Mom Over Miami - By Annie Jones Page 0,56
simple statement but the wistful longing in his tone went straight through her. Despite the progress they had made, Sam still carried a vulnerability that she readily recognized.
She brushed his cheek with her hand. “Why don’t you call one of your soccer buds and see if he wants to go out for pizza with us tonight?”
“Really?”
“Sure. The team directory is on my desk. I was entering some e-mail addresses into my computer. You can use the phone in there.”
She hadn’t finished the last sentence before he’d shot off toward her tiny home office space.
“Okay, Tessa.” She pulled the baby up into her lap. The child nuzzled close and exhaled, and Hannah could feel some of the tension leave her tiny body. She kissed the bright red hair. “If only all the problems you kids will ever have could be solved by pizza and hugs, sweetie. Now, let’s you and me read these letters.”
She tore into the package and dumped the contents beside her on the couch.
“Check.” She held it up. “Hmm, maybe your daddy will pitch in on the pizza.”
Tessa grabbed for the computer-generated payment.
Hannah whisked it away, sending a note sailing into her lap. Another reminder from her editor that she really should set up a Nacho Mama Web page.
“Yeah right. Open myself up to a whole World Wide Web of people happy to point out my failings? No thank you.”
She stifled a shiver and set the note on the coffee table, then fixed her attention on the envelopes in the pile.
Five. Not bad. Her first week she’d gotten ten, the record. But some of those were e-mails the paper had kindly printed out for her. Four were old friends catching up. One had been a scolding from her seventh-grade English teacher for playing fast and loose with good old-fashioned grammar. After that it had fallen off to two or three a week, mostly kind comments on this or that, the occasional correction and questions that ranged from wanting information on adopting an ex-racing greyhound like Squirrelly Girl to requests to know “Where do you get those really big cans of cheese?”
Reader mail day was often the highlight of Hannah’s week. She snuggled down deeper into the cozy cushions of the still-new couch and opened the first letter and then the next and the next. Two notes of encouragement and a high school student doing a project who wondered if Hannah might answer some questions on how she got started.
“I don’t think her teacher will like my answer to that much, will she, Tessa? How did you get started in journalism? Answer—against my will.” Hannah tucked the pages back inside the proper envelopes and set them aside to answer later.
“This one looks official.” She held up the only legal-size envelope in the bunch and tried to remember where she had seen the logo before.
“‘The Faith-Filled Home,’” she read from the letterhead inside. “Oh, yeah. I’ve seen their magazine in the church office.”
A subscription sales pitch probably. She read on. “Not that I have time to read for pleasure these—”
Not an offer to read, an offer to write. “We have read the columns in your local paper with interest, and would be open to future submissions of new material for possible use in our magazine.”
Hannah showed the paper to her daughter, careful to keep it just out of reach of those sticky fingers. “My editor at the paper is a friend of the editor of the magazine and sent some of my stuff over, and looks like they are ‘open’ to me submitting to them. I wonder what that means in editor-ese?”
Tessa rolled off Hannah’s lap and onto the couch, crawled to the back and started to pull herself up.
“Open? As in ‘We get so much of this stuff, another few won’t matter’? Or ‘open,’ as in ‘I saw something of worth in this stuff and wouldn’t mind seeing what more you can do’?”
The baby bounced at the knees a few times, clutching the back of the couch, like a rock climber about to make her ascent.
“The second. Definitely the second. I mean, if I have to choose…I choose the second option. Your daddy says for me to listen to the way I talk about myself, and he’s right. I am saying here and now that I can do this. I can produce something worthy of national publication.”
Her heart rate did a dance. Her throat went dry. “Listen to me! Did you hear that? I actually admitted I could do