Tommy decided to drown her sorrows in a large portion of a fifth of Scotch. In the morning, her throbbing head reminded her why she didn’t normally have more than one drink at night.
Her eyes were bloodshot and her hair messy when she arrived at the newspaper that morning. Sandoval took one look at her and sent her into the cafeteria. His cure for a hangover was bulking up on foods filled with fat.
“Go get some more coffee in you. Order a plate of hash browns, sausage and bacon. Read the paper and eat and I don’t want to see you again until all of that is done.”
Tommy was too despondent to argue.
Shoveling hash browns into her mouth and reading the paper, she flipped to the obituaries. Something there caught her eye. This last name sounded familiar. It was a unique one. Tommy walked over to the recycling bin and plucked a paper out from the day before. Yep. Sure enough. Same last name.
Back in the newsroom, she made a few phone calls and a few minutes after that, she stood in front of the assigning editor’s desk, a too-smart-for-his-own-good graduate from Northwestern.
“It sounds like a great story, St. James, but I don’t have a body to spare. I’m telling you, they are going to keep doing layoffs until I’m not only the editor, but the only reporter on staff, too. Right now, I’ve got the education reporter covering the school board, the transportation district, and the city council. It’s ridiculous.”
Tommy bit her lip for a minute, thinking. The story she pitched to the editor was a good one. A couple in their 70’s had died within twenty-four hours of one another, leaving their seven grown children behind. The mother had died first of a stroke and then when the father had watched her body being taken out of their bedroom on a stretcher, he’d suffered a heart attack. He died hours later in the hospital.
When she reached the man’s daughter-in-law, the woman had said the couple had an unbelievable love story and that the family believed the dad had died of a broken heart. A quick call to a doctor she knew established that, yes, some medical professionals truly believed someone could die of a broken heart. That was enough to send her over to the editor’s desk.
“What about me?” Tommy said suddenly. “How about I do the story? I was a newspaper major at J school for three years until I switched to photojournalism.”
“Yeah, I know you can write.” He looked at the budget for the Saturday paper. “Frankly, we could really use another story in the paper on Saturday. Deadline for you is going to be early, though, say Friday night?”
“Deal.”
Thinking about Mr. Bender and his son, Tommy paused.
“If I have other stories do I have free reign to pursue them as a reporter?”
He looked distracted. “Sure, whatever. Go for it.”
She’d come up with another story idea. She wanted to do an extensive photo essay about what it was like in a halfway home for mentally troubled adults. She would show people the heartache on both sides when a family member was mentally ill, she decided.
She would do this story justice and hopefully ease a little pain and guilt from the feeling that she had crucified an innocent man because he was mentally ill.
She made a few phone calls, hoping to find a halfway house that would welcome her and her camera. Nobody who could authorize the project was available, so she left five messages for people before she left the office that night.