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  "You slept with your fucking agent!" She jumped up and slapped me across my face. One of her fingertips struck my left eye and I cried out in shock and stumbled backwards covering it with my hand. "Amy, listen. I--"

  "You what? What, Dan? What are you planning on saying? Tell me! What could you possibly say right now that you think will change anything?"

  "I was…drunk, and--"

  "Oh boy! You were drunk! Well I guess that just makes everything ok then. Why didn’t you tell me that sooner?"

  I moved forward, my left eye still watering and burning, and reached out for her. She sidestepped to her left and laughed. It was a laugh I had never heard from her. "If you think that I--"

  A sharp, pulsing beeping noise drowned out the rest of what she said.

  BEEP!BEEP!BEEP!BEEP!BEEP!BEEP!BEEP!BEEP!

  It was almost ear piercing. Covering our ears we both ran out into the hallway, where we followed the first signs of smoke out into the kitchen.

  Dillon was under the kitchen table, crying violently and rocking back and forth with his tiny hands pressed tightly over his ears. He saw us run in and looked at me and spoke. I couldn’t hear him over the beeping but I already knew what happened and could read his lips. "I was trying to make toast."

  The toaster we had in the house I had owned since college. It was a cheap ten dollar thing my roommate and I had picked up from a drug store and it had never really worked right. Often, it would only toast one side of your bread, and more times than not, it would never pop what ever you were toasting back up. No, it just continued to stay on, keeping your bagel or Pop-Tart toasting for all eternity, or until somebody went and popped it up manually. I should have replaced it long before that day.

  "Dan, your fucking toaster!" Amy ran over to the counter and unplugged the toaster. Then in the most violent and unexpected thing I had ever seen her do, she grabbed it with both hands and raised it high above her head. "God," she slammed it to the ground, two pieces of burnt toast bounced out and landed near the dishwasher, "Damn this thing!"

  She looked at me, "And you, too," she screamed with a pointing finger. "You, too, Dan!"

  She ran past me, our shoulders colliding, knocking me against the wall, and into the guest bedroom. Dillon and I looked at each other, his crying not slowing up. Amy came back out with a handful of Dillon’s clothes, pulled him out from underneath the table, hoisting him up into her arms. She stopped only for a second to grab her purse off the counter, and then slammed the front door as she headed out to her car. I watched as she drove through the grass of our front yard to get around my Jeep, and then she was gone down the street.

  I stood alone in the kitchen with toast on the floor and a full pot of hot coffee. The Smoke Detector was still going off.

  Chapter 5

  Amy didn't like Jackson Hugh, but the rest of the world seemed to be head over heels for him. If my short story collection hadn't included the Jackson Hugh story, there's no telling how things would have ended up, if I would have been as successful. But, it did include Jackson, and he was met with rave reviews from all angles. I guess I owe him the credit for my success. Well, him and Jenna both.

  Jenna McMurray launched my career. A young literary agent from New York that apparently saw the potential of my writing where nobody else did; she was the only positive response to a query letter I received. Turns out it was the only one that I needed.

  After the positive letter she sent me, and after I sent her the completed collection of stories that I planned to publish, we had our first phone call. She sounded young, closer to my own age than I had expected, and there was a bit of a Southern accent lingering at the back of her voice, suppressed, it seemed, by her many years in New York. We hit it off immediately. I don't know if it was the fact that we were both young (I found out a bit later she was indeed 28) or if we just had similar personalities and sense of humor. Either way, it seemed like I had hit the agent jackpot. I couldn’t have asked for a better person to represent my work. If our relationship had stayed strictly business professional, that might have been the case. But things didn't turn out that way.

  Two weeks after Jenna began to shop my manuscript around, we had our first deal together; a two-book deal worth high six figures. I nearly fainted when Jenna called to tell me the news. She giggled with delight as I asked her to repeat the dollar amount for me again and again, just to make sure I hadn't misheard her. She said that the publishers loved my writing and especially liked the Jackson Hugh story, and that they hoped there would be more of him in the future. She seemed genuinely happy for me. Amy and I went out to celebrate with a fancy dinner, both still in complete awe of the situation.

