Come As You Are

I stare at her incredulously.

This is who she is.

This is how she acts.

It shouldn’t surprise me. But it still does. Maybe it always will. But my answer will always be the same.

“No.”

“No?” She’s equally incredulous. “How can you say no?”

I scoff. “I don’t have money for you, and I certainly don’t have Flynn’s money for you. I barely have my own. I have a business meeting to go to, and I am leaving. Drive safely.”

I head inside, slamming the door behind me, my breath coming hard and fast and angry. Latent fury runs through my veins and threatens to overtake me.

But I don’t have the time for rage.

I have life to deal with.

I must refuse to let her bother me.

I tell myself to let her go, and I picture her and her boyfriend cruising along the interstate, blasting past the speed limit, getting the hell out of New York and away from me.

I bid them a silent farewell.

She is who she is, and every day I make the choice not to be my mother’s daughter.

I dry my hair, run to the subway, and soon I’m back at the building in midtown, heading inside. I do a double take when I reach the nineteenth floor.

The frames of old editions on the walls have been removed. The receptionist is gone. Most of the desks are dismantled.

Bob Galloway strides in my direction. He looks like he hasn’t shaved in days.

31

Flynn

I toss the towel into the hamper of the gym locker, grab my wallet, and slide my glasses back on. When I turn to leave, I nearly bump chests with Dale, the locker room attendant.

He flashes a toothy grin. “Hey, Flynn. I’ve been thinking about what you said, and here’s my idea.”

He wastes no time, and I do respect that. “Hit me.”

Spreading his hands out wide, he makes the universal sign for I’m-about-to-give-an-elevator-pitch. “Picture this. Instead of How’m I Doing rating my own sexual performance, what if it’s used to rate your partner’s?”

I blink, rubbing my ear. That can’t possibly be how he’s decided to pivot on his idea. “That’s your plan?”

He nods proudly. “You’d use the app to write up the person you just got busy with. Like a sexual Yelp.”

I part my lips to speak, but I’m not sure words exist to describe how awful that would be.

Dale misinterprets my silence. “Brilliant, right? You could share information about someone. Rate them like an Uber driver. Let the next person know what they’re getting into.”

“No pun intended,” I say drily, recovering speech.

“Right. No pun.”

That’s the problem.

An expectant look in his eyes, he waits for my blessing. I scratch my head, trying to figure out exactly how to combine the words in the right order to tell him never do this, when he holds up a finger and says, “Or, my other idea is something to do with pizza. Because I like pizza, and everybody likes pizza, and maybe I should make an app where you rate your favorite pizza places and share ideas for great and unexpected toppings and combos.”

My smile spreads of its own accord, and I clap his shoulder. “Go in that direction. Pizza is awesome. Pizza is good.”

I leave the gym and head to my office. In the lobby, Claude raises his face and waves. “Mr. Parker, did I ever tell you about my cousin?”

I stifle a groan but slap on a smile. “The one who wants to play professional miniature golf?”

Claude chuckles and shakes his head. “Not him. I told him he needed to figure that out on his own. No one was going to ‘GoFund’ him and his dumbass idea,” he says, sketching air quotes, and I’m glad Claude set him on the right path. “This is my other cousin. Gracie. She’s eleven and goes to school in the Bronx, and they’re trying to take a trip to the planetarium next week. You know that one where Neil deGrasse Tyson does his thing?”

“He’s the man. I love that guy.”

“They’re trying to go there. Isn’t that cool?” He’s beaming, and I don’t even wait for him to ask for the money.

“You need me to fund it? I’ll do it.”

“What?” He jerks back, clearly flummoxed.

“Oh, I thought you were asking.”

“No, but I’m sure they do need some help. I was just telling you about it ’cause I knew you liked him. I like that dude as well. I like to watch him on TV.”

“Claude, let me take care of it. It would be a pleasure.”

As I make the offer officially, an idea blasts into my brain. Unexpected, but completely awesome. Because that’s what ideas do. They pop out of nowhere. I’m eager as hell to head upstairs and work out the details.

“Really? That’d be amazing. Gracie will be excited, and so will her class. You’re the man.”

“It’s my pleasure. Anything that exposes young kids to science is a good thing.”

As I make my way toward the elevator with a renewed sense of purpose, ready to tackle my plan, another voice calls my name. It’s a little gravelly, like it was roughened over the years by too many cigarettes.

When I turn, I see a woman with flaming red hair and too many bracelets. “Yoo-hoo! Sabrina told me to come see you.”

32

Sabrina

Even though his face is bedraggled, the suit Bob Galloway wears looks like it cost a mint. The stitching aligns so elegantly across his shoulders that it must have been custom-made.

“Sabrina,” he says, extending his hand and shaking mine. “Thanks for coming by. I need to give you a kill fee.”

I flinch then swallow hard. “A kill fee?” I ask, in case there’s a chance I heard him wrong.

“It was a brilliant piece. One of the best stories I’ve read in years.” He gestures to the disheveled offices, sighing heavily. “But the publication is shutting down.”

Swaying, I brace myself against the wall. It’s as if the ground has fallen out from under me. “You’re shutting down?” I ask, because this makes zero sense.

“Like many other print publications, we don’t have enough ad dollars to survive.”

“But you had all those fat magazines full of ad pages.”

“Those were from last year.”

“What about the website?” I ask, grasping for the bow of a sinking boat.

“We didn’t move quickly enough to establish a presence, so others have beaten us there.” He clears his throat, looking around sheepishly at the emptying offices. “And we might have overspent in a few areas.”

In an instant, everything snaps into view. I see where the money went. It went to parties, to his suits, to these opulent offices they didn’t need. It went to paying exorbitant fees for articles.

“The story isn’t going to run anywhere?” I choke out.

“That’s why I wanted to call you in today.”

“You could have emailed me,” I point out gently.

Genteel till the end, he removes his wallet from his back pocket. “No. I couldn’t. I’m paying you the kill fee from my own pocket.”

Snapping open his billfold, he fishes out two crisp hundred-dollar bills, less than 5 percent of the finished fee, and hands them to me. “The piece was amazing. Brilliant. Fair. Thoughtful. Entertaining. Beautifully written. Everything I could want,” he says, and I beam, a ray of sunshine peeking through a cloudy sky. “I’m sorry we won’t have a home for it. But it’s yours to do what you want with. You could publish it on your own website. Maybe turn it into a book,” he suggests, and both ideas border on outlandish.