The Wedding Writer

by Susan Schneider

Genres: Humor & Satire; Contemporary Romance; Workplace Romance

Synopsis

Four talented women, one glossy wedding magazine: life should be as perfect as a bridal catwalk… right?

Lucky Quinn writes up weddings for one of the hottest bridal magazines. And it wasn't easy to get there. From humble beginnings, she outsmarted her way into the center of New York's glamorous magazine industry – making up for her background with a sharp mind, whip-thin physique, and ceaseless ambition.

Then, in one day, her life is utterly transformed; two of the magazine's major competitors fold, and Lucky is named Editor-in-Chief, replacing the formidable, but aging Grace Ralston, who had been at the magazine's helm from day one. Grace taught Lucky everything she knows, but now it seems that she taught her too well…

As the ripples of Lucky's promotion spread, the intricate lives of four women begin to unfold. Felice, Your Wedding's elegant and unshakeable Art Director is now being shaken for the first time by troubles at home. Sara, the Fashion Director, is famed for her eagle eye for fashion trends and exquisite hair. But, for all her know-how, "the Angel of Bridal" has never come close to starring in a wedding herself – she's picked the dress, but where's the groom? Grace, recovering in the wake of her sudden, humiliating fall from power, must learn to accept herself – and love – after a life dedicated to fulfilling other women's dreams. And, through it all, Lucky begins to discover just how lonely the top really is.

Release date: June 7, 2011

Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group

Print pages: 368

Sample

1


The Big Day, November 27, 10:45 A.M.

