She'd come to New York from Dayton, Ohio, to be a writer, and while she was toiling away at her first and sure-to-be-epic novel, she decided she'd do what she'd done in Dayton, which was work at the local paper. So she had gone to the New York Times and waited for them to be impressed by her perkiness and her extremely literate application form. After several months of waiting, she decided they had indeed been impressed but they were not going to be hiring her, so she started looking elsewhere. In a couple of months she'd been turned down by both New York tabloids, several small papers in New Jersey, and an Upper West Side giveaway. In the meantime, she went to a temp agency, and they sent her from ad agency to publishing company to, while they lasted, dot-com start-ups. At one of the ad agencies, she met a guy whom she dated for a while. In their third week of dating, he took her for a weekend to the Hamptons house he shared with six other people, and within an hour of driving and strolling around she fell in love with that part of Long Island. She and the guy broke up at the end of the summer, but she couldn't get Long Island out of her mind. She decided it was the perfect place to write her novel, so she gave up her city sublet and rented a small two-bedroom apartment, half of an adorable Victorian house, right on Main Street in the center of the town of East End Harbor, which was a bit more blue-collar and not quite as chic as the Hamptons but was only a few minutes away. And what do you know: Her first week there she went to a yoga class, just two doors down from her new digs, and not only was the yoga instructor the woman who rented the other apartment in Susanna's house, but one of the people in the class was the man who owned and ran the local newspaper. Two days after that she began working at the East End Journal. A dream come true.
She started out at the low end of the totem pole and did a little bit of everything at the paper: editing, writing, rewriting, reporting, making coffee. It was a staff of only five. Four years later, she was still writing the same novel but she was no longer at the bottom of the pole: She practically was the East End Journal. She'd added a food page and now traveled all over Queens and Long Island looking for quirky ethnic-restaurant stories, interviewed all the top chefs who were gradually opening upscale eateries in the area, and from time to time even tossed in some recipes of her own because she was not a bad cook herself, thank you very much. She reviewed the local summer-stock theater, which wasn't very good, but she did get to have a drink with Alec Baldwin to discuss the local writing talent. At the drink she happened to mention that she was working on a novel and that it would make a terrific movie if she ever actually finished the damn thing, and he told her he'd love to look at it-if she ever did finish it. Susanna also wrote about local gardens and covered the twice-yearly house tours of the town's old homes and, as of three months ago, she was even writing the obituaries. She didn't tell this to many people, but the obits were actually her favorite things to work on. She didn't mind that she was writing about dead people and talking to bereaved relatives several times a week. She loved digging into the family histories and hearing about the community roots that went back years and years. There was a wonderful graveyard in East End Harbor-some of the tombs went back to the early 1700s-and she had even begun to think about doing a book based on all the history she'd uncovered from talking to so many grief-stricken people.
Yes, everything was absolutely lovely.
Then, two days ago, it all began to unravel. She didn't understand how life could get so screwed up in a mere forty-eight hours.
Wednesday afternoon she'd been in the office working on a piece about an athlete, the only local football player who'd left East End High and gone on to play in the NFL. He used to play for the Green Bay Packers in the mid-1980s and once ran an interception back 102 yards for a touchdown. But after he retired from football he got into crack, was arrested for armed robbery, and spent several years in a homeless shelter. Earlier that morning he'd jumped off the roof of a building in Dallas, Texas, leaving behind a note that said A hundred and two yards my ass. Except that "two" was spelled too and "my" was spelled mi. She was trying to decide whether to mention that the player had gone through four years at a Texas college when she looked up and saw Harlan Corning, the owner of the Journal, standing over her desk. He looked like he'd been standing there for several seconds. And he looked uncomfortable, she thought. He looked as if someone had died.
"I got a call," he told her. His voice was softer than usual and soothing in that way people spoke when they thought they had to be gentle. "Bill Miller died."
Susanna didn't swear very often, but the first thing that came out of her mouth was "Oh, damn," and she turned her head down toward her desk because she felt her eyes welling with tears and she didn't particularly want to cry in front of Harlan.
She composed herself, nodded, accepting the news she'd heard, and instead of crying, said, in as clear a tone as she could muster, what she thought a good journalist should say: "I'd like to write the obit."
Which she did.
Susanna did not have to do a lot of research for her obituary on Bill Miller. Over the past two years, she had gotten to know him extremely well.
Since working nearly twenty-four hours a day clearly wasn't enough to keep her busy, twice a week Susanna did volunteer work at the East End Retirement Home. The Home was a series of small apartments, near a bay of the Long Island Sound, around which the town was originally built. The apartments had been built as a condominium project but, in the mid-seventies, the developer had gone broke. Before the 1980s boom struck, another developer, a local this time, bought the half-finished buildings on the cheap and turned them into an assisted-living complex, mostly so his grandmother would have a nice place to live out the last years of her life. Susanna, who spent her afternoons there talking to the inhabitants, reading to them, mostly just showing them that someone cared, soon got very personally involved. She got to know many of them intimately. She loved hearing their stories about the old days-it all fit in with her growing interest in the town's history-and she never tired of their fascinating, often odd perspectives on the world. She had always liked old people. Her attitude was, I'm going to be one of them some-day-might as well find out what I'm going to be like.
Her absolute favorite was William Miller, who had been living there for quite some time, as long as anyone could remember, and who was friendly and garrulous and had extraordinary energy. Susanna often would start out reading to Bill only to have him take the book out of her hands, explain to her about the need for dramatic inflection, and end up reading to her. She would try to entertain him with stories about her most recent date or something crazy that happened at work, but he would usually interrupt with far more compelling reminiscences about a woman he'd dated when he was a teenager or anecdotes about a lunatic boss from fifty years ago, and Susanna would find herself sitting, sipping iced tea, and listening to his yarns, their roles once again reversed. Bill Miller had been an actor, and he was a marvelous storyteller. He entertained her with Hollywood tales and stories of his days on Broadway. Since she was not a showbiz-type person, it all was new and fascinating to her. Soon she knew his credits by heart, and was a little in awe of the fact that Bill, when he was young, had actually been nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. It was for a movie called The Queen of Sheba. Susanna had tried to rent a tape of it once-she wasn't ready for a DVD player, she had just figured out how to work her VCR-but the kid at the local video store said they mostly kept new stuff on hand. One of these days when she went back into the city, she figured she'd get a copy. In the meantime, she'd been content to listen to Bill yak away, particularly when he spoke about Cowboy Bill, the character he'd played on TV in the early fifties. It was a series for kids, and Susanna's mother got extremely excited when she heard that her daughter had met the real Cowboy.