  After that, things went by at a blazing speed, and it seemed like every bit of news I received pertaining to my book was good news. But, this is not why I'm writing. While at the time the events of my success were perhaps some of the happiest of my life, looking back now on all that has happened since, and all the hell that I've been through, those few months seem like nothing but insignificant and distant memories, like stars in a neighboring galaxy. Forgive me if I skim through the details. I've got a more important story to tell.

  My book was published a little less than a year after Jenna and I had landed the deal. Thanks to some over the top marketing from my publishers, and some early positive reviews, The Teachers' Lounge (a title I thought was quite clever) debuted at number ten on the best seller list and steadily rose over the next few weeks. After some more glowing press remarks and as word of mouth took over, Jenna called me while I was in the grocery store one day, comparing the prices of Brand Name and Store Brand bottled water, to tell me that I had officially made it to the number one spot in fiction that week. My head swam for a moment, and if the grocery store floor hadn't of appeared to be so grimy and smeared with filth, I would have sat down right there in the middle of it. Again, Amy and I went out to celebrate with a nice dinner.

  Once The Teachers' Lounge hit number one, I started to tour, doing signings and question and answer sessions at bookstores across the country. Amy didn't like me being away from home, traveling all over, and she said so every time I went to pull out of the driveway and head to the airport. She was certain something bad would happen. She was right, although not in the way she probably thought.

  While on tour, every evening after a signing, I would have two phone conversations: one with my wife, and then one with Jenna. The call with Amy was to check-in, reassure her of my safety, chat about our days, say that we loved each other, and then hang up. The calls with Jenna were more business like; we talked about the event that day and discussed future bookings and procedure. She'd tell me how the book was doing sales wise, and update me on other happenings in the publishing world. Things went on fine this way for a while, but at some point during one particular multi-city stretch of days, I realized that Jenna and mine's conversations were lasting longer and longer. They always started the same, with Jenna giving her business speech, but then we'd end up talking about other things: sports, politics, the weather, we told each other jokes. It was if one day the switch was thrown and Jenna and I graduated from business partners to two friends who enjoyed each other's company. I don't know when exactly the flirting started, or even who was the first one to flirt with the other. But I remember the night very well when I realized that my talking with Jenna had officially crossed some sort of line in my marriage. Although Amy would never know.

  I had my Bluetooth ear piece on and was loosening the tie that I had worn to the book signing and then to dinner, where I had proceeded to drip A1 Steak Sauce on it. It wasn’t like in the commercials, though. No steak-crazed lunatic from the table next to me rushed over and wiped up the drop on my tie with a piece of his own steak stuck on the end of a fork. Nope, in reality I used my napkin and only managed to smear the drop of sauce into a large, uneven, spot. I hoped it would come out easily, Amy had gotten me this particular tie for Christmas.

  Jenna was still laughing in my ear, a result
of me telling her about a young girl who had come on to me pretty heavily at the signing and had slipped me a key to her hotel room.

  "Jesus, Dan. I swear, I’m starting to think these women are reading a few chapters in bed, and then flipping to the back jacket to look at your picture and touch themselves for a while before they go to sleep." She laughed again and I slid out of my shirt and pants, hunting through my suitcase for some sweatpants and a t-shirt. "So how does that make you feel?"

  "How does what make me feel?" I asked.

  "How does it make you feel to know that you are serving as masturbatory stimulus for woman all across the country?"

  I chuckled at this. "I feel like Amy doesn’t need to know about any of this or the publishers are going to have to find a new Playgirl author."

  "You haven’t told her any of these stories?"

  "Are you kidding? She’d be nervous enough if I told her I was going to do a signing for a sanctuary full of monks. If I told her about these women propositioning themselves to me she’d never let me out the door again."