The news hits Your Wedding fifteen minutes before Lucky is scheduled to go up to the thirty-third floor for her big meeting. She hears a buzz outside her office in the labyrinth of cubicles inhabited by junior editors who have been suddenly flooded with calls and texts from their friends across town at Princess Bride and its very glossy, high-end offshoot, Tulle: the magazines folded exactly ten minutes ago, and the staff has forty-eight hours to remove themselves from the premises.
Then, Jeff's urgent text: "Come up ASAP." The meeting, originally scheduled for eleven, is pushed up to 10:45.
In disbelief at the confluence of events, Lucky shoots one last glance at herself in her closet mirror. Her heart hammers as she squares her shoulders and stands straight-backed in her black wool jacket and pencil skirt, egretlike in the four-and-a-half-inch Jimmy Choos she'd found on one magical trip to a consignment shop. She swings her hair one final time, watching it settle into its shiny shape. Then she peers both ways out of her office door—she can't let Grace, the editor in chief, see her.
All clear. She makes a dash for the twenty-seventh-floor elevators.
* * *
"What incredible timing!" Jeff says. "Princess and Tulle go down, and Your Wedding marries a brand-new editor—it must be destiny!"
With a jaunty skip, he enfolds her in his arms and pumps her hand. The publisher of Your Wedding, genial, friendly Jeff wears tight jeans and a cowboy-style shirt with snaps. He prides himself on a flat stomach and quite presentable, gym-buffed pecs. As he'd explained to Lucky, his divorce proceedings require him to be a lean, mean machine.
Nelson Media's corporate offices face downtown, toward the skyline at the southern tip of the island, where the World Trade Center towers once stood. By the windows stand Mike and Dave Mann, the brothers who rose to power in the company a decade ago, with a combination of intimidating weirdness and a genius for the bottom line that astounded even their cost-cutting superiors. Completely bald, stoop-shouldered, with pale wispy mustaches, Mike and Dave preside over a vast roster of magazines, everything from boating to bridal, by wielding their seemingly supernatural ability to add and multiply and divide and subtract hundreds of digits in their heads, with never a mistake. Lucky can't tell them apart, and she's never wanted to.
Now each Mann holds his BlackBerry in his hand like a sacred talisman and moves the dial with his thumb. One or both cracks his knuckles whenever he's pleased, and knuckles are snapping and crackling now.
"Lucky girl," Jeff murmurs, still clasping her hand. She likes the feel of his big, dry palm. "We can't have asked for anything better. Princess dead, millions in advertising—millions—heading our way even as we speak."
The Men's thumbs move more excitedly. Dry coughing, or maybe chuckling, provides a soundtrack. They've barely looked at Lucky. Still, even with the skeletal late November skyline in the background, the office feels warm as if a hidden source of heat, for the inner circle only, has now opened to embrace her.
Nadia Milosovici, aka the Axe Lady, the company's bass-voiced HR autocrat, who reaches no higher than the clavicles of even her shortest coworkers, enters with a bottle of Dom Perignon and stands at militaristic attention. Her presence in the corridors of any Nelson Media magazine signals big trouble for anyone who depends on a paycheck.
The Men nod. Nadia Milosovici untwists the wire with a show of force. Her strong spatulate thumbs easily pop out the cork, and the champagne froths forth.
"A toast!" cries Jeff. "Leigh Quinn, no longer a bridesmaid, finally the bride." He winks, a habit of his. The magazine's sales staff affects this complicitous tic, implying a shared source of illicit mirth.
Lucky allows Jeff a thin smile. When she first came to interview for the wedding writer position at Your Wedding, Jeff had looked over her resume silently: copywriter, associate editor, senior writer. He'd finally queried with phony innocence, "All lateral moves. Always the bridesmaid, never the bride?"
She'd been stung, and had to think fast. "A magazine is about teamwork, isn't it? On Grace Ralston's staff I can help make a winning team."
It was the perfect thing to say.
Nadia Milosovici hands champagne flutes around and pours smidgeons into each, though she gives a smidgeon more to Mike. Grace had always sworn that Nadia harbored a secret frenzied desire for Mike Mann. No one else could see it.
She also swore that wherever Nadia Milosovici stood, she could detect a paranormal cold spot.
Enjoying himself now, Jeff continues. "On this occasion I'm taking you out of the chorus and making you a star."
"Bridesmaid. Chorus girl. Gee, Jeff, make up your mind."
"Hey! To Lucky Quinn."
"Luck of the Irish," says Mike in his scratchy voice. Nadia Milosovici laughs heartily, and Dave laughs his dry cough of a laugh, as if his brother had said something clever.
