My Year of Casual Acquaintances (South Bay #1)

10.

The day begins with bad news.

I’m going through my first emails of the morning when I come across one from my boss containing a big red exclamation mark. Robert almost never resorts to this overused flagging device, the same way he abhors the use of exclamation points or all caps in the subject line to lend a message greater urgency. My pulse quickens as I click on the email to open it. Robert informs me that ad revenues are “down, down, down.” For trade magazine publishing to be profitable, we have to maintain a prescribed ratio of ads to editorial pages. When the paid advertising commitments fall short, articles end up on the cutting room floor. Robert writes that the special sixteen-page pollution control insert we’d planned for the next issue must now be slashed to eight pages due to lack of advertiser interest, making it more of an excision than an insertion.

“Damn,” I say aloud. I haven’t had my morning coffee, and my voice sounds like gravel. As editor, it’s my job to decide what goes, and it’s never fun to tell a contributor that the article we accepted weeks earlier will now be pushed back to an indeterminate month on the editorial calendar. I open up a spreadsheet containing the special insert plan to review my options.

The landline rings, and caller ID displays an unfamiliar New York number. I should let it go to voicemail as usual. But I somehow worry, absurdly, that Robert might be phoning from another location in New York, and I don’t want to miss his call. “Hello?” I answer in my still-croaky voice.

A brief pause, an intake of breath. “Oh no. I think I woke you up.”

I clear my throat and sound a bit more human when I ask, “Who’s calling, please?” Definitely not Robert.

“I am so sorry, Ms. Meyer. I’m Nicolas Rodriguez. That’s Nicolas with no ‘h’.”

“Yes?” The name is unfamiliar.

“I’m the new account supervisor working on L&M Processes, and I’m a total idiot. They told me you worked from California, and here I am calling you in the middle of the night.”

I laugh. “It’s actually six-thirty, and I was already at my desk.”

“Are you sure? Or are you being tactful?”

“Oh, I’m rarely tactful. I turn off the phone at night, so I assure you there’s no danger of you waking me up.”

“Oh, thank goodness,” he says. He has a theatrical way of speaking.

“You’re with Bentley Communications?” I ask, naming the small New York agency that handles publicity and advertising for L&M, one of Powder World’s biggest advertisers.

“Yes, I joined the agency two weeks ago. Nice to meet you by phone—though I still think an apology is in order. It can’t be fun having to start your workday this early to keep up with New York.”

“On the contrary, I love the Pacific Time Zone. It has so many advantages.”

“Such as?”

“Like, you can host people for the Super Bowl or even the Oscars and stay awake through the entire event. All the guests are gone by a civilized hour.” To hear me talk, you’d think my lonely little rental unit was Party Central.

“I never thought of that,” he says.

“Good thing you called. You folks owe us a feature article for the July issue, and it’s almost the deadline. With the account changes going on at Bentley, I wasn’t sure who to contact.”

“I’m your man,” he says in a self-assured tone that inspires immediate confidence.

“Do you need me to send you a copy of our article submission guidelines?”

“No, I’m good. Already got ‘em. Remind me, what’s the drop-dead date?”

I glance at the calendar. “Three days from now. Can you submit it by then?”

“You can count on it. We immigrants know how to get things done,” he says, paraphrasing a line from Lin-Manuel Miranda’s smash Broadway show, Hamilton.

“Ah—a Hamilton fan, huh?”

He lets out a whoop. “Sounds like you’re a fan yourself. Have you seen the show?”

“Yes, I saw it here in Los Angeles. Ticket prices for the touring company weren’t too crazy. I don’t think I could afford the Broadway production.” This is not true, since Henry’s settlement has left me with wiggle room for splurges, but I would prefer to project the image of an earnest and hardworking publishing professional rather than a pampered divorcee.

“Well, we can solve that,” Nic says. “Management has given me a generous budget for entertaining important editors. And spouses, of course . . . if you’re married.”

Though he hasn’t known me for five minutes, this man has already scoped out how to get on my good side – quoting one of my favorite shows, flattering me professionally. A junket to the New York production of Hamilton with such a fun individual might be just what I need this spring. I’m already imagining us after the performance, enjoying post-theater supper and champagne at Joe Allen or one of the other old-school Times Square haunts. “I take it you’re an immigrant, then?” I ask, circling back to his reference to the Hamilton song.

“I will admit to taking liberties with that reference, Ms. Meyer. I’m a born and bred New Yorker. My parents immigrated to the Bronx a few years before I was born.”

“Please call me Mar. Where did your parents emigrate from?”

“Puerto Rico.”

“Just like Lin-Manuel’s folks.”

“Marvelous. A-plus-plus for you on Broadway trivia,” he says. “In fact, I think I’ll call you Marvelous Mar. And you can call me Nic with no ‘k’. My intuition tells me we’re gonna get along fine. Let me see if I can guess your tastes. Rodgers and Hammerstein – good. Rodgers and Hart – even better.”