  I found and put on my clothes and then collapsed onto to the bed, reaching for the TV remote on the nightstand. It wasn’t there. My eyes did a quick scan of the room and found it resting on top of the TV itself, a stupid place for it. I sighed heavily, for some reason feeling entirely too lazy to get back up off the bed.

  "Something wrong?" Jenna asked, concerned.

  "I’ve made a horrible mistake," I said, deciding to be honest.

  "Oh?"

  "Yes… I’m afraid I have already taken refuge upon the bed here in the hotel, and alas, the TV remote is resting comfortably out of reach, on top of the television."

  My earpiece vibrated with laughter and I smiled at Jenna’s response to my joke.

  "Well, Dan. You’re the big hotshot writer now. Call the front desk and get a maid or somebody to come and fetch it for you?"

  "Did you just say fetch?" I asked.

  She thought for a second. "Yes. Yes I did."

  "It’s not a tennis ball, and the maids surely wouldn’t appreciate being referred to as dogs."

  We both laughed then and, giving up on thoughts of the remote, I slid down further, stretching myself out on the bed. When Jenna stopped laughing, she asked, "So Amy would really freak out if you told her about the woman at the signings? I figured she’d get a good chuckle out of it. Take pride in knowing women everywhere were getting off to her husband."

  I shook my head. "Again with the masturbation. You have my book on your nightstand don’t you?"

  She gave me a pseudo-shocked gasp and then giggled. "I do actually," she said. "But for purely literary purposes only. Cocky."

  "Hey, you started all this talk. But anyway, no, Amy would definitely not be ok with it. Don’t get the wrong idea, she’s not some bitchy wife that’s got me on a noose so tight that one slip and I’d hang myself, but she’s funny about some things."

  "I see," Jenna said.

  If the phone call had ended there, who knows how things would have ended up. But again, this is just another one of those forever worthless what-if moments. They are silly things to dwell on because they only make you hate yourself even more for not picking the other side of the fork in the road.

  My moment was this: What if I had gotten off the phone before Jenna had said, "So, tell me about her."

  When searching for somebody to blame other than myself, the maid will often take the fall for that particular incident. Whoever had cleaned the room last had had the brilliant idea to place the TV remote on top of the damn television, where no right-minded individual should ever place such a thing. Maybe it was hotel policy, part of the cleaning peoples’ check-list. Everything had to be in the exact right spot, including placing the TV remote in a place where nobody wants it. But maybe, just maybe, the person who had been assigned to clean room 109 before my arrival had gotten lazy. Maybe, just as they were walking out of the room, headed to 110 with an arm full of dirty towels in hand, had seen the remote laying on the floor in some obscure place, like next to the bathroom door, or poking out from under the tiny desk in the corner, and in their haste, not wanting to trek the whole ten feet from near the door back to the nightstand had simply set the remote on top of the TV, never thinking for an instant it was going to ruin somebody’s life.

  That’s the way I imagine it when I need somebody else to blame.

  It was simple chit-chat, and I’m certain that at that moment, before the conversation took place, that’s all Jenna meant it to be, not knowing what it would spawn.

  "So, tell me about her." She had been asking about my wife, and so, with the TV remote smiling back at me from the Television, I did.

  I told her the same story that I told you a while ago, meeting Amy in the Teachers’ Lounge, and everything that followed. I told her how she was very supportive and how she basically was the main reason that I got published. Jenna argued that my writing was the reason that I got published. I told her that was only part of it, that I had needed a push. I told her all about Amy’s likes and interests. What she did for fun, the things that I enjoyed and things that I disliked. I told Jenna how Amy wrote poetry although I didn’t think that it was good enough to get published (I felt bad, but it was true) although I would never tell her that. Jenna would interject and ask questions now and then and I would oblige her with answers. When I felt that I had nothing else to tell Jenna about Amy, I looked at the TV remote again and contemplated retrieving it. But, by this time, a mere fifteen minutes later, my spot on the bed was warm and I had managed to find an incredibly comfortable position, my head disappearing between the two stacks of pillows. So, I asked Jenna a question of my own.