"Thank you," she murmurs, carefully polite.
It had all been hard work, not luck. She's grounded in the day-to-day.
As editor in chief she'll be seeing a lot more of these two conjoined weirdos—she'll have to tolerate regular concerts of knuckle-cracking. The amazing job she's landed comes with this fine print attached to it, but she's already figured it in.
A few days ago, when Jeff told her the Men had approved her promotion, her first, bizarrely inappropriate thought had been: I can't wait to tell Grace. Her boss. Now ex-boss. It's hardly her dream situation, the way she would have liked her ascendancy to be—this is the real fine print. The fact is, not only is Grace her ex-boss, but she's also her best friend. Ex–best friend.
The changes have left Lucky nearly breathless. Please, God, let me breathe, let me hang on!
And as of today, with Princess folded, the pressure is on. She's now going head to head with Chic Bride and Winnie Whitcomb Weddings, the three of them fighting their way to the top of a treacherous mountain of tulle.
Downstairs, Grace is probably looking all over for her, dying to crow over Princess Bride, asking Felice or Sara or Vicki where Lucky had gotten to—under any circumstances annoyed not to know Lucky's whereabouts, but especially today! It's a very special day. Grace has a reputation for being tough, but Lucky knows her soft spots. One is she hates to be alone. The other is she loves to gloat.
Lucky is the last in a long line of Grace's right-hand women, her OBFF—office best friends forever—except they were never forever enough for Grace, always abandoning her for tedious, inexplicable reasons like motherhood or marriage. Then Grace would set out to find her next consiglieri. For Grace's purposes you had to be profoundly uninterested in personal glory while committing your life to facilitating hers. You had to be willing to subsume your own ideas in hers even when you knew yours were better. What resulted was the comfort of being in Grace's favor—as well as boredom and claustrophobia. And worse, her own silent resentment at devoting herself entirely to polishing Grace's image to a fine sheen.
Now personal glory is rumbling toward Lucky like a runaway Seventh Avenue 1 subway train.
As she steps forward to shake hands with the Men, Lucky forces thoughts of Grace out of her mind. Today is her victory. Hard work has brought her good luck. The best ever.
The Big Day, 11:30 A.M.
Grace Ralston, long-time editor in chief of Your Wedding and one of the most respected names in the bridal industry, is composing a condolence note on scrap paper to Sandy Billstein, editor in chief—well, ex–editor in chief—of Princess Bride and Tulle, owned by Pridette Publishers. The news has spread like a raging fire. Good God! Princess Bride is dead! And so is Tulle, that snobby little offshoot with which Sandy Billstein, with her horrible down-market taste, should never have been entrusted!
Well, it's out to pasture for Billstein. Grace will never again have to see her at the bridal collections sitting in her unearned front-row seat, raising her periscope neck to survey the room, turning it full circle, then pulling it back in.
Billstein is nearly Grace's age, and there's no magazine in this woman's town that'll touch her with a hundred-foot pole. She'd weaseled her way into the business only because she was friends with the sister of the wife of a CEO in Pridette corporate—this has been a source of outrage for Grace for a good ten years now.
Making all this even better is that Billstein has been circulating the nastiest kind of rumors about Grace. Grace's little mole over at PB has kept her abreast of Billstein's prophesies of Grace's date with the chopping block.
Ha, ha! Look whose head is rolling now!
Picking up her Montblanc fountain pen, Grace very, very carefully copies her note onto a precious leaf of her Mrs. John L. Strong personal stationery. She's been hoarding the card stock ever since that formidable Upper East Side bastion of stationery closed its doors, shredded by the recession—but if this occasion doesn't warrant the best, Grace doesn't know what does.
Dear Sandy,
What terrible news! I can't imagine how it must feel to have been at the helm of not one but TWO magazines shuttered by Pridette. The main thing is not to take it personally. I'm sure it had nothing to do with you.
For you, dear, this is the loss of a life's passion, but I know you'll find another path as time goes on. And who knows—it may be something more suitable! After all, it was just a bit of luck that got you where you were, wasn't it?
She signs her huge, swirling G, blots it and addresses the envelope. Off on its merry way!
Marching purposefully toward the twenty-seventh-floor elevators, she gets a Marie Antoinette vintage image of Billstein's head on a pike, chignon coming loose.
