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through my clippings. I feel nervous, which is laughable, but the real joke is that I want this small-time job as badly as I did my gig at the Gazette, and I’m afraid Charley won’t give it to me. She lights a Marlboro, on which she takes long puffs. I can’t believe her slowness. I think of all the competitive editors back in New York who would piss themselves laughing if they could see me right now. But why do we New Yorkers always think we have the best of everything? Only in New York. Only in New York. Only in New York, my parents told me. But one day I started wondering, Is that really true? Is all this New York hustle really that important?
    The key to not blowing your life apart is not asking too many questions. But once I started, I couldn’t stop—and then there was Henry. Standing there in the bar near my office downtown, the one I went to on bad days, not the celebrating pub two blocks the other way where I might see people from work. I was staring at the back of Henry’s neck and waiting to order something truly potent to make the day slip away. His neck was so deeply tanned I knew he worked outside. He smelled of pine and soap, and when he turned he caught me behind him, leaning in too close. What, do I smell or something? he said. We sat in a vinyl booth.
    Hours later, I said I hoped I wