books at the library.
I think you’ll be amazed at how much you have in common but even more amazed at how quickly bitterness and isolation are replaced by acceptance and even love, love for your family, love for your friends, love for your new life.
Loneliness is hard, Grammy. Really hard. But the antidote is easy: connect with the people who are already all around you. They need you as much as you need them, maybe even more.
Sending you some sugar,
Calpurnia
“Celia?”
I gasped. Dan McKee was standing in front of my desk. This was unusual. When Dan wants to talk to somebody, he stands at his office door and shouts, “Get in here! Now!” (Though he never adds a name to this command, the person who is about to get chewed out always knows who he means.) Even stranger than Dan’s making a personal appearance at my desk was the look on his face.
He was smiling. It made me nervous.
“Sorry. You were really focused there, weren’t you?” He chuckled.
What was going on? Dan McKee chuckled? Out loud? And apologized?
“Is this a good time?” he asked. “Jerome said you were looking for me.”
“Uh . . . yeah. Now’s good.”
“Great. I wanted to talk to you too. Why don’t we head over to my office?”
DAN OFFERED ME a seat in the dreaded wobbly chair. When he closed the door, I took a deep breath and catapulted into my pitch.
“Dan, apart from the big news stories, my column gets more traffic than any other Daily McKee feature. Page views for Dear Calpurnia are up seventeen percent, which means the advertising revenue I’m generating—”
“Is a big contributor to our bottom line,” Dan said, finishing my sentence for me.
I stopped and tried to regain my bearings. Calvin and I hadn’t role-played a scenario where Dan agreed with me. The way it was supposed to work was that he’d argue with me, downplaying my value to the paper, and I would come back at him, saying my effort added a lot of the bottom line and that I should be fairly compensated for that contribution. Then I was supposed to demand a raise.
Having Dan agree with my main point was throwing me. I felt like a performer in a two-person play when the other actor inexplicably skips a few pages of dialogue. I was confused to the point of stammering, trying to figure out my next line.
Dan took a blue box with a white ribbon out of a drawer and handed it to me.
“What’s this?”
“A present. To let you know how much I appreciate you. Open it.” When I hesitated he said, “It’s a bracelet. Or a bangle. That’s what the lady called it. Rose gold with two diamonds. Small ones.” He smiled. “I bought it at Tiffany’s.”
“Wow.” I sat there. “I really don’t know what to say. Thank you.”
“You’re welcome. Listen. Celia. I wasn’t going to say anything to anybody until tomorrow but . . .” He leaned forward in his chair, eyes glittering with the secret he was dying to tell.
“I sold the company today.”
“Wait. What? You mean this company? You sold Daily McKee?”
Dan nodded.
“Oh. Wow. Well . . . congratulations.”
Was it cause for congratulations? His grin indicated it was, at least for him. I wasn’t so sure about the rest of us worker bees.
“Who bought us? I mean it . . . the company. Who bought it?”
“Tate Universal.”
My mouth went dry. As the name indicated, Tate Universal was a media behemoth, an empire composed of newspapers, a cable network, hundreds of small- and mid-market television stations, a movie studio, and a theme park. Like any good empire, they made their money by gobbling up the smaller provinces and wresting every bit of profit, productivity, and life’s blood from the unfortunate conquered noncombatants, pawns to the ambitions of more powerful and more ruthless people.
The worker bees were not to be congratulated.
Dan started to laugh, not chuckle, but really laugh and in a voice that was strangely high-pitched. He sounded almost giddy, like an anxious schoolgirl who had finally nabbed a date the day before the prom.
“I did it,” he said, getting up from his chair and pressing his palms to his temples as if to prevent his head from exploding. “I actually did it. When I started Daily McKee, I told myself I was going to make enough to retire by the time I was forty. Now I can. And with six weeks to spare.”
“How much did they pay you?”
The figure he named almost made my