Page 4 of The Business Trip

Changing into flannel pajamas and pulling on some slippers to combat the relentless January cold, I headed down to the kitchen, took out several cans of wet cat food and a bag of dry food, and put them on the counter, scribbling a note for Robert.

Hi Neighbor. Thanks again for feeding F. I’ll get you a present from CA. Good luck on your date! Also, I decided to get that alarm clock that wakes you up with light, the one you told me about. It’s coming Friday. Can you bring it in?

I was so thankful for Robert. We had become good friends since he moved into the townhouse next door to me two and a half years prior. Our relationship started on a summer day when he was unpacking. We both had windows open, and I heard him blasting the soundtrack toFiddler on the Roof. As a former high school theater kid myself, I started hummingalong and smiling. Later that afternoon, I was out front watering the plants on my side when he came out with a load of folded cardboard moving boxes in his arms.

“Oh, hey there. Are you my neighbor?” he asked cheerily. Quickly, I sized him up. Silver hair, black-rimmed glasses, and a smile that was slightly crooked. He was wearing a T-shirt that said “Gay and Gray. Wanna Stay?”

“Yes, hi, I’m Stephanie,” I said, trying to put on my best cheery-neighbor voice. “Stephanie Monroe. Welcome.”

As I extended my hand, he put the boxes down and took it. The grip was firm and confident, and his eyes sparkled as he pumped my arm.

“Thank you. Happy to be here. I’m Robert Tayburn, the new and obviously obnoxiously loud person next door to you. I hope you don’t mind. The first thing I do in a new place is hook up the Bluetooth. I can’t unpack without a little fun music to bop around to.”

“No, I don’t mind. In fact, I loveFiddler,” I said and then added some of the lyrics for good measure in a singsongy tone: “To life! To life! L’chaim!”

“Oh. My. God. You know the words!” He threw his head back and laughed.

“I was in the cast in high school.” I smiled. “Just the ensemble, but I loved it.”

“I may have died and gone to neighbor heaven!” Robert cried out.

From there, we just kept talking. Since we were a pair of self-professed musical connoisseurs, Robert suggested “Broadway and Bubbly” nights, and we took turns at each other’s townhouse, eating from charcuterie boards, drinking champagne, and singing along. He also had a cat, and soon Evita and Fred were a shared conversation topic.

Robert had never been married. He told me about dates he went on and new men he met, and he encouraged me to get out there more. I told him about my time-sucking job and the crazy television news business I was in. He never watched the news unless there was a storm coming and he needed to see the weather. The rest he considered too negative or too fluff. More than once, he chided me for my profession in a joking way. Eventually, though, he became my confidant. Because he didn’t care that our anchors or reporters were locally famous and because he was a good listener, I found myself downloading things that happened at work.

“So you’re telling me this anchor was acting like the evil stepmother inCinderella?” he would ask. “Just turn ’em into a pumpkin and move on, sister! You’re the boss!”

He helped when I complained about the still male-dominated field. Sometimes at awards banquets or events, other news directors in town, who happened to all be male, would sit together in what appeared to be a good old boys’ club.

“They’re jealous,” Robert would counsel. “Because you’re kicking their ass and they feel threatened.”

At least I had a good boss. Dave treated me with nothing but respect, and Robert liked him for that.

“But don’t tell Dave that you don’t watch local TV news,” I had laughed one night during Broadway and Bubbly. “You’re part of the problem that every station is trying to fix.”

“Don’t worry, I’m an excellent liar,” he said, giving me his full crooked smile. “He’ll think I’m the biggest Channel 3 fan out there.”

Robert felt like a brother. He worked from home for a local tech company, so he was happy to feed Fred when I was out of town. I could trust him with a key to my place, which was why he always had one on his side of the townhouse.

Back upstairs after writing the note for this latest trip, I brushed my teeth, washed my face with an apricot scrub, wiped it with exfoliating pads dabbed in witch hazel toner, applied under-eye night eye cream, and put on way-too-expensive face moisturizer that Gwyneth Paltrow claimed in an Instagram ad was a miracle product. I had clicked on it in a moment of weakness when my forty-five-year-old face looked closer to fifty than forty to me. It smelled like roses but had done nothing so far to tighten my skin.

