This lunch—this potential working relationship—is dead in the water.
Charlie doesn’t want to work with me, and I don’t want to work with him, but I guess he hasn’t entirely abandoned the social contract, because he considers my question.
“It’s overly sentimental for my taste,” he says eventually. “And the cast is caricatured—”
“Quirky,” I disagree. “We could scale them back, but it’s a large cast—their quirks help distinguish them.”
“And the setting—”
“What’s wrong with the setting?” The setting in Once in a Lifetime sells the whole book. “Sunshine Falls is charming.”
Charlie scoffs, literally rolls his eyes. “It’s completely unrealistic.”
“It’s a real place,” I counter. Dusty had made the little mountain town sound so idyllic I’d actually googled it. Sunshine Falls, North Carolina, sits just a little ways outside Asheville.
Charlie shakes his head. He seems irritable. Well, that makes two of us.
I do not like him. If I’m the archetypical City Person, he is the Dour, Unappeasable Stick-in-the-Mud. He’s the Growly Misanthrope, Oscar the Grouch, second-act Heathcliff, the worst parts of Mr. Knightley.
Which is a shame, because he’s also got a reputation for having a magic touch. Several of my agent friends call him Midas. As in, “Everything he touches turns to gold.” (Though admittedly, some others refer to him as the Storm Cloud. As in, “He makes it rain money, but at what cost?”)
The point is, Charlie Lastra picks winners. And he isn’t picking Once in a Lifetime. Determined to bolster my confidence, if not his, I cross my arms over my chest. “I’m telling you, no matter how contrived you found it, Sunshine Falls is real.”
“It might exist,” Charlie says, “but I’m telling you Dusty Fielding has never been there.”
“Why does that matter?” I ask, no longer feigning politeness.
Charlie’s mouth twitches in reaction to my outburst. “You wanted to know what I disliked about the book—”
“What you liked,” I correct him.
“—and I disliked the setting.”
The sting of anger races down my windpipe, rooting through my lungs. “So how about you just tell me what kind of books you do want, Mr. Lastra?”
He relaxes until he’s leaned back, languid and sprawling like some jungle cat toying with its prey. He turns his water glass again. I’d thought it was a nervous tic, but maybe it’s a low-grade torture tactic. I want to knock it off the table.
“I want,” Charlie says, “early Fielding. The Glory of Small Things.”
“That book didn’t sell.”
“Because her publisher didn’t know how to sell it,” Charlie says. “Wharton House could. I could.”
My eyebrow arches, and I do my best to school it back into place.
Just then, the server approaches our table. “Can I get you anything while you’re perusing the menu?” she asks sweetly.
“Goat cheese salad for me,” Charlie says, without looking at either of us.
Probably he’s looking forward to pronouncing my favorite salad in the city inedible.
“And for you, ma’am?” the server asks.
I stifle the shiver that runs down my spine whenever a twentysomething calls me ma’am. This must be how ghosts feel when people walk over their graves.
“I’ll have that too,” I say, and then, because this has been one hell of a day and there is no one here to impress—and because I’m trapped here for at least forty more minutes with a man I have no intention of ever working with—I say, “And a gin martini. Dirty.”
Charlie’s brow just barely lifts. It’s three p.m. on a Thursday, not exactly happy hour, but given that publishing shuts down in the summer and most people take Fridays off, it’s practically the weekend.
“Bad day,” I say under my breath as the server disappears with our order.
“Not as bad as mine,” Charlie replies. The rest hangs in the air, unsaid: I read eighty pages of Once in a Lifetime, then sat down with you.
I scoff. “You really didn’t like the setting?”
“I can hardly imagine anywhere I’d less enjoy spending four hundred pages.”
“You know,” I say, “you’re every bit as pleasant as I was told you would be.”
“I can’t control how I feel,” he says coolly.
I bristle. “That’s like Charles Manson saying he’s not the one who committed the murders. It might be true on a technical level, but it’s hardly the point.”
The server drops off my martini, and Charlie grumbles, “Could I get one of those too?”
* * *
Later that night, my phone pings with an email.
Hi, Nora,
Feel free to keep me in mind for Dusty’s future projects.
-Charlie
I can’t help rolling my eyes. No Nice meeting you. No Hope you’re well. He couldn’t even be bothered with basic niceties. Gritting my teeth, I type back, mimicking his style.
Charlie,
If she writes anything about lifestyle guru Charlie Manson, you’ll be the first to know.
-Nora
I tuck my phone into my sweatpants’ pocket and nudge open my bathroom door to start my ten-step skin care routine (also known as the best forty-five minutes of my day). My phone vibrates and I pull it out.
N,
Joke’s on you: very much want to read that.
-C
Hell-bent on having the last word, I write, Night.
(Good night is decidedly not what I mean.)
Best, Charlie writes back, like he’s signing an email that doesn’t exist.
If there’s one thing I hate more than shoes with no heels, it’s losing. I write back, x.
No reply. Checkmate. After a day from hell, this small victory makes me feel like all is right in the world. I finish my skin care routine. I read five blissful chapters of a grisly mystery novel, and I drift off on my perfect mattress, without a thought to spare for Grant or his new life in Texas. I sleep like a baby.
Or an ice queen.
1
TWO YEARS LATER
THE CITY IS baking. The asphalt sizzles. The trash on the sidewalk reeks. The families we pass carry ice pops that shrink with every step, melting down their fingers. Sunlight glances off buildings like a laser-based security system in an out-of-date heist movie, and I feel like a glazed donut that’s been left out in the heat for four days.
Meanwhile, even five months pregnant and despite the temperature, Libby looks like the star of a shampoo commercial.
“Three times.” She sounds awed. “How does a person get dumped in a full lifestyle-swap three times?”
“Just lucky, I guess,” I say. Really, it’s four, but I never could bring myself to tell her the whole story about Jakob. It’s been years and I can still barely tell myself that story.
Libby sighs and loops her arm through mine. My skin is sticky from the heat and humidity of midsummer, but my baby sister’s is miraculously dry and silky.
I might’ve gotten Mom’s five feet and eleven inches of height, but the rest of her features all funneled down to my sister, from the strawberry gold hair to the wide, Mediterranean Sea–blue eyes and the splash of freckles across her nose. Her short, curvy stature must’ve come from Dad’s gene pool—not that we would know; he left when I was three and Libby was months from being born. When it’s natural, my hair is a dull, ashy blond, and my eyes’ shade of blue is less idyllic-vacation-water and more last-thing-you-see-before-the-ice-freezes-over-and-you-drown.
She’s the Marianne to my Elinor, the Meg Ryan to my Parker Posey.
She is also my absolute favorite person on the planet.