Zoey’s day hit with full force the moment she stepped out of the elevator on the thirty-third floor, as it did every Monday morning. The spring issue deadline was coming up on Friday, and everyone in the office was in full production mode. A flood of articles, bios, and photo captions all clamored for Zoey’s attention—mountain biking in Ecuador, wine tasting in the Balkans, photo-essays with famous travelers’ names in the bylines—and it was her job to shape and polish their scribbles into perfect sparkling prose.
Zoey worked at a large publishing company with offices in One World Trade Center. The Freedom Tower, they called it. Which always seemed a little ironic to Zoey, because as much as she liked the rush of work, she would hardly describe the time she spent within those walls as free. She was grateful for the position, but she worked punishing hours and the pay was not nearly as glamorous as their readers probably would have guessed.
And talk about irony: here she was, twenty-seven years old, an associate editor for a world-famous travel magazine—and she’d never been outside the US. Or west of the Mississippi, for that matter. She didn’t even have a passport.
A travel editor who never traveled.
She plopped down her laptop, flipped it open, logged on to the staff network, and got to work, her fingers flying over the keyboard.
Zoey thrived on the chaos of it. The insane deadlines, the last-minute content changes, the challenge of taking a piece of decent-to-mediocre writing and shaping it into a thing of quality. She pushed away that vague sense of unease she’d had and hunched over her keyboard as she slipped into the rhythm of the place.
“Are we hungry yet?”
Zoey straightened in her chair and rotated her neck to get out the kinks. Was it really already past one o’clock? She turned to find her boss watching her from behind the half partition that defined Zoey’s workstation.
“Even virtual world travelers have to eat sometime,” her boss added.
Barbara was not as hip or fashion forward as most of the magazine staff. In the upscale environment of Lower Manhattan, it sometimes seemed to Zoey that Barbara was a visitor from a small town who had never quite adapted to her new environment. (More or less the opposite of Jessica, in other words.) But she was exceptionally smart and had a natural empathy and keen sense of what was going on under the surface of things. Zoey supposed that was what made her such a great editorial director.
When Zoey first started there six years earlier, it was Barbara who made the hire, and the two had clicked immediately. Barbara had high expectations and exacting standards. She was a “tough” boss, in that sense—but she didn’t push people. It was more like she pulled. It wasn’t that you were afraid of her; it was that you didn’t want to disappoint her.
And Zoey never did. She was a ferocious editor, and very good at her job.
“Famished,” said Zoey. She put her laptop to sleep and followed Barbara to the elevator to head upstairs for lunch.
The company cafeteria overlooked downtown Manhattan and the Hudson, with a good view of the Statue of Liberty. With its open spaces and austere decor, the café looked like any high-end Manhattan lunch spot. When Zoey first started working there, she’d had to get used to the occasional celebrity sightings.
Barbara had brought her simple lacquer lunch box, which she unpacked with deliberate care while Zoey went through the lunch line and selected a complicated chicken salad with quinoa, Marcona almonds, and organic baby greens. As she began picking at her salad, she made a stab at chatting about the article she was currently working on, but small talk was not her forte and she trailed off after two sentences.
In the brief silence that followed, Barbara worked on her sandwich and regarded Zoey.
“So,” she finally said. “You seem . . . off your game today. Everything okay?”
There was that Barbara perceptiveness for you. Zoey had tried to forget all about that strange mood that had taken her over this morning, but her boss had sensed it anyway. She took a quiet breath and let it out. She wasn’t sure quite where to start, because she didn’t fully understand it herself.
“You’ll think this is weird,” Zoey began.
Barbara took another bite of her sandwich and nodded, as if to say, Go on.
“On the way to the train, in the morning, there’s this coffee shop where I always stop, right in Williamsburg.” As she began describing where the place was located, Barbara nodded again.
“Helena’s Coffee.”
“You know it?”
Barbara looked at Zoey over her sandwich and said: “And?”
“Okay,” Zoey began. “So there’s this framed photograph hanging on the back wall. I mean, there are a lot of framed photographs there, the place is covered with them. But there’s this one in particular.”
You could just see it from the order line up front, where Zoey would wait for her latte and breakfast muffin. Helena’s was the kind of place where the snack items were always ultra-fresh, the coffee was reliably delicious, and the prints on the walls were stunning.
She described the photograph, then went silent as she worked on her salad.
“And?” added Barbara after a moment.
“And, I don’t know. I’ve just been thinking about it, is all. I’m not sure why.”
Zoey carved clean sentences for a living, but she wasn’t doing a very good job of it right now.
“And you want it.”
Zoey sighed. Of course she wanted it.
It was a simple enough scene: a little seaside village at dawn, the first rays of sunlight casting an amber-golden glow that sparkled like jewels, and, in the foreground, a fishing boat crew readying their vessel to head out to sea. Golden Hour, they called it, that time just after sunrise when the light reddened and became almost liquid. To Zoey there was something magical about it, a hushed moment bursting with unseen energy, held suspended for all time on a silken thread.
The photo print was good-sized, probably four feet wide by three feet high. Even so, she’d never seen much detail, because she’d never spent enough time in the place to go over and really study it. Every morning she would leave her apartment (usually a little late), rush to the coffee shop to pick up her double-shot latte and muffin, then fast-walk to the stop just in time for the L train to whisk her off to Manhattan. She barely had time for a glance around as she paid for her order. Yet, even in those brief glimpses, there was something about that photograph that always called to her. This morning, she’d paused a half minute longer to take it in, moved a step or two closer. It was just one little moment, really—but it had been enough to fix the picture vividly in her mind.
