The moment we finished that phone call, I scooped up Davy and twirled him around, singing a tuneless, “Yes, yes, yes, I have an agent!” I called Danny in Canada—he was in a meeting and couldn't be interrupted—and I knew I couldn't tell anyone until I'd told him. So I waited, and called again, and waited and called yet again. Then decided I really ought to tell the Wednesday Sisters first—they were the ones who'd been writing with me. And my mom called just after I'd hung up with Kath, so I told her. And of course everyone who saw me when I went to pick up Maggie from school knew something was up and had to know the news: Maggie's teacher and several of the parents, and, yes, her little friend Karen, whose mother responded to my inquiry about whether Karen's grandfather was really Dr. Seuss with “Dr. Seuss?”
On the way home, Maggie picked me a bouquet of dandelions, which we put in a little pewter vase, and while they ate snacks, Davy made me a picture of a penguin—why a penguin I cannot imagine—and Maggie drew one of me with a cake and candles, my book in one hand and, ever practical, a fork in the other.
A cake is what the Wednesday Sisters showed up with that afternoon, too. A cake and champagne.
I was cleaning up the dinner dishes, exhausted and a little tipsy, when Danny finally called back. The moment the phone rang, I thought, I can't believe I told Karen's mother—I don't even know her name—and I haven't told Danny yet. I thought, This must be something like what it's like to tell your husband you've been unfaithful. I thought, But I tried to tell him first. I did.
“An agent,” he said. “That's great, Frankie.” No “future famous novelist M. F. O'Mara.” No “I'll try to get home this weekend to celebrate.” But he had been working so hard, hoping to wrap up things in Ottawa in the next month or so. He was exhausted.
That night, Maggie lost her second tooth. Getting ready for bed, she started explaining the tooth fairy's magic: “She's got this magic that, if you see her, then you get her magic, you get to be the tooth fairy instead of her. So that's why she comes at night.” She was up the next morning at 5:18, standing by my bedside with her quarter in her hand and the most wonderful look on her face. She woke me from a dream—my book had sold quickly and Danny had brought me flowers and was calling me “M.F.”—and I was so disoriented that for a minute I wondered if she really hadn't seen her tooth fairy, because she sure seemed magical to me.
I never did get back to sleep that morning, a spectacular spring morning that I was certain boded well. I took Maggie and Davy to the park after school and watched them scavenging for the most unreasonable treasures (bottle caps and stubs of chalk and broken crayons they collected in a tennis ball canister they also found), all while I started thinking about my next book, mapping out in my head the details of my new chapter 1.
THE FRIEND OF THE FRIEND of the woman Linda had met at that AAUW meeting, the publishing-job possibility for Kath, turned out to be a Mrs. Arlene Peets, and she was indeed looking for someone to replace a gal who was leaving when she married that March. The day Kath went in for the interview, finally, Mrs. Peets asked her all the expected questions—Could she type? File? Take dictation?—and Kath had to confess she didn't know shorthand. She thought the interview was over when Mrs. Peets said, “Why this particular job?”
“Why this job?” Kath repeated.
“Why do you want it?”
Kath sat there feeling mute and stupid for a moment, as worn out as the fabric on Mrs. Peets's chairs. “All I know is books,” she said finally. “I was an English lit major. What do English lit majors know how to do that's practical?”
They'd ended up talking for an hour about their favorite novels, and by the time Kath left that office, she was working for a boss who was not only a woman but also just about the nicest, smartest person she'd ever met. Arlene, she insisted on being called, not Mrs. Peets. Kath would be a copy editor: instead of spending her days typing boring letters with too many numbers in them and fetching coffee and the accountant's dry cleaning, she would spend her days reading. The only catch was that she had to watch for typos, grammatical and factual errors, awkward phrases, deviations from the publisher's style.
“Drop the ma'am, too,” Arlene told Kath. “You're not in the South anymore, Dorothy. If you want to be taken seriously, don't be calling people ma'am and sir. And don't feel your shoes have to match your bag every day, either. You'll make me look bad, and I'm vainer than you might think.”
THE FIRST PUBLISHER'S rejection of my novel rolled in a few days after Kath's interview. “A lovely rejection,” Fred said. “‘ . . . Nicely written, with a likeable protagonist. As strong as it is, I'm afraid it didn't keep me turning the pages as I would have hoped. A close call, though.’”