I need you, now,” was the only other call I made.
“I’ll be there as fast as I-16 will take me,” said the voice from the other end.
To kill the next three and a half hours, I did what any normal college student would do in her moment of uttermost stress—I cleaned. But I didn’t clean just anything. I cleaned the bathroom. From top to bottom, spic-and-span, take-a-nap-in-the-shower kind of clean.
Screams from my best friend, Paige, snapped me out of the world of the ceramic celestial. “Oh my word, this is worse than I ever dreamed. You could have a picnic in here. I came as fast as I could.” She walked over to help me pull off the kneepads, rubber gloves, and galoshes.
“I’m not well,” I said as I derubberized. I stood to give her a hug, realizing only then that my body had participated in contortionist activity. Paige threw her arms around me, then, forcing me back, stared at me eyeball-to-eyeball.“You look horrible. Let’s go get a Coke.” And she headed for the door.
I never moved. With no inflection or emotion I said, “I don’t want a Coke.” For a moment Paige was paralyzed.
“What?” Her flip-flops brought her back over to me.“Come in here.” She led me into my bedroom and pushed me across the room to a small sofa at the foot of my bed. “Sit down.You aren’t well, are you? You talk; Paige will listen.” She took the floor and wrapped her petite frame into a ball, positioning herself as she had countless times through the years, ready for me to let loose.
I wanted to pace, but I didn’t have the energy. So, I just began at the beginning. I told her of the letter,Vicky’s name, and the call to New York. She listened intently. “Paige, I’ve tried for years to figure out what I wanted to do with my life. Years, I tell ya! Finally, finally I figured out I love books. I love to read them, and I love to write them. So, I changed my major to English and literature, you know, and I felt like the world opened up to me.
“Through all of this, the one thing Little Miss Vicky couldn’t do was stay out of it. First she tried to get me a job hosting the Athens news before I had even finished my first semester. Then, she tried to get me a radio broadcasting gig covering the capitol.”
“But she hates Atlanta,” Paige said, getting up to search the room for food.
“There are chips in the top drawer of the dresser and some bottled water in the closet.”
“No Diet Coke?”
“No! Just water. No ice, no cup, just room-temperature water kept in a closet. Now, please, this is my crisis.”
“Who keeps chips in a dresser and water in a closet?” she asked.
“You are here to console, not critique.”
“I can’t console well without food.” Paige finally discovered the Doritos and some water, and she walked back to the sofa with a look of hungry dismay.
After a full minute of Paige’s futile attempts to open the bag, I jerked it from her hand, ripped it open, and gave it back.
“Focus,” I said.
“I am, I am, continue.” She munched a Dorito.
“Then she tried to get me the role of the narrator in Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat.”
“Oh, I remember that,” Paige said, starting to laugh hysterically. “The whole role is singing, and you’re the worst this side of Arkansas.”
“Yes, well, thankfully, I know I can’t sing and declined the audition. But that’s just what she’s poked her nose into since college. Who has time to talk about the previous eighteen years!” I was finally coming alive.
Paige pulled her fingers through her hair, trying to push her bangs out of her eyes.“You just put cheese powder in your hair,”
I told her.
“Oh, it’s just us. Who cares?” She put her hand back into the bag to retrieve another chip.“But you know what? I think it’s time you quit whining about your mama and get on with your life.”She stuffed another chip in her mouth.“You know what really amazes me?”
“What?”
“I can’t believe you figured this out. Me? I would have spent the rest of my life thinking what a coincidence it was that my mother’s name was on my letter.” She was totally serious.“But you’ve always been that way. You could figure out just about anything, about anyone. You remember when someone stole your student-council speech from your locker?” She snickered.
“Yeah,” I said, laughing myself at the memory.
“You turned that school and half its students and staff upside down until you finally sneaked into Kimberly Malloy’s house and found it in a shoebox in her closet. You are shameless!” Now her snicker had turned into a belly laugh.
“Hey, I was doing good until her mother sneaked up on me with a can of Mace, ready to attack the behind that was poking out of her daughter’s closet.”That image made us both hysterical.
