She exhaled noisily. “I’m waiting, Reenie.” A sigh and a peevish first-name dump. Not good. But fortune favors the brave.
“Are you aware that I’m still making the same thing I did when I started?”
“No,” Ivy said. “What do you make?”
She didn’t know. Well, I wasn’t going to tell her. “It is just that I can’t survive on it.”
“You’re asking for a raise?”
I had the impression that no one had ever before used the R-word with Ivy.
I had to swallow hard before I replied. “Just consider it. Maybe, after this story, I can give you more help. I could be more like a writing editor. Steer new projects. Come up with fresh perspectives. Write a column. If you just think it over...”
“Don’t need to,” said Ivy. “Okay. What were you thinking?”
I hadn’t been thinking beyond the first sentence. I said, “I’ll send you a proposal with a figure.”
Ivy said, “Reenie, you know it’s never been the case that I didn’t think you were capable of writing bigger features. I didn’t think you wanted to.”
“I always wanted to write bigger stories.”
“Why didn’t you tell me? Why didn’t you ask?”
“I thought you would fire me. I thought that you hired me to be a lightweight, and, Ivy, I don’t mind being a lightweight, it’s a lot of fun, but it’s not all I want to do.”
“I understand.”
“Well, thank you, Ivy.”
I pulled the car over near the first coffee shop I saw and wrote to her proposing a pay raise and a figure for the expenses I would need in coming months, making it clear that the expense figure could get bigger. I was prepared to cry “Psych!” if she got annoyed, but she wrote back right away asking me to keep a running record and copy every receipt that I could. She would put some funds in my next check backdated to January 1. Further, she said, I should make notes about possible longer stories to do when I was back in the office full-time.
Even with an expense account, I made nowhere near what minor-league reporters in New York made, but so far, so good. This was great, great for me, great for my résumé, a giant leap for womankind.
Great, great, great—if you ignored this being perhaps the most distressing work I would ever do in my life. As I headed north again, I thought of what Ross had said about the reputation that Felicity had for being “an ice dolly,” a beauty with a cold heart, a transactional thinker.
I was far from being the only one who would say that the exact opposite was true, but no one was ever acquitted of felony murder because people said they were nice in high school.
I thought of a time when I was out walking and ended up near the rectory. At the last minute, in recognition of my friend’s legendary insistence on order and privacy, I asked her mother, did she think it would be okay for me to drop in? Uncharacteristically downcast, Ruth said, “I wish you would.”
Felicity’s bedroom door was partly open. A bright, hooded plant light, like a tiny, blue-toned alien installation, illuminated one corner of her desk. Under the lamp was a nest of three baby birds, all plaintively cheeping, their scrawny, naked necks outstretched, as Felicity fed them from a syringe.
“Oh hi!” I said, as I knocked. Then I noticed that she was crying.
“It’s not like they’re puppies,” she said, hiccuping. “If they were puppies, you could maybe find a home for them, except maybe not in this shitty state where animals are just something you eat or beat on. I called the rehab and they’re like, we really only work with hawks and owls. Why? Why can’t they care about sparrows? They’re so beautiful and they sing their hearts out. They are successful. They adapt. But they’re just junk birds. There are too many of them and nobody cares about them.”
His eye is on the sparrow...
Sitting in my car, I started to cry.
On the drive to Madison, I managed to stop crying only for short intervals, but then a lump in my throat would form and dissolve again. By the time I got to the door of Damiano, Chen, and Damiano, Attorneys at Law, I wasn’t even attempting to wipe away the horseshoes of mascara from beneath my eyes. Clearly the receptionist had seen it all, because she didn’t even blink when I sat down in the waiting room and pressed the heels of my hands to my eyes and began to sob. That was where I was sitting when Sam Damiano came out of his office.
“I can take it from here, Catalina,” he said to the receptionist, who, clearly smitten, lowered her elaborate eyelashes and smiled up at him. “Remember, Monday is a holiday.”
“No, Mr. Damiano,” she said. “It’s not.”
“Just Sam is fine. And, yes, you’re new, you probably didn’t hear. It’s a paid holiday for our office.”
“Really? That’s great,” she said. She gathered up her coat and purse and departed.