She knew just the spot on her living room wall where she would hang it. Although maybe “living room” was a stretch; more like her living room/dining room/home office. Zoey lived with a roommate in a cramped little apartment, and it wasn’t much to look at. That big sunlit oceanside scene would transform the place.
“It’s not that I want to own it, necessarily. It’s just . . .” Just what? The photograph had stirred up feelings in Zoey that she couldn’t quite describe, let alone explain. “I don’t know.” She shook her head, as if dismissing the thought. “I don’t even know that it’s for sale. And anyway, even if it is—”
And Barbara spoke the next four words together with her, the two in perfect unison:
“I can’t afford it.”
In the song that was Zoey’s life, that was the chorus. The verses might be inspiring, adventurous, or contemplative—I’d love to go back to school, tour the American Southwest, travel Europe, have a place with an actual bedroom where I could write and do some yoga—but they always came back around to the same refrain: But I can’t afford it.
And she truly couldn’t. Brooklyn wasn’t as expensive as living in Manhattan, but it was still pricey. And then there were her student loans, which sat on her like a hundred-pound backpack filled with bricks. It was a good thing she lived in the city, where she didn’t need a car, because if she had one, it probably would have been repossessed by now. Car? Ha! The way things were going, her bicycle would probably be repossessed by summertime.
Zoey was skilled with words and had a good visual sense. But numbers? Not her thing. And she was terrible with money, always had been. She’d tried to organize herself with a budget, as her mother had urged her to do—“budget” being probably Zoey’s least favorite word in the English language. That, of course, had been a dismal failure. At work she was fiercely structured and productive, but when it came to her own money, she had zero discipline. That was just the way things were. Here it was, March, and she was still buried in card charges she’d run up buying the previous year’s round of Christmas presents for family and friends. Probably those from the year before that, too, if she took the time to sort through the statements. Charges on top of charges on top of charges.
Yes, Zoey liked her job, and she was good at it; but she had to admit, she was barely making ends meet. In fact, the ends weren’t really meeting at all—more like catching glimpses of each other from across the room every now and then. Zoey thought she would qualify as poster child for the phrase “living paycheck to paycheck.”
Whatever that photo print actually cost—$500? $800? $1,000?, if it was for sale at all—it was certain to be a chunk of cash she did not have just lying around waiting to be spent on a whim.
Barbara’s voice cut into her thoughts: “You should talk to Henry.”
“Henry?”
“The older guy you see in there, in the mornings, making the coffee? That’s Henry.”
It took Zoey a moment to register what Barbara was talking about. “You mean, at the coffee shop? You know the barista at Helena’s?”
Barbara stood up, closing her empty lunch box as she did. “Known him for years. You should go in and talk to him. He sees things . . .” She paused. “He sees things differently.”
“Talk to the barista?” said Zoey. “And say . . . ?”
Barbara gave Zoey her trademark blank expression, a face that saw everything and gave nothing away. “Just talk to him. Tell him you love the print. See what he says.”
Zoey frowned.
“Trust me,” said Barbara. “He’s resourceful.”
“And he’ll help me do what, exactly? Pick the right lottery ticket?”
Barbara shrugged. “Probably not that. But you said it yourself: you can’t afford it. And that bothers you. Am I right?”
Zoey said nothing. Of course she was right. She was Barbara.
“Well, then,” said Barbara. “Do something about it. Talk to Henry.”
Heading back to her desk, Zoey felt a twinge of guilt. She hadn’t told Barbara what was really nagging at her. And it wasn’t just the photograph. It was the other thing.
The agency job.
Two Fridays ago, over drinks, her old college roommate Jessica told her about a position opening up at the media agency uptown where Jess worked. “You’re a hard worker, Zoe,” she’d said. “You’re smart, you’re a fantastic writer, and people love you. You’d be perfect.”
So Zoey had slipped uptown one day the week before and interviewed for the job. That same night Jessica called and told her that, from what she’d heard, Zoey was the odds-on favorite. “There were a ton of candidates, Zoe—but you hit it out of the park.” Sure enough, this past Friday the agency called to give her the news: she was officially their first choice. If Zoey wanted the job, it was hers for the taking—and at considerably higher pay than at her current post. She knew it would mean higher stress and a brutal schedule, which didn’t thrill her at all. But that agency salary would really turn things around for her.
She’d talked with Mom about it again over the weekend. Her mother wasn’t so sure about the idea. “Oh, Zee,” Mom had said, “be happy with what you have! Besides, sweetheart, money won’t make you happy.”
Money won’t make you happy. How many times had Zoey heard that growing up?
Her father had gotten on the phone, too, which was unusual. “Think about this, Zoey,” he’d said. Zoey knew what that meant: I don’t want to come right out and say you should take the job . . . but yeah, maybe you should take the job.
Her dad had made decent money as a general contractor, until his health forced him to ride a desk at some building supply company. It was far less pay (and, she suspected, far less fun), but they were managing. Although Mom sounded even more worn-out than usual lately. Be happy with what you have. Her parents were not unhappy, she was sure of that, but could she describe them as truly happy?
And what about Zoey herself?
She thought again of that strange image from the Oculus that morning, of the boat beached in the middle of the desert. If you don’t know where you’re going . . .
The people at the agency uptown had given Zoey a week to work out the details of leaving her current job and make her decision official. Which meant that if Zoey wanted the job, she needed to give them a firm commitment by this Friday. After which she and Jessica would celebrate the deal together at their usual Friday meet-for-drinks-after-work date.
The only other alternative Zoey could see was to keep struggling on her current salary and hope for another promotion. And meanwhile, maybe, take on some additional freelance writing or editing, jammed somehow—along with the extra load of work she typically brought home from her day job—into the evenings and weekends. An idea that definitely did not thrill her.