“Nailed it.”

“Let’s try another. You can’t bear Disney musicals, but you adore Sondheim.”

“Nailed it again, but that was too easy,” I say with a laugh.

“How many times have you seen Sweeney Todd?”

“Four.”

“I’ve got you beat – six times. Not including the film version, which I think we can agree is best forgotten.” This time we laugh together.

“Okay, my turn. What’s your favorite Sondheim that nobody’s ever heard of?”

“Oh, good one,” he says, then pauses before responding with, “Road Show,” one of Sondheim’s later works that was not a commercial success. “What’s yours?”

“Evening Primrose.”

“Come again?”

“It’s a musical set in a department store, starring Tony Perkins. Sondheim wrote it for television in the mid-sixties,” I say.

“Wow, you’re good. But I hope you know, we’re in serious geek territory here.”

I love this guy.

. . .

Four days later, there’s no sign of the promised feature article. I’ve been so focused on cutting eight pages from the special insert that I’ve forgotten about the article until now. Nic picks up the call on the second ring when I phone him to ask about the status.

“Good afternoon, Marvelous Mar.”

“It’s still morning out here, but no matter. I’m following up on the article, checking to make sure it didn’t get lost in cyberspace.”

“Oh, my dear, I haven’t sent it yet . . . but I have not forgotten you, trust me. I’ve finished the copy – and if I’m allowed boasting rights, it looks terrific – but I’m still waiting for a couple of people at L&M to sign off on it and send me the photos they promised. I am so sorry if I’ve thrown off your whole schedule.”

“You haven’t thrown it off – yet. I always build a little air into these deadlines. I can give you an extension until the end of work Monday. But I need to get it by then at the latest.”

“You’re the best, Mar. I promise you shall have it.” Nic changes the subject, telling me about a Broadway preview he attended the previous night.

“I’m not familiar with that show. Is it a musical?”

“No, a straight play.”

“When I was younger, I thought a ‘straight’ play was one that had only heterosexual characters. I didn’t know it meant a play without music.”

He finds this hilarious. We discuss a few more theatrical developments – major productions scheduled to open this season, other shows that are trying to hang on by the skin of their teeth until the Tony Awards. I don’t have a lot of theater pals, especially in my current self-imposed friendless period, so I enjoy the banter. I’ve let Nic off easy about missing the editorial deadline, but no big deal. I’m sure everything will be fine. Monday comes and goes, however, and still no sign of the article. Late in the day, I shoot off a one-line email: Hi, Nic. Checking back with you on the article status. I need it asap, thanks.

I don’t expect a response until the next morning, since it is already dinnertime in New York. I slip on a warm hoodie and go out for my afternoon walk along the esplanade, and as usual, I’m able to put work matters aside for the hour. It’s a coolish day in the fifties. Living near the beach, I’ve developed a mere fifteen-degree comfort zone, from about sixty to seventy-five Fahrenheit. Anything lower or higher and I complain. Like now, when the marine layer has settled in and the ominous dark gray cloud bank envelops me in its chilling mist.

Occupying my mind today is the vexing situation with my son. In the weeks since I bungled my babysitting duties, Michael has rebuffed my attempts to set things right. To complicate matters, he’s been traveling a lot, and I don’t want to contact Heather and put her in the awkward position of either rebuffing me or going against her husband’s wishes. I reach out to Michael with short chatty emails every few days and hope he’ll get over what happened before too much time passes.

Meanwhile, I keep replaying our last argument in my head. It’s now clear to me that Michael resents being left alone when he was a boy, and that he regards my putting Benny in daycare and leaving him with Sunny as a similar form of abandonment. What did he say to me on that dreadful day last month? “There were lots of times I wasn’t fine with being alone.” But there is only one time I recall him being upset – the day his bicycle was stolen.

I rack my memory to recall the sequence of events that led to the incident sixteen long years ago. We’d given Michael a new red bike for Christmas. He was thrilled for the first couple of weeks, watching over it like a new baby and even wheeling it into his bedroom at night. But he quickly grew careless about using the shiny metal padlock and chain we’d given him with strict orders to secure his prized possession whenever he left the bicycle outdoors. More often than not, he’d leave the bike laying on its side, unlocked, on the front lawn or the edge of the driveway where anyone could come along and take it. Though we lived in a safe neighborhood, I tried to impress on Michael that it was never wise to tempt fate.

I remember coming home one afternoon from an editorial meeting to find Michael in tears. I hadn’t been gone much over an hour. “What’s wrong?” I asked.

He let out a pitiful sob, his reddened face streaked with tears. “My bicycle is gone.”

“Gone? Oh, Michael. I warned you about this. I told you not to leave the bike lying around the yard.”

“It didn’t get taken from our yard.”

“Where, then?”

“I—I don’t want to say.”

“Tell me what happened. Did you go to the park?” He often rode to the neighborhood park at the end of our block to use the playground equipment.

