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said.
    “How much is that—a couple hundred?”
    “More than twelve hundred dollars in cash,” I said.“In a blue nylon gym bag.” Even as I said it, I knew it sounded bizarre.
    Marlene stared at me like I was thicker than Uncle Bob’s knotty pine paneling. “A guy built like a Greek god who’s been dancing nearly naked for a room full of screaming women walks out at one A.M . with twelve hundred dollars in untraceable cash, and hasn’t been seen since—and you don’t think anything is wrong? What’s the matter with you, Francesca?”
    She was right. What was wrong with me today? Might as well go to the
Gazette
, where I was expected to be wrong. I wasn’t disappointed. I’d hardly reached my desk when my editor, Wendy the Whiner, came over wearing a wrinkled suit that looked like it had been swiped from a Goodwill donation box. “Charlie’s been looking for you all morning. I didn’t know where to find you,” she said, accusingly.
    “Where you’ll find me every morning, at Uncle Bob’s looking for stories,” I said.
    “He’s not happy with you,” she said, with satisfaction.
    Charlie’s door was open, and he was sitting at his vast, empty black desk in his huge sterile office. I’d always suspected his chair was built up to make the sawed-off little hairbag seem taller. He was smiling, a bad sign. His blue suit was styled to hide his paunch. His red tie matched his nose.
    “Sit down, Francesca,” he said. “You’re late. Most people start work at the
Gazette
at nine A.M. ”
    “I do, too, Charlie,” I said, still standing, because I knew it irritated him. He hated any reminder that I was considerably taller than he was. “I was at Uncle Bob’s.”
    “You count eating breakfast as work?”
    He counted expense account lunches as work, but I didn’t remind him of that. “That’s where I meet readers, Charlie, and they tell me stories for my column.”
    “Well, see if you can eat your breakfast on your own time in the future,” he said. I figured I could ignore that as bluster. He was too eager to deliver his bad news. The man was practically wiggling in anticipation like a puppy. Either that, or he had to use the john.
    “In order to have a closer link with our readership,” he began, with a solemnity usually reserved for Vatican Square, “we at the
Gazette
want to publish something with the common touch. Of course, we thought of you.”
    I knew this was insulting. I just wasn’t sure how.
    “We are doing a compendium of St. Louis recipes. We’d like you to write the foreword and contribute a recipe.”
    “I don’t cook, Charlie,” I said.
    “What do you mean, you don’t cook? You’re a woman, aren’t you?”
    “Cooking isn’t a sex-linked gene. That is an incredibly sexist statement.”
    “I figured you’d try to hide behind that EEOC stuff,” he said. “So I’m offering you this choice: if you find a recipe too offensively female, you can do a Dialog St. Louis page.”
    Oh, my god, not that. Anything but that.
    Charlie must have seen the look of horror on my face. It was why I don’t play poker. “It’s your decision, Francesca. If I don’t have your recipe by tomorrow, I’ll expect you to begin working on the nextDialog St. Louis. That subject is: The Information Highway.”
    Trust the
Gazette
to go down that well-worn road where no reader wanted to follow. Charlie had been sold on something called “public journalism” at a newspaper conference he attended in South Carolina. Nobody was quite sure what public journalism was, but we could recognize it by its catch phrases: “solution-oriented stories,” “focusing on community resources,” “deliberative conversations,” “citizen commitment.”
    We knew what that meant. Expensive and time-consuming investigative reporting was out. Blather by city planners, sociologists, and other experts was in. The
Gazette
would no longer attack corruption in City Hall, the state legislature, and the school system.