Spritzing my pillow with lavender sleep spray that also smelled nice but didn’t seem to induce instant sleep very often, I climbed into bed next to Fred and reached for my phone on the bedside table. Yes, I knew the blue light was bad for me. Yes, I knew I should be reading a book instead, but the lure of a digital hit before bed was too great.

My order of checking items was always the same: texts, Teams messages, work email, personal email, Facebook, Twitter (I refused to call it X), Instagram, Threads, TikTok, and my news app. As news director, I had to be constantly up on what was happening both here in Madison and also across the country.

Thankfully, there were no texts. You never knew what you might get when you oversaw a newsroom full of young journalists. People were always asking questions, feeling the need to text me or my assistant news director at any time of day or night, especially the overnight crew, who arrived at ten p.m. and worked to produce the morning show. They were fresh out of college and fearful of making mistakes, so they asked a lot of questions.

I was glad to see that it appeared to be a quiet night in Madison. That was one of the reasons I liked being a smaller-market news director. Shootings were rare. Our biggest events weretied to the university or state politics. We still covered things like the opening of the RV show or the Little League tournament that brought out thousands.

I had done the big-city thing, had gone to college at DePaul and worked in Chicago, moving up the ladder from intern to executive producer. The long commute from our suburb to the NBC affiliate in downtown Chicago was just about killing me, though, ninety minutes each way on a good day, so when an assistant news director job opened in Madison, my then husband Jason, our son Evan, and I packed up and decided to give smaller-town living a try. Two years in, the news director left and Dave promoted me. I had been in the role ever since.

Evan was just out of college now and working his first career job doing marketing for a soccer team in Minneapolis. Jason and I had lasted only a year past Evan’s empty-nest departure for college. We found we just didn’t have much to say to each other without the hustle of a shared child, and we drifted further apart, watching our favorite TV shows in separate rooms, finding excuses to stay late at work, and exercising, shopping, and eating at different times.

I would steal glances at Jason around the house and try to find the young guy I met at DePaul, but everything seemed to have changed. His face was older, of course, as was mine, but I couldn’t identify the handsome kid I had fallen in love with. Instead, things he did annoyed me: the way he never rinsed out his coffee cup but instead left it sitting next to the sink so that a dark brown film hardened on the bottom; his obsession with football and how he seemed to think he was part of the game himself as he rocked and swayed with each play; the way he not only snored but snorted when he fell asleep on the couch; the way he always left the grocery shopping and laundry to me, even though I worked longer hours. When we took walks,we walked at different paces. His stride was much longer than mine, and I noticed he didn’t slow down like he used to in order to let me keep up. Even a simple walk showed how out of sync we were. We were so young when we had Evan, and Jason had been a good father, but I was just bored and increasingly irked by him.

Finally, one night, I built up the courage to ask him if he thought we were still compatible. He sat up from his reclined position on the couch, looked at me without speaking for a solid thirty seconds, and then said, “I guess we’ve both been feeling the same thing, huh?” My stomach dropped. When he added, “Maybe we should try living apart,” I felt an equal amount of relief, hurt that he had been the one to propose it, and sadness that a partnership that had raised such a solid kid was coming to an end. We never even tried counseling. It was an amicable divorce and it was fast. Thankfully, he told me he had no problem with me keeping Fred. I would have fought hard for my Freddie boy.

Jason remarried sooner than I would have thought, which gave me a few pangs when I saw the wedding pictures with his new wife and her daughters, plus Evan, looking so dapper in his suit, but a part of me was happy for Jason. Truth was, I just wanted the same. I liked my life, but I longed for the sort of easy companionship I had with Robert, just with someone who found me physically attractive. Maybe I’d meet a guy this weekend—dark and handsome came to mind. A new romance would be so exciting. I longed for adventure, change, a vacation, and a life partner. None of it had been happening in my life for way too long. When I suggested to Dave that my assistant news director, Bruce, be sent to this conference, Dave said that Bruce would have a hard time getting away because he had two younger children still at home. I tossed afew other names from the newsroom out to Dave, saying that they might enjoy a conference, but Dave shut them all down. They either also had families, or they were too young and inexperienced to represent the station. So I just kept going on a hamster wheel I seemingly had no control of. It was long past time to step off, even briefly.

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