Jeff has called her upstairs earlier than scheduled. He and the Men will want to celebrate and powwow. New lay of the land, new strategy. Multiple images of Billstein's head dance across Grace's mind like sugarplum fairies.
As she shoots up to the thirty-third floor, she pats down her springy brunette curls and fixes her cat's-eye specs on the tip of her nose. Once on the floor she passes short, squat Nadia Milosovici, queen of cost cutting and layoffs, and sidesteps an icy draft. Grace has been noticing this creature lurking around a great deal—corporate calls her out of her dungeon in HR whenever a magazine is losing money to terrorize the staff. Grace isn't worried, though; neither the Men nor Jeff have said anything to her.
Breezing into the big office, Grace says, "Well, guys, what amazing news, eh? We'll really clean up now." She smiles.
"Well, Grace!" says Jeff heartily.
Nadia Milosovici eases her round wooliness into the office, clicking the door shut behind her. And then Grace knows.
But her brain won't take it in—instead it focuses on the woman's sweater, covered with nightmarish blackish-purple flowers that have no correlation to anything that actually grows on earth.
Grace looks at Jeff until he drops his gaze. Mike and Dave stare at the wall. Only Nadia Milosovici stares Grace down.
Grace will never, ever address this woman. As far as she is concerned, this woman does not exist. "Jeff, dear, I see that you've brought me here for a reason that I hadn't anticipated."
"Have a seat, Grace."
"I'll stand, thank you very much."
"All right. I have to tell you…" He blushes beneath his perpetual salon tan. A miserable silence saturates the room.
When he squares his shoulders, she understands that a prepared speech, containing something oozingly repulsive about how sad it is to be "parting ways," is on its way.
"So," she says briskly. "Let's get started. Have I been invited here to learn that we must part ways?" She thinks she's made her voice sound cool, even amused, but fears she was unnaturally loud.
"Well"—Jeff clears his throat—"let me be clear. Grace, it has been an honor to work with you. They don't make 'em like you anymore, right, guys?"
The Men make a sound like dry lizard claws scratching on rock.
"Anymore? Yes, I suppose I am the older model," she says lightly.
"We need to replace you, Grace." He's finally spit it out.
Replace?
Her cool shatters like Waterford crystal, and heat floods her chest and rises up her neck and into her face. "Replace me? That you can never do, Jeffrey Wilson. No one knows this magazine or the market or the advertisers the way I do. I'm the head of the club, for God's sake! No, Jeff, I am not replaceable. But go ahead. Do you want someone younger? Someone cheaper? Sure, they're a dime a dozen. And things are getting tough. So, bring on the interns! But if you think some child can replace me, you have your head up your … Jeff, you cannot, cannot, cannot, use me up and toss me out. I will not, you cannot…"
Nadia Milosovici presses a button next to the door.
Calm, she tells herself. "Mike, Dave, have a seat. I'm almost done here."
The Men always respond to a commanding female voice. They sidle over to the chairs and stand clutching the chair backs.
"Fife meenutes." Nadia Milosovici's basso profundo starts the countdown to the drop of the blade. She lets in a security guard, a slender, terrified Somalian no older than eighteen, dressed in a dusty blue uniform.
Grace walks to the window, takes off her specs and rubs the spot between her eyebrows. She vividly pictures her note to Billstein already wending its way through the U.S. mail, and decides to jump. Steady there, she tells herself, now a deep, yogic breath. Deliberately she draws the breath up from her abdomen into her chest and lets it out ve-e-e-ry slowly.
She fits her glasses back on and turns. Regarding Jeff over the rims, she waits until he cringes.
"Jeff, my love, let's talk sense. I am the magazine's most valuable asset. Mike, Dave, I've worked at Nelson for twenty-five years, since way before your time, and you've seen the magazine imitated, you've seen them all grab on to our coattails. We've grown the industry into the billions of dollars. We built it. We are bridal. And now with Billstein gone, we can get Winnie out of the way, and corner the entire thing! Bridal will be all ours!"
The only sound is one knuckle cracking. Then silence.
"Time eez up."
Jeff is suddenly furious. "I will determine that," he tells Nadia Milosovici. He faces Grace. "Gracie, extraordinary times require extraordinary measures … and honestly, we are so…"
"Nefer say sorry when terminating."
The Men, emboldened by the voice of doom, step up to flank Jeff. Jeff meets Grace's gaze and it is almost loverlike, a shared history passing between them. The good, the bad, and the ugly. It's over.
He explains she must leave immediately with just a few of her personal belongings—company policy. Her boxes will be packed and shipped ASAP. Her computer has been disabled—nothing personal, company policy.
