There’s another thing,” Erika slipped in before I had the chance to hang up. “But it can wait a day or two.”
For that, I thanked her. Maybe mentioning this other can only to kick it down the path was wrong of her to do, but it was understandable. I could even understand the other thing: the ‘dropping this bomb onto me’ thing. I could understand why she thought it made sense for her to be the one to tell me. Her background check had dug it up, after all.
But honestly, in hindsight, I don’t know what to think of her approach. Maybe she was right that having her break the news to me was somehow going to cushion the blow. And maybe spinning this tale involving Phil the PI was the best way she could have cushioned it. I will never be sure.
But as far as Erika knew, I was alone in the break room of an office building full of people I mostly didn’t know well or liked, trying to keep myself steady as my world was spinning. And I didn’t know how she thought that could have been okay. News like that came with the need for a hug, but there was no one around to give it to me. So I hung up the phone and placed my hands on my shoulders, doing my best to make some poor copy of the real thing. It didn’t help.