Michael paused before answering. “Yeah. I—I rode to the park.”

“And where was the bike when this happened?”

“I—I’m not sure.”

“You’re not sure?”

“I guess I leaned it against a tree.” Now he was crying harder. “I climbed up the jungle gym, but I was only gone a few minutes. When I went back to the tree, the bike was gone.”

It relieved me that the theft had occurred in a public park and not on our property. But that knowledge did nothing to mitigate my annoyance with Michael. “You knew not to leave the bike unlocked. And now see what’s happened?”

“I’m really sorry, Mom.” His face contorted with pain and loss.

I couldn’t bear to look at him when I said, “You’ll be a lot sorrier when you have to walk everyplace because there’s no more bike to ride.”

He was shocked at this as if the idea hadn’t occurred to him. Did he assume Henry and I would go right out and replace the stolen bicycle?

“Will I have to walk to Luke’s? Or can you drive me?” he asked, referring to his best friend who lived a few blocks away.

“Neither. You’re grounded.”

Maybe I was being a little harsh on the kid. Losing his treasured bike was probably punishment enough in itself. But my disciplinary actions soon became irrelevant when Henry – always the good cop on our law enforcement team – overruled the grounding after he came home later and heard the story. He even treated Michael to a ski weekend up at Big Bear. So much for discipline. Though there were still consequences to pay. Michael remained bike-less for the rest of the school year at my insistence. What rankled the most – Henry made sure Michael knew he would’ve had a new bike a lot sooner had it not been for his hard-ass mother.

Still, thinking back on the whole episode, it doesn’t add up. The theft of Michael’s bike may have left a traumatic scar, but what did that have to do with my leaving him alone? If I’d been working in my home office that afternoon when he rode to the park, the result would have been the same. I couldn’t understand how it was my fault for going out. Perhaps the events had become muddled in his young head after this disturbing episode. Or perhaps he needed someone to blame other than himself.

“You don’t listen. Work has always come first with you,” he’d said to me the day he was so angry about Sunny. It’s all connected, I think, but I can’t fathom how. I can’t get the pieces of the puzzle to fit, no matter how much I shuffle and rearrange them.

My troubled musings are interrupted when I run into Dog Lady and her Wheaten terrier. The dog jumps up and plants his furry paws on my shoulders, then licks my chin as if I’m his favorite friend in the entire world. “Off, Petey,” Dog Lady commands, tugging sharply on the terrier’s leash. “Gosh, I’m sorry. We call that the ‘Wheaten greetin’, but he knows better than to jump up on strangers.” She says gawsh instead of gosh, and bettah instead of better. I hadn’t noticed until now that she has such a pronounced New York accent. Make that New Yawk. It fits well with her expression of wry amusement, the look of a city girl who’s wise to everything.

“Oh, we’re not strangers. We’ve been running into each other for a long time. Haven’t we, Petey?” I extend both hands to scratch the terrier behind the ears. Wheatens have curious but delightful ears that lift out from their heads at jaunty angles, and then fold down in bluish-gray triangles in vivid contrast to their sand-colored coats. Petey presses his shaggy square head into my hands and closes his eyes, luxuriating in the massage.

Don’t stop. Don’t ever stop, I imagine him saying.

“He loves that,” says Dog Lady. “I’m Audrey, by the way.”

She extends a pudgy hand and I reach over to shake it. Petey looks up as if to inquire why I interrupted the ear-scratching. In my mind, he’s speaking to me again. I told you not to stop.

“Nice to meet you. I’m Mar. Petey is beautiful. Is he a show dog?”

“No, but he’s a busy boy. I put him through a therapy dog training program last year and he’s been making rounds with me every week at a retirement home. The folks there are crazy about him—aren’t they, Petey?” She strokes the dog’s back like a proud parent. “He’s gentle with the residents. He never jumps on anyone when he’s on duty.”

“I guess I should be flattered that he doesn’t mix me up with the old folks.”

Audrey laughs at this. “I don’t think anyone would confuse you with old folks.” She sweeps one hand across her forehead to brush away the dark bangs that are falling into her eyes. I note that wry expression again.

“Thanks. I’ll see you next time. I need to get home and finish up some work.”

“You work from home? Doing what?”

I give her the abbreviated answer about my editorial job, the one where I don’t mention the name of the publication. When I say Powder World, people think it’s a magazine about skiing, or maybe women’s cosmetics. I’m not in the mood to have that conversation right now.

“I work from home too. But I’m out on the road a lot.”

I learn she is a regional sales representative for a pharmaceutical company. “What about Petey?”

“If I’m going out for a long stretch, my boyfriend, Nathan, pitches in, or my parents. In the winter, when the weather’s cool, sometimes I take him with me on my customer rounds and he sleeps in the car. But he’s okay by himself at home most of the time. He’s a good boy.”

I stoop to give the good boy a final scritch and continue on my way. My thoughts return to Michael and this mysterious anger he’s holding onto – but I’m no closer to figuring it out.