“At least you weren’t cleaning her bathroom,” Paige said, laughing so hard she fell off of the sofa.
“Maybe that’s it,” I said after we wiped our tears and regained our composure.“Maybe I don’t need to write books. Maybe I need to uncover stories. Maybe I need to write for a newspaper or something.”
“Yeah! You could move back home and write for our paper.”
For the first time in the last six hours, I was actually having a rational thought. “You’re right, Paige. I could. Maybe this book-writing thing isn’t what I was really supposed to do. Maybe I’m supposed to be a journalist after all.” That said, I began to pace. “Maybe I could go home,write for the paper, and uncover stories. The first will be ‘Tales of Victoria.’That’s what I need to do. I need to go home and write stories that terrorize my mother.” I was beginning to like this whole idea.
“You need to just go home and do what you’re good at.”
“I was able to prove that Victoria rigged this contest. There’s no telling what I could uncover around our fair city. We’ve had a very productive evening, my fine friend.”
“Yes, we have. Can we eat now?” she asked as she stood to brush the Dorito crumbs off her shirt.
“Are you not totally sick? You just ate an entire bag of chips.”
“We’ll call that an appetizer,” she said, then she threw her arm around me and led me toward the door.
“OK. I need a Coke anyway.”
Leo’s has the hottest chicken wings north of Hades, accompanied by what Leo calls “raw fries,” thinly sliced potatoes cooked either almost raw or crispy, like I like them. Paige and I munched on celery and blue cheese and ate ourselves sick, then we headed back to my apartment to crash. Around three a.m. we had exhausted both conversation and ourselves. Paige got up with me at seven thirty, and by eight I was in class and she was headed home.
After my second class, I went to the mailroom and reached into my mailbox, excited to examine the paper and discover where the Savannah Chronicle could most effectively utilize an investigative reporter. But that morning’s edition held more distracting information.“ Local Humanitarian and Writer, Gloria Richardson, Dead at 62” announced the headline. I read in disbelief, feeling as if a friend I loved deeply was gone. This woman, who had made such an impact on my life, was dead of cancer.
Who knew how many articles she had written about people who overcame insurmountable odds and helped others, in spite of their own circumstances? All the while, she could have been writing her own story. She chose, instead, to keep her battle a secret. Maybe it was the cancer itself that drove her to write some of her more moving pieces.Who could be sure?
As I closed the paper, I thought about the last six years. Lines from past columns began to fit themselves together in my recollection, as if taking over my senses. Then came thoughts of short stories and novels I had written, chased by images of my misguided mother and the decisions I was now forced to make because of them.
It was time for me to become a writer. A good writer. A life-altering writer. A Gloria writer. I knew what I would do. I would decline the award. Better yet,Vicky would decline the award on my behalf and with sincere regret for all of Mr. Peterson’s troubles.
I would return to Savannah. I would make my own mark right on Vicky’s doorstep.
The front page of the Savannah Chronicle declared a Mr. Samuel Hicks the editor at large. Within the hour I dialed the number, went through a truly southern receptionist, a rude secretary, and finally landed a rather winded-sounding Mr. Hicks.
“Uh . . . uh, Mr. Hicks,my name is Savannah. And this is probably not the way you normally handle business, but I, well I, uh, I really felt like I needed to speak to you immediately. I’m here at the University of Georgia, and for the last six years, I’ve consumed every article Gloria Richardson has written. Each one seemed more, well, more powerful than the one before.”
The phone was so quiet on the other end, I finally asked,“Are you still there?”
“I’m here,” said a perturbed voice.
“I know her death has left a tremendous void at the Chronicle. I also know that no one will ever totally fill the place that she has left, but I believe I am capable of carrying on her vision, and—”
“Young lady, I’m not sure who you are or what you think you are capable of, but I won’t be hiring anyone to fill Gloria’s shoes. No one can. We have only entry-level positions available at this time. If you are interested in a job, you can send in a résumé and some writing samples to our human resources department. Now, I have to get to work.” And he hung up.
I decided at that exact moment that I would have Gloria’s column in less than a month. Vicky wouldn’t be allowed to know. At least not until I decided to tell her.