Things We Didn't Say_ A Novel - Kristina Riggle [7]
“Surely you can manage to jot down some canned statements from a podium without too much strain.”
“I realize it’s not open-heart surgery,” I reply to Henry Turner, M.D., but he ignores my remark. “However, they might have an important announcement, there might be reaction, analysis . . .”
“Analysis,” he repeats, and I hear him huff through his gray mustache into the phone.
“I’ve gotta go. I’ll call you.”
I give up trying to make sense of the release and just take note of the location and parking.
Turning back to my screen, I decide to give last night’s story one more read-through, double-checking the quotes and the vote totals from the precincts. I can’t find it in the system at first, and I have a moment of queasy panic, thinking it vanished. Then I do find it, in a folder where I can’t open it. It’s already out of my hands, off to the copyeditors. Damn. Now I’ll be anxious all day that I couldn’t double-check. We never used to send the stories so early, but the copy desk is stretched so thin these days, they need more time. If I made a mistake on my late shift last night—I’m careful, but it’s always possible to screw up—now I can’t fix it, and it will be reprinted thousands of times, all over the city, with my byline.
There’s nothing I hate more than a mistake with my name on it.
I set my phone to vibrate and put it in my pocket. It goes off immediately, but I don’t even look. It’s probably Henning calling with some terrific quote for the election story, and now I can’t even use it.
I check my recorder for fresh batteries and head to my car to listen to some canned quotes from behind a podium.
The press conference is in the atrium of the administration building. They have arrayed many more chairs than necessary for just me, a radio reporter, a college kid in jeans and combat boots from the school paper, and a couple of TV cameras there sans reporters for the sound bite. I pick a seat close to the front, sharing nods with the handful of colleagues. I think I heard something on my way out of the office about a shooting at a nightclub last night, so that’s probably where the TV reporters are, doing stand-ups in front of the building.
Casey reacted the same way most people do when I told her I was a newspaper reporter. Her eyes got big and she said, “Ooooh.” She asked what I write and I told her, “I cover City Hall.” Most people start to shut down right there, their minds shifting from fedoras and crime scenes to dreary ordinances and budget hearings. But she stayed interested, even when I did talk about the ordinances. Just as she was interested in my kids right off, and not just Jewel, the youngest and most cuddly.
Mallory—and now Angel—have so much scorn for the fact that she’s young, but there’s something infectious about that twentysomething enthusiasm. I haven’t had that since, well, never. I had my kids too young for that and, anyway, I was old before I left the house for college.
I look at my watch. They’re late to start. The radio guy looks like he might make small talk. He’s trying to catch my eye. I leaf through my notebook—old notes from old stories, now in recycle bins and at the bottom of birdcages all over town—as if I’m doing something terribly important and shouldn’t be interrupted.
My eye passes over a note in the margin, a note to myself that had nothing to do with whatever meeting I was in at the time. Call Mallory re: weekend, it reads. As I recall, she’d sent me a text that she didn’t think she could take the kids. Another “headache,” which had years before become code for her just not feeling up to mothering that day. At various times I’d feel compassion for her—I know what she’s been through—and heated frustration. Aren’t you carrying this a bit far now? I’d want to say. In any case, the approach of every weekend when Mallory has “parenting time” means a creeping anxiety about whether she might call it off, leaving me to smooth things over and stay positive, just like that pamphlet from Friend of the Court says to do.
People