By the Book
Authors: Mary Kay McComas
Mary Kay McComas
To everyone who ever worked at
Bantam Loveswept, thank you
A Biography of Mary Kay McComas
STEP ONE
In the long run, we hit only what we aim at.
—Henry David Thoreau
Henry had a point. A good one. Determine exactly what it is you want. You can’t have your way unless you know which way you want to go. Be practical. Be realistic. Reach for the stars ... but stay in your own galaxy.
W
AITING FOR A BLUE,
two-tone station wagon to back out of a parking space in the crowded lot at the supermarket, Ellen Webster looked up in time to see a woman in a green Volkswagen swing around the corner just as the elderly couple pulled away, and drive straight into the open space. ...
A short time later, while waiting at the deli counter, she watched a small child topple a display of boxed crackers. She stepped forward to help the harried mother set the disarray right. When she set the last box in place, she turned to see she’d not only lost her place in line, but the mother and child were walking away with enough thin-sliced bologna to plug a pothole in a country road. ...
A portly, out-of-breath man with thick glasses and a cane bumped into her shopping cart with his at the checkout counter.
“Oh. Excuse me,” he said, squinting to see her.
“No problem,” she said, backing up a bit to let him go first.
“I think you were here before me.” He was wheezing heavily, as he swung an arm wide to usher her through.
“That’s okay,” she said, noting his pallor and the thin layer of perspiration on his brow and upper lip. “You don’t have much there. Go ahead of me.”
“Thank you.” He pushed his cart into the narrow aisle as the person in front of them paid her bill and gathered up her groceries.
The man fished around in his cart and picked up the first thing he touched, a head of rusty iceberg lettuce, and set it on the moving belt. She frowned. Poor guy. Can’t see well enough to get a good head of lettuce, she thought, watching it travel toward the cashier.
That was when the sirens began to blare and the store lights started to flash off and on. Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony came blasting over the loudspeakers.
“What? What?” the man cried out in confusion, raising his cane in the air, swinging it back and forth.
“Congratulations, sir,” she heard the teller tell him as she ducked the cane. “It’s Lowry’s tenth anniversary and you’re our one hundredth customer today. You’ve just won five hundred dollars, sir!”
“Well, fancy that,” he said.
Fancy that indeed. She released a sigh of abdication that she’d been holding in her lungs for half her lifetime. She closed her eyes and bent her head, wagging it slowly.
It wasn’t that she hated her life. She didn’t. For the most part, it was self-designed and tailored to fit her perfectly. Still, there was this unshakable suspicion that something was terribly wrong with it.
If the meek were to inherit the earth, she wasn’t getting her share. Doing unto others as you would have them do unto you was simply another dogmatic dud, if you asked her.
Good guys always finish last
was an adage that better depicted her life.
Only the good die young
was an expression that was beginning to make absolute sense to her.
What was she doing wrong? she wondered, not for the first time, as she opened her eyes to see the fat, blear-eyed man waving five crisp one-hundred-dollar bills in her face.
She smiled weakly at him, knowing he wouldn’t be able to decipher her insincerity.
Let a smile be your umbrella,
people said. All she ever got was a mouthful of rain.
She backed away from the checkout stand, where the manager was shaking the winner’s hand and posing for pictures, and moved three aisles down to a line that was still moving.
Politely encouraging other people to take the winner’s position in front of her was becoming a terrifying and familiar experience. Just that morning she’d accidentally discovered that the young girl she’d trained as a teller at the bank was not only making fifty cents more an hour than she was, but was also being considered for the temporary loan officer’s job that would be opening up when Mary Westford went on maternity leave.
Last month her sister, Jane, had complained that she was tired of the same old summer resort she and her family had been vacationing at for the past few years. Ellen merely mentioned how much she’d enjoyed the quiet little seaside town of Rainbow Beach the summer before. There wasn’t a room to be had when she’d called around the village four days earlier, and yet somehow her sister had managed to find a condo for three whole weeks.
She stepped to the front of her shopping cart to unload her groceries onto the rolling black belt. Apples. Onions. Gourmet cat food. Breakfast cereal. Shampoo. Gourmet cat food. Paper towels ...
And then there was the mystery man. She sighed. So attractive. And he had that big flashy smile that he aimed at everyone but her. He’d reopened the camera shop across the street from the bank about a month ago. His shoulders were very broad. He’d been out washing his front display window that morning when the bank opened. She could see him from her cubicle in Bonds and Trusts. The muscles in his arms had strained and corded under his T-shirt when he’d reached to get the high spots; his short wavy brown hair had been streaked with gold in the morning sun.
Why hadn’t she kept her mouth shut about him?
“Where are you this morning?” she’d heard her friend Violet ask as she sat with her chin on her fist watching him. “I’ve answered your line twice already.”
“My line?” she’d asked, looking at her phone to see three lights blinking on hold. “Oh. Sorry.” She’d looked at Vi and laughed at herself. “Well, it’s clear I’m not really here yet, isn’t it?”
Vi had leaned against the wall of the small cubicle while Ellen answered and quickly dispatched her calls.
“He’s a nice distraction, isn’t he?” Vi had asked, thoughtfully twisting a long curl of her blond hair around her finger. “Have you noticed how often he washes that front window?”
“Who?”
“That beautiful hunk-o-man across the street,” Vi had said with a knowing smile and a sly glance toward the front window. “Your view is better than mine, by the way.”
“Does that mean you’re going to be standing there all day?”
“Nah. I got work to do. I’ll leave as soon as he bends over to pick up all those paper towels on the sidewalk.”
Ellen couldn’t help herself. She had looked. Just in time to watch him bend over and pick up the dirty paper towels, displaying for the entire world behind him a rather nice picture of the seat of his pants.
“Okay. My day is made,” Vi had said, pushing away from the wall with a satisfied grin on her face. Then she’d grown thoughtful. “I wonder how much a good camera would cost? And how long it would take me to figure out how it works? And which film to use? And then there’s always all those lenses to get into. ...”
“Go for it,” she’d said, understanding her perfectly. Blindly shuffling papers across her desk, she knew full well that Vi had a better chance of attracting the man’s attention than she did ... and wished it weren’t true. “Your handle has room for one more notch on it.”
Vi had laughed. “That’s why I carry the big guns, baby. Plenty of space for my notches.”
She’d nodded, agreeing, trying to look busy and uninterested in Vi’s social life—which consisted primarily of discovering what a man would fall for, rather than what he stood for. Her idea of a truly romantic setting was something with a diamond or a sapphire in it.
“They say,” Vi had said enticingly, “he used to work for the CIA.”
“I heard it was the FBI.”
Vi had laughed. “I heard he was a spy. But before I heard that, I heard he was some kind of war hero turned mercenary. I heard he’s some sort of relative to old man Blake who’s come here to help him out till he’s back on his feet.”
“I heard long-lost son,” Ellen had said experimentally.
“I heard nephew.”
They’d stared at each other for a second, then laughed. How could she not like Vi? She simply
was
the sort of person Ellen wished she could be. Bold and sassy.
“Maybe we should mosey on over and check out his inventory during lunch,” Vi had suggested. “Start up a conversation. Find out what’s what.”
“Can’t. Not today. Promised Mrs. Phipps I’d pick up a few things for her at the grocery store. You go on without me. Take notes.”
“You know what your problem is, Ellen?” she’d asked after several short moments of contemplation.
“You mean, other than the huge flaw in my self-confidence and the total lack of sexual aggression?”
“In addition to those.”
“Well, no, I guess don’t know what my problem is, but I’m sure you’ll tell me,” she’d said as the phone rang again.
“You’re too nice. That’s your biggest problem. You take better care of everyone else than you do yourself. You’re just too nice.”
... Bananas. Vitamin C. Gourmet cat food. Canned peaches. Gourmet cat food. Tomato paste ...
She
was
too nice. Vi was right, she thought, setting a box of denture paste on the belt and looking over the rack of impulse items to the man with the thick glasses. She should have left that old man panting and wheezing over his rusty lettuce and gone ahead of him in the line. She was there first. He’d offered to let her go first. But no. To be nice, she’d practically insisted that he go before her. Now she was out five hundred dollars
and
she was going to be late getting back to work.
She really was too nice. Wasting her lunch hour fetching groceries for old Mrs. Phipps when she could be across the street from the bank checking out the man in the camera shop.
She was way too darned nice! She was losing fifty cents an hour and a promotion to a girl with a tenth her experience. She had no place to spend her vacation this year.
And
she was going to have to hike all the way across the parking lot to her car on top of everything else.
She was almost angry about it, she decided with half a huff, squeezing a bag of cookies a little more forcefully than she might have otherwise, just for spite. Almost angry? What was that? she chastised herself. She had red hair. She was supposed to have a fiery temper. So where was it? Gathering a good head of angry steam was time-consuming; sustaining it was impossible for her. She was, quite likely, the only living redhead with a temper to match that of a dead blonde. It didn’t seem fair.
That’s when she saw it. Its little green cover seemed to flash at her like a neon sign. There it was between
Name Your Baby
and
Lose Ten Pounds Overnight,
below
Toilet Training Your Cat
and
Know Your Lucky Number
and above
Eat Yourself Healthy.
There it was.
Have It Your Way,
with a subtitle of
Getting What You Want.
Granted, it was one of those five-inch mini-books that everyone sees and no one with any sense ever buys, but there it was, bright green cover, bold white lettering.
Have It Your Way.
As if a book that size could tell her how to change her life, she thought with great disdain, looking first at the cashier, then at the woman behind her.
Ridiculous, she thought, reaching out to take a copy of
Word Find,
looking around once again. Her nice problem was a major disorder. She fanned the pages with a fake interest and put the booklet back. There was also that lack of sexual aggression and the flaw in her self-confidence. What she needed was an intense psychological overhaul. Not a pamphlet. Casually she ran her fingers through her hair. It would be absolutely insane to believe the solutions to her problems could be found in ...