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drying dishes, I goofily said, “You know you’re my hero.” She laughed, then turned serious. “That works very well, since I’ve started to think of you as my protégé.” I felt pinpricks of delight.
    The summer after graduation, when I’d turned down law school and gone from being her bright protégé to being her ailing graduate who couldn’t get a job, she offered to let me stay with her and Paul, for free, in the glassblowing hut in their backyard.
    I took them up on it for a few months. To be clear, “glassblowing hut” was a misnomer. Complete with two floors and indoor plumbing, the hut was a beautiful, scaled-down version of one of those ornate winter greenhouse palaces that make it possible for Icelandic princesses to eat oranges all year long. On afternoons when she came out to the glassblowing hut to work, she graciously listened to every sob story I had about jobs I wasn’t getting and Robert-related melodrama. On the nights she and Paul would invite me over to “the big house” for dinner, they offered thoughts on careers and grad school and writing.
    At one of our dinners, when I lamented for perhaps the millionth time that maybe I should have gone to law school, Helen had finally had enough. She was gentle, but I remember her exact words. “You’d make a great lawyer, Dawn,” she said. “And you haven’t closed the door on law school. Not by a long shot. But if you’re going to try something else first, you need to stop second-guessing yourself. There’s a time for reflection and course correction if necessary, but you’re not there yet. ”
    When October arrived, I finally decided to move to New York, job or no job, and Helen left a note on my cot. (To be clear, “cot” was also a misnomer. It had feather padding and one-thousand-thread-count sheets.) On simple cream stationery in Helen’s sloping script, the note was just one line: “D, I believe in you, and what makes me really happy is I think you’re starting to believe in you too. Love, H.” I folded it and tucked it into my copy of Must We Find Meaning? and I’ve kept that book by my bedside every night since then.
    On my last day before decamping to New York, I was poking around in Helen’s library (a favorite activity, made even more favorite by the fact that her library had one of those rolling ladders), when I found the framed Ten Girls to Watch award certificate on one of the upper shelves, Charm scripted out in vintage magenta font. She’d giggled and gushed through the details of the contest when I’d asked her about it the next day. She still remembered the platform boots they’d outfitted her in for her photos, seeing Grease on Broadway with the other winners, touring the UN, and lunching with Betty Friedan. When the magazine hit newsstands, she’d enjoyed the glow of minor celebrity. The suitcase full of beauty products she’d gone home with hadn’t hurt either.
    _________
    I knew Helen would be thrilled to hear about my new job. That night, just after I got the e-mail from XADI that assured me I hadn’t been hallucinating, I zipped off an e-mail:
     
Helen, you won’t believe it. I just got a job. An amazing job. A real job. I’m working at Charm Magazine, and my first assignment is to track down all the past Ten Girls to Watch winners for the contest’s 50th anniversary this year. TGTW winners—that means you! Talk later this week? Love, Dawn
     
    After that I called my older sister, Sarah.
    There were a few reasons I was in New York. One was Robert. Another was the ostensible possibility of writing-related jobs. A third was Sarah. She’d never left Oregon. I mean, she’d left for vacation, but she’d never left left. It wasn’t supposed to be that way. Her plan had been: New York City. She was five years older than me, and as a twelve-year-old listening to her talk about all the clubs she was going to sing in someday in Soho and the East Village, the place names had taken on the power of