  "So, you know my story. What’s yours?"

  "Technically, I don’t know your story," she started. "I know Amy’s."

  "Ah, good point. Well, you go first."

  And so I listened as Jenna told me her story of how she grew up in a small town in South Carolina--explaining the accent I had been curious about--and then made her way to New York at the age of twenty-two, following her passion for reading and writing, climbing the experience ladder and eventually opening her own agency.

  "Yeah, it took some time, it wasn’t immediate or anything," she said. "But eventually I got this guy who wrote a novel about a detective who was blind to send me some sample work. It was good stuff, really, and it turned out to be my first sale. It just happened to be a big one. Publisher loved the character and wanted three more in the series. Gave the guy two million. "

  "Wow, that’s a decent chunk of change your way, huh?" I said. My Bluetooth battery was dying, so I pulled it off and sat up, raising my actual cell to my ear.

  "Yeah, it was. I used most of it for the business. That first sale launched my career. That was almost three years ago. I moved out of the city to New Jersey last spring, it's nice to be able to get out of all the hustle and bustle and actually relax after work. And the train gets me to work pretty quick."

  At that I did some quick math with her storyline and figured her to be either twenty-seven or twenty-eight, verifying my assumption I had the first time we spoke. She was young.

  "So things have been good?"

  "Yeah, you could say that. I’ve got a nice office in a great location and three assistants working for me. All really sharp girls, good knack for talent. "

  "What happens if one of them goes and starts her own business, just like you?"

  "I’d be thrilled. I’ve done it. There’s no reason they shouldn’t have the same opportunity. Life’s all about taking chances isn’t it?"

  "What about in the male department. Husband?"

  "Nope, not yet. I date now and then, but I work a lot too, so you know."

  My phone beeped in my ear and I pulled it away to check the caller ID. It was Amy. I glanced at the bedside clock and saw that it was almost 11:00 pm. Sensing that the phone call with Jenna was almost over, I told myself I’d just give Amy a call back in a few minutes.

  I was
wrong about the conversation. I can’t indulge you in the details because I honestly don’t remember much of it, other than the fact that Jenna and I spent the next two hours talking. Yes, two hours. When we finally said our goodbyes--they were rushed and cut off because my phone’s battery died as well--it was past 1:00 in the morning.

  Like I said, I can’t remember all of it, but I know that ultimately we sounded like two long-time friends just hanging out, shootin’ the breeze. We talked about movies, about politics, about sports. Jenna was more of a basketball fan than football, but she knew enough names to impress me. And I knew enough about basketball to give her a hard time about her favorite NBA team--The Knicks--not doing very well the past season. We laughed at stories, and raised our voices when expressing a strong opinion, said the right sympathetic things when necessary. We just talked.

  I suppose that I officially crossed the line in a moment of stupidity that was the product of a lull in the conversation. For a period of about twenty seconds it seemed like neither one of us had anything to say. We had simply talked ourselves out, I guess. But then, yes, I came through with a very horrible question. It formed as a joke in my mind, but as it was halfway out of my mouth, I realized that it turned into a statement of genuine curiosity that was putting pictures in my head that I would blush over if Jenna could see.

  "So," I said. "What are you wearing?" I sounded like a 1-900 number, or maybe a teenager in a sex chat-room. My heart quickened as soon as I said it, braced for the answer like I used to feel when I would ask a girl to the school dance.

  Jenna laughed. I let out the breath I was holding in. "I’m naked," she said. "And I’ve got your book flipped open to the back jacket."

  We both had a hard its-too-late-and-we’re-acting-dumb laugh, and then got back on the topic of woman harassing me at book signings. It was during this conversation that my phone finally died. If it hadn’t, there’s no telling when we would have voluntarily hung up our phones.