She stares at him. "Jeff, dear, I have all the magazine's secrets right up here." She taps her forehead.
"Sorry, sorry. My bad. Of course. Look, I feel terrible, Grace. Just awful." His eyes moisten.
Nadia Milosovici makes a furious guttural sound.
"Severance package," a scratchy voice prods Jeff.
"Right!" Relief written all over his face, Jeff assumes his corporate tone and tells her she will be called in a few days to discuss the package. A very generous one, commensurate with her years of service at the magazine and the high esteem in which the company holds her. She gathers from this there will be extras thrown in.
"Don't call me, call my lawyer," she says crisply. "Or rather, she'll call you. But please, don't call me, Jeff. You and I are kaput."
She turns slowly as if to leave, then whirls back around, catching him start to relax. "Who is it?"
He gulps. Coughs. "We cast a wide net, naturally."
"Naturally. And what did you catch?"
"Nut your beezness." Nadia Milosovici looks smug.
But Grace knows. She can tell by the way Jeff stuffs his hands in his jeans pockets and rocks back on his cowboy boot heels. By the way his tense knuckles press through the denim.
"Now Gracie, look…"
Lucky. Her favorite, her protégé. Whose sneaky skinny behind Grace saved and who has apparently been drooling and slavering to sink her teeth into Grace's neck.
She holds up her hand. "Lucky Quinn! Yes, indeed! A terrific girl. Best in bridal, as we say. I should know—I hired her and taught her everything."
Over her specs, she watches him squirm. "Lucky's who I would have picked to replace me, too. Smart move, guys."
They're all nodding as if she's giving them a genuine compliment.
"Thank you, Grace," Jeff simpers. "You were always a real trouper. Always had the magazine's best interests at heart."
She almost tells them all to get the hell out of her office, then remembers she's in their office. Drawing herself up, she says, "Good luck, Jeff. Mike, Dave. You will so need it."
As for Lucky, just let Grace find her now.
* * *
Grace is returned to the twenty-seventh floor by the Somalian. She tries to bend him toward Lucky's office, but he hews to course. The entire vast area of cubicles is deserted, emptied out in the face of a tornado, Lucky spirited out of Grace's wrathful path by Nadia Milosovici's hired guns.
In her office Grace furiously digs glossy shopping bags out of a large file drawer—relics of fashion and beauty events, once overflowing with swag. She'd always kept the bags for something—and now, what do you know?—here she is, filling them up with shoes. She curses herself for the mountains she's let accumulate. Everyone says a shoe pile is a clear sign that you've let yourself go at the office, the equivalent of socking on weight after marriage. She'd known it, and yet she'd let her guard down. She digs out the extra pairs of pantyhose that are crushed behind old files and a veritable drugstore of Advil, Klonopin, Tylenol, some old Xanax from years ago, not to mention lipsticks in pinkish tones pointing out the fact that she's well past pink.
She wonders just how long Jeff and Lucky have been looking her right in the eye and lying. Jeff's the usual type of charming sociopath who ends up being publisher. Believe these guys at your own risk, Grace had told Lucky on a regular basis. And Lucky! Don't even go there, she tells herself.
No one knows better than Grace that the magazine's numbers have been sliding. Chic Bride has been nipping at her heels for months now, as has Winnie Whitcomb Weddings. And all of this had been happening even before the economy crashed. The only thing that had saved her was that Princess Bride was doing even worse. The sad truth is that, though she'd racked her brains, she hadn't known what to do.
Jeff bumped Grace off because he had to do something—he has to show the Men that he's being proactive. Fresh blood! New ideas! Everyone's peeing in their pants because of the economy—who'll live, who'll die—and large, important lambs are everywhere being sacrificed on the altar of profits. He gave her job to Lucky because she's eager and hungry and she'll cost bupkus, so they'll see some instant savings. But in the long run? What will Lucky actually do?
You get what you pay for—that much she knows.
Everything that goes around comes around. People recite this as a consolation mantra whenever the axe falls. But Grace's experience has taught her not that history is long and bends toward justice but that life in business is nasty, brutish, and short. Look at its embodiment: Nadia Milosovici.
She yanks out a drawer filled with her stash of reading glasses. Winged, sequined, rhinestoned, neon-hued—her trademark. She sweeps them into a bag.
In a whirlwind she pulls framed photos off the wall—dozens of her cats, Pookie and Pie, and her daughter Isla from the edenic time before Isla's epiphany that Grace was a moron.
