Page 9 of We Met Like This
“Yes,” I said. “And things are good. I talked to Rob today about dropping thejuniorfrom my title.”Talkedwas a strong word, but I’d mentioned it and he hadn’t shut me down.
“That’s great, honey. See, you don’t need to move to New York. You can find success right here in the publishing industry.”
I hadn’t found success at all yet, but this was one of the other main reasons I hadn’t started my career in New York in the first place—my family, my friends, everything was here, thousands of miles away. I knew I could be a literary agent anywhere, but the heart of publishing was still in New York and that’s where I knew I’d eventually need to go if I wanted to build a strong foundation. “Maybe,” I said.
“Do you really call your boss Rob?”
“What?” I started to say, but then realized what she was asking. “What else would I call him?” My heart picked up speed as if this was the final clue she needed to discover that I was more familiar with my boss than I should’ve been. Shewould be so disappointed in me, and I wasn’t sure I could handle Mom Disappointment right now. I was already on a roll of disappointing myself.
“Mr. Bishop,” she said.
“We work in a small office. There are just three agents and two assistants right now and we’re familiar with each other. It would be weird to be so formal.”
“When your dad and I got married, I called his mom Mrs. Hart for years.” Yes, my last name was Hart. Another reason, Sloane assured me, that I was so enamored with romance.
“Well, yeah,” I said. “She made me call her Grandmother. That should say everything.”
Mom laughed. “True.”
“You can call my boss Mr. Bishop anytime you want, Mom,” I said.
“I’m older than him. I would call him Robert.”
I gave a barking laugh.
“When would I ever talk to your boss to call him anything?”
Never. The answer was never, and I would keep it that way.
“Oh! Dad is organizing things in your old room,” she said. I was grateful for the subject change. “He’s thinking about turning it into an office.” My old room had gone through several iterations since I’d left. It had been a workout room with a stationary bike, a craft room, with rolls of ribbons and stacks of material. Now they would add a desk and a computer to the room, it seemed, but my twin bed would still exist, along with the bike that never left the craft room and the ribbons that would never leave the office.
“You can get rid of all of it, Mom. I don’t mind. It’s your house. What things of mine do you still have, anyway?”
“I don’t know. Probably some old handwritten scripts. Remember when you wrote those?”
I let out a breathy laugh as a memory of me sitting on the floor beneath my desk so my mom wouldn’t catch me, headlamp on so I could see, writing late into the night. Another memory, just as vivid, quickly followed: Audrey, in the light of day, flipping through the handwritten pages and telling me she’d researched the odds of getting a script made into a movie and they were devastatingly low. “And that’s for the very best scripts,” she had said. Even as a child, my sister always had a mind for business.
“Nope, don’t remember that at all,” I told my mom now.
“Well, it was a long time ago.”
“It really does feel like ages ago.” I took my exit off the freeway toward my apartment.
“You were so creative back then.”
“Thanks, Mom.”
“No, no, I’m sorry. You’re still very creative,” she said, as only a mom could.
“I’m just teasing you, Mom. I was creative.” On the total wrong path, but creative.
“Are you okay?” she asked after a couple beats of silence.
“I’m fine. Why?”
“It’s just lately you seem so…”
She could’ve filled in the end of her sentence with any number of words—unmotivated, preoccupied, adrift—and been right.
