"What is it? What's the matter, Meghan?"
"That's a strange question to ask right after we've returned from Sal's funeral," I answered.
"It's not Sal I'm asking about," Taylor answered. "Sal lived nearly a year longer than the doctor's gave him. He'd been reconciled with the inevitable and prepared for months."
No, Taylor was right. I didn't mourn Sal Singleton, my literary agent. I'd talked with him several times in the last two months. I knew that this was a release for himâthat he had been more than ready to pass on. So why was I so melancholy? It hadn't really occurred to me that I wasâcertainly that anyone else could perceive that I was.
I was searching for an answer when Taylor distracted me with a flash of vermilion-red nail polish when she stood up and turned and leaned against the thin metal pillar between the two floor-to-ceiling windows of her office at Fabian Publishers. We were both left to our own thoughts momentarily as she gazed down seventeen floors to New York's Park Avenue. What I was thinking was how good Taylor looked in comparison to me. Her arm looked so thin as she raised it to her head and ran her fingers through her soft, but severely short, hair. She wasn't standing straight, but at a model's pose angle, all slimness and sharp angles in her tailored black business suit. I didn't hate her for it, but I resented the heck out of fate.
I suddenly felt decidedly large and frumpy in my crumpled dark-gray Palazzo pants and black jacket over a black knit shell. Of course it hadn't been fair that this was essentially the only outfit in somber colors I owned and that I'd gone straight to the funeral home after an early-morning flight up from New Orleans, where I'd been researching my next book.
I knew that pose; it was Taylor's "I have bad news to deliver" pose. And, so, I wasn't really surprised when she turned and picked up the manuscriptâmy latest submitted manuscript, the draft of my latest novelâand held it up with as few of her vermilion-tipped fingers as she could manage.
"I don't mean Sal. I mean your latest offering, Meghan. My heart skipped a beat when I read the title, 'Misery Creek,' but I'm afraid it went a little cold when I discovered that the title quite fairly described the storyline."
"Taylorâ" I started to say. I'd dreaded this moment. I felt like I needed something new, something more serious and realâsomething not as shallow and happy go lucky as I had been writing. Something that didn't pretend. I was tired of writing about happy-go-lucky woman who were like me. It wasn't all that happy-go-lucky in real life.
"This isn't you, Meghan," Taylor broke in. "I've been your editor through five best-sellers, and this isn't the Meghan your readers want. You are the author of hope for young women. You write Romanceâbooks that give hope to women who feel they are being overlooked by love. Romance has happy endings. So, again, I ask what is the matter? It can't be Sal. The change here isn't just a lack of optimism. It's something fundamental to romance. Tell me, Meghan, how is the young man you've been writing me aboutâBill Hamilton? I would have thought he would have come up to the city with you."
Bingo. She had got it in one. She knew me better than I did. I hadn't let myself think of it to the depth she was, and I could not, in a million years tell her about it. Images of Bill on the front porch of his family's old Beaufort mansion that eveningâthe moss-covered southern colonial on the street named for his family in the oldest part of Beaufort, South Carolina, came to mind. I hadn't been expected. But I'd baked up several pans of blueberry muffins and then made the mistake of passing by a mirrorâand suddenly I knew I wouldn't be eating these muffins and was trying to think of who would appreciate fresh muffins for their breakfast. That's how I found myself driving around the harbor from Fiddler's Cove to the old town.
They hadn't seen me through the heavy foliage between the porch and the street, and I withdrewâin shock and despairâas soon as I simultaneously heard and saw themâboth nearly naked, he on top of her in the porch swing, her slim, white legs wrapped around the small of his back, the muscles of his buttocks expanding and contracting to the rhythm of her moans. I didn't realize then who she was, but I worked it out on the numb drive home. Sondra Laurens, the owner of Sondra's Grille on Bay Street, facing the harbor park, was a beautyâand so slim and trim. I didn't stand a chance against her. I probably never had.
I found through the pain of the memory, back to Taylor's office, where she was addressing the failings she saw in my book.
"The manuscript starts off fine, but somewhere here, about page 230, there's a change. But it can be fixed." Taylor, good old, model-thin, perceptive Taylor, had obviously realized she'd put her slender, vermilion-red thumb nail on the problem of my life and of my manuscript and had continued on, not pausing for me to tell her how frigging perceptive she'd been. She was so perceptive that she knew the precise page I was working on when I'd baked those blueberry muffins.
I looked on dully as she put the manuscript down and raised the trim black jacket from the back of her chair and began to put it on.
"Changes?" I asked. "Yes, yes, of course. I can do changesâbut Sal . . . I'll need to start making arrangements on new representation."
"Oh, I don't see that you really need a literary agent anymore, Meghan," Taylor said with a breezy wave of her arm, as she moved around the desk, my manuscript now cradled in her arms. "You're part of the Fabian family now. We'll take care of you."