Grace stops to catch her breath, hands on her hips. She'd made the whole damn office into her boudoir. Right down to curtains on the windows! What had she been thinking?
It will take her all week to clear this stuff out. No. She picks up the shopping bags—six of them—and her large D & G tote bag and heads for the door. As she hands the Somalian her bags, she thinks, in a moment of lucidity, poor kid, traveled all the way from his miserable war-torn country to do this.
The elevator door opens and out walks Desmarie, the lobby security guard that Grace cheerfully greets every day of her working life. She's seen Desmarie lord it over the Somalian before, and at the sight of his boss lady, he puts down the bags and scuttles off. Desmarie's enormous hips roll inexorably toward her.
Following Desmarie is Nadia Milosovici's underling from Guillotine Central, the Harpy—no one knows her real name—a walking nightmare with a receding hairline and an indefinably bad smell and prominent moles on her chin upon which a garden of curling coarse hairs flourishes.
They have been ordered to escort Grace from the building. Company policy, nothing personal. Twenty-five years on the job and she'll be taken out like a criminal.
As the elevator begins its twenty-seven-floor descent, the modest corn muffin Grace had for breakfast threatens to pop back up. Worse, the Harpy's odor wafts toward her, and Grace flashes to those times when she's had to meet with the woman over tedious problems with health insurance that were never resolved in Grace's favor.
She made Grace think of bad breath, ancient menstrual periods, Lipton's tea bags. And always, a ghoulish delight taken in such things as preexisting conditions. Grace presses her hand over her mouth.
The Harpy announces that Nadia Milosovici has approved Grace's use of her regular company car one last time. Grace starts humming along with "O Come All Ye Faithful," which is pumping into the elevator. Desmarie stares intently at the red electronic numbers flowing by. When it stops at fourteen and then again at eight, she watches Grace nervously as if she might pull a Patty Hearst and blast her way to freedom.
"It's all right, Desmarie," Grace says, suddenly weary. "I'm the same person I was when I came to work this morning."
But is she? She doesn't feel like the same person.
They pass through the lobby, adorned with the same awful fake tree the building management hauls out every year. It is ancient, maybe two thousand years old or so. Grace had repeatedly begged them to throw it out and replace it with simple tasteful real wreaths. But no. At least she'll never have to see or worry about the tree's ugly plastic needles again, which at the moment seem to be actually menacing her.
As she's perp-walked to the curb, the Harpy looks as if she'd like to dance a jig. In another burst of rage, Grace considers ripping the woman's head off, then sighs deeply. This sort of thing—seeing the mighty fall—has got to be the high point of the woman's life, and even now the wretch is freezing—forgot her coat in her excitement. And she's probably never even been laid. Grace will have mercy.
"You take care of yourself," says Desmarie, clearly relieved she can now roll back inside. "You're a nice lady."
"You, too. You're just lovely. And thank you."
And what exactly is Grace thanking her for?
Grace glares at the Harpy, who's turning corpselike in the cold.
No. More. Company. Car. It's awful, she won't be able to cope. Again, panic grips her lower gut. She's going to need the bathroom, pronto.
And Sandy Billstein, thrown out across town on the very same day! That incompetent, tasteless hag! Oh, God!
Don't freak out, she commands herself. You're too old to be a mean girl, although it's hard to believe you're ever too old for that. Getting canned has nothing to do with quality—Grace is good, Billstein is terrible. It's about numbers. And now they're both on the street. It's rotten, miserable luck to be thrown out on the very same day because people will lump them together. Two long-time bridal editors, twins in misfortune, bite the dust before lunch on November 27, 2009.
Crap.
As taxis swish by on the slushy street, she imagines getting used to those unprepossessing interiors again—the driver mug shots, the bulletproof partitions, the sticky floors. Well, but who does she think she is? She will take the subway, just the way everyone else in New York does, even the mayor, or so he says. Ride New York City public transit and get back in touch with her roots.
Except that her roots are planted firmly in her Upper West Side classic seven, a vast complex that seems to keep expanding, the way the universe does, according to a theory explained to her by a man, a friend of a friend, whose voice had been saturated with envy as she allowed him a tour. She'd dated him for about two minutes.
