fireman’s name is Chance. Are there actually people in the world named Chance?”
“Coming from a man named Herbert Dowling Fleishman the Third, I don’t think you have room to sneer.”
He glared at me and sank down on the couch. He always hated it when I reminded him of his name. There was a good reason he went by Fleishman.
“What are you going to do?” Wendy asked me.
“I guess I’m going to treat myself to a crash course in editing.”
For the next two days, I was a slave to the Chicago Manual of Style. I went through two red pencils marking up that manuscript. And in the meantime, I read several of the books. I read The Fireman’s Baby Surprise, Beauty and the Bounty Hunter, and I skimmed a long book that was a retelling of Cinderella set in Scotland in the 1700s called Highland Midnight Magic. I steeped myself in romance.
I don’t know what I was expecting. Hilariously purple prose, I guess. And it had been a long time, maybe forever, since I had heard a man’s sexual organ referred to as his manroot. But for the most part, the thing that surprised me was that the books were so not focused on sex. At least the little modern ones weren’t. (The Scottish book was half sex, half clan war.) The fireman had firehouse politics and an arsonist to deal with, along with his paternity dilemma. The bounty hunter was chasing an heiress wrongly accused of jewel smuggling—so that was a big mess to have to work out. Every step of the way, these poor people had problems, and they were falling in love.
By the end of the week I was beginning to see the appeal. If some schmuck has time to find an arsonist, expose his boss for corruption, find good daycare, and fall in love with a sassy local news reporter, the authors seemed to be saying, there was hope for us all.
I must have done something right, because the day after I turned in my test Kathy Leo called me to tell me to come in again, this time to talk to someone named Rita Davies.
When I was led back to Rita’s office, I was struck at once by the mess. If Mercedes’s office was disorganized, Rita’s could have qualified as a Superfund site. Manuscripts piled up precariously in teetering Seussian columns. I counted six different in-boxes, and all of them were full. Rita was a blousy, heavy-lidded woman with frizzy red hair. She looked up at me when I walked in and took a sip from one of the three coffee mugs on her desk.
“Do you smoke?” she asked by way of greeting.
I was a little taken aback. Was this a trick question? I took a deep breath and sensed a definite smell of tobacco. “Uh…not really. I mean, occasionally I’ll bum one at a bar or something…”
She cut off my answer with a wave. “Because if you want, we can go outside.”
It was drizzling outside. And cold. It wasn’t yet March. “No, I’m fine here.”
“Okay, great. Just a second.” She opened a drawer, tossed out several old pens, what looked like an ancient bagel wrapped in wax paper, and a box of nicotine patches. She took a moment to slap on a patch, waited a moment for the burn to begin, then turned back to me with an easy smile. “Great job on the test, by the way.”
“Thanks. I really liked that story.”
“Yeah, she’s a good author for us. I’ll give you more of her books, if you want.”
“Terrific!” I could give them to Fleishman. Ever since my first interview, he’d been on a romance reading jag.
“Mercedes told me all about you. She said you’re just what we need around here.”
“Oh, well…” What she really needed was a Mighty Maid service.
“She said you had worked with Sylvie Whatsawhosit and really were invaluable to her.”
I just shrugged modestly.
She squinted at me. “Sure you don’t feel like a cigarette?”
I was pretty certain there was a hard and fast rule about not smoking on your job interview. It was probably up there with not showing up shit-faced drunk or wearing flip-flops. I shook my head.
“Nicorette?” she asked, offering me a box.
“No, I’m fine. Really.”
“Wish I could say the same!” She sighed and popped a piece of gum into her mouth. “I guess I should tell you how we work around here. This little area here is referred to as the Pulse Pod.”
“Pulse?” I asked.
“I’m senior editor of the Pulse line.” She pointed to a shelf of books with identical red and white spines that were for the most part obscured by random piles of other books, souvenir ashtrays, and, inexplicably, a pair of beige suede boots. “It’s Candlelight’s line of medical romances. You know—doctors, nurses, paramedics. Even a phlebotomist or two.” I was going to laugh, but she didn’t give me a chance. “As far as staff goes, I’m the senior editor of the pod, and I’ve got an ed assist. Then there’s an assistant editor and an associate. Another person would be such a big help, I can’t tell you. I hope you don’t mind having a ton of work thrown at you all at once. You wouldn’t have much of a learning curve.”
“Learning curves? Who needs ’em?” I joked.
“Right. Well, what I could use is a vacation, but I doubt that’s coming anytime soon, unless it’s in a place with padded walls.”
She went on to explain to me that Pulse Pod people worked on all sorts of books aside from medical romances. “We also work on Hearthsongs, Flames, MetroGirl, Historicals, and occasionally Divines.”
She might have been speaking to me in a foreign tongue. I was lost. All I could think of when she said divine was the cross-dresser who starred in Lust in the Dust. I was pretty sure that wasn’t what she meant.
She stopped. “Divine is Candlelight’s inspirational line. Those books are really hot right now. You might say preachers are the new vets. Vet heroes came into vogue a decade ago. And cops are always the rage.” She sighed. “We don’t do a lot of Divines in this pod, though. Mary Jo is pretty possessive of those. Have you met Mary Jo Mahoney?”
I shook my head.
“You will.” She inhaled on her pen. “Lucky bitch—she knows she’s sitting on the gold mine over there in the God Pod. It’s where the real growth is now.”
I left the interview with mixed feelings. I couldn’t decide if the job looked like a great thing or a nightmare. When I got home hauling a totebag full of books, Fleishman was all over me. (Well, all over the totebag.)
“More books? Yay!”
I was beginning to worry about him. “Aren’t you supposed to be at work?”
“I called in sick.” When I leveled a stare at him, he smiled impishly. “I had to see how your interview turned out.”
“It went fine.”
“I’ll say—there’s a message from Kathy Leo on the machine.”
I gasped and scrambled over to the phone. When I called Kathy, she announced,
