Page 21 of Off the Record

Linus leaves the shop in the hands of the teenager, and we walk a few doors down to a little cafe. We order sandwiches and lemonade and sit at a table against the window, eating an early lunch while Linus talks about Elisa—how they met, how they decided to bring their children to Tennessee when he inherited his father’s house, how they developed the shop. They had curated their stock together, and now he believes she is still at his side when he shops for new items to sell.

“Do you have enough information?” Linus asks when we gather on the sidewalk outside his shop.

“I should,” I tell him. Hudson stands beside me, so close his arm almost brushes mine. “Can I call you if I think of follow-up questions?”

“Of course.”

“It’s been such a pleasure to chat with you.” I hold out my hand to shake his again, but he pulls me in for a hug. His arms press into my shoulder blades, the type of embrace you get from an affectionate uncle.

He then hugs Hudson before heading back inside. Speaking to Linus felt like a breath of crisp autumn air—fresh, the old and the new swirling together.

I wait for the door to close before sending an accusatory glance at Hudson. “You could have warned me I’d need tissues.”

“I didn’t know you were a cryer.”

“I’m human. You knew his story already. Isn’t that enough?”

Hudson grins. “You want to walk around a little?”

I definitely don’t want to leave yet. “I have nowhere else to be,” I say with a shrug.

He looks right through me. “There’s an ice cream place on the corner back there.”

“That smell is waffle cones? I could go for an ice cream.”

Hudson tips his head towards the ice cream shop and I fall in line beside him. “So, what made you want to be a writer?” he asks. “Was it the newsreels you made with your sister?”

“Sisters, actually. Plural. And my brothers when I could convince them to join, but they’re both older and usually had more important things to do with their time.”

“Where do you fall in the family?”

“Middle. There are three above me and two below.”

We cross the street, and Hudson tells me about his brother while we order our ice cream cones and take them outside. We discuss shopping, but neither of us enter any shops. We just walkdown the street, circle the roundabout, pass his car, and keep walking back to the other side.

“I was obsessed with the news as a kid,” I tell him. “Not just the stories, but the news anchors. I wanted to wear lipstick and sit in front of a camera and share the news.”

“Do you have lipstick on in your fake newsreels?”

“You’d better believe it.” I take a bite from what’s left of my cone. “I’m okay with how things turned out. I acted in a play in middle school and discovered I have stage fright, anyway.”

“You could overcome that.”

“Maybe,” I agreed. “But writing is my calling.”

Hudson nods like he understands. His cone is gone, so he wads up his napkin and tosses it in a garbage can.

“What made you want to get into editing?” I ask. “Your family?”

“My uncle was a big part of it. Expectations and the family company and legacy and all that. My brother wanted nothing to do with the media industry, and one of us needed to care about the family business, so that influenced me a little. In college, I worked for the school paper and found I enjoyed curating the paper.”

“Like Linus and the stock for his store.”

“Yeah, kind of.” He shoots me a look, then dips his head and rubs the back of his neck. “I have an eye for editing, and I like taking pieces of things and putting them together in one congruous product. Finding what will fit, analyzing reader interest and trying to meet it. It’s like an enormous puzzle every week, and I get to be the puzzle master.”

“But you don’t do that anymore, do you?”

He keeps walking. “Not really. I do some of it on a much larger scale, since I’m over marketing for four publications instead of just one.”

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