Grace isn't among the super wealthy, but she's very, very comfortable, as her mother had put it. Comfortable enough to attract a certain kind of man, who, it may be said delicately, suffers from financial embarrassments and views Grace as a crutch. Who needs this? Instead of marriage, Grace has devoted herself to weddings. Meeting women as they emerge from the dark tunnel of singledom and guiding them down the rose-petal-covered aisle into doubledom has given her so much joy.
Standing in the cold, waiting for her car, she can't bear it, just can't. But there it is: Lucky! The protégé who is closer to her than her own daughter, the two of them a team, pulling issue after issue of the magazine out of a hat, out of their asses. She no longer has to watch her language.
On her toes she cranes her neck, looking up Seventh Avenue for the black town car. But of course traffic is backed up for blocks. She thinks of Pookie and Pie, waiting for her at home, and sniffles. They don't care if she's been replaced; they will love her anyway.
So all you can count on in life are your cats?
They will love her as long as Isabel brings them their lemongrass-roasted quail from Zabar's. At the moment, though, it isn't even clear to Grace if she should employ a housekeeper now that she isn't working. But of course that's ridiculous. This is no time for Grace to be alone.
She squeezes her eyes tightly shut. At work, from the moment she walks in to the moment she leaves, she's enveloped in a tsunami of activity—problems to be solved, situations to be mastered, people to boss. She loves her magazine in a way that Jeff and the Men can never know. Her love is like a secret, all-consuming passion.
A taxi approaches, the driver obviously thinking he's got a fare—an older, no, an attractive woman of a certain age, well dressed, expensive shopping bags slung over her arms—but as she shoos him impatiently away he takes off with a vengeance and sprays her with icy slush. A chunk hits her under the chin and leaks down beneath her scarf, under her cashmere sweater and into her cleavage. Christ.
Tears flood her eyes and freeze on her face. Her life has flown by, just the way she'd always heard older people so irritatingly say. Now she feels her heart shattering like old ice.
She spots her town car and waves wildly; it inches up to the curb, the slush parting like dirty ruffles. Her lovely driver, Abdul, rushes around to help with the bags, and she tries to muffle a sob but can't.
"Abdul," she weeps, releasing the bags. "I've been"—she starts to say replaced—and starts sobbing in earnest. "I've been fired."
Abdul's face crumples, and he puts his arms around her. They stand there as the yellow taxis slosh by.
The Big Day, Four P.M.
First things first. Lucky must write to Grace before another moment goes by. She takes out of her desk drawer the monogrammed Mrs. John L. Strong stationery that Grace gave her for her birthday. The only stationery Grace ever uses. And then she pulls over a piece of scrap paper.
"Dear Grace: I am so sorry.… This is so awful … It isn't that I don't adore and respect you, it's simply that Jeff offered me the job … they had to do something…" She scratches it all out. "Dear Grace: You are my role model and my mentor. You are a great magazine lady and a great woman. I'm not in your league AT ALL."
She knows Grace so well, she can just imagine the conversation:
"How dare you, Lucky!"
"Grace, I can't tell you how awful I feel…"
"How awful you feel! You lied to my face for a month and you took my job!"
"I do feel awful—it's just that I want the job so much, more than I've ever wanted anything. I know you understand, Grace. This is the truth. I love you, but I want your job, too! I feel awful … awful."
"So now you want me to feel sorry for you because you feel bad that you took my job? Oh, please!"
* * *
She can't write to Grace now. It's too complicated. She can justify what she did if she thinks about her goals—but she can't if she thinks about their friendship. She puts her pen down. This is not the moment for an emotional firestorm. Jeff is going to call her to the conference room at any moment, and she needs to be on top of her game, not sitting here with tears streaking her makeup.
She holds her round mirror up and away and pats her cheek with a tissue. At least her hair looks good; long, fine, and straight—the ends were trimmed yesterday. And the length—just touching the clavicle—suits her longish face. The bangs work, too.
She likes her straight nose, almost too sharp but not quite, and her eyes' subtle slant, which she extends just a little with liner. But she has a pale complexion, and Grace used to use her thumb to rub blush on Lucky's cheeks. "Heavens, my girl, you just don't pop without it!" she'd exclaimed, dabbing till she got it right. Now Lucky rubs blush in as Grace had taught her to. It gives her a better-defined look.
This is how other people see me, she thinks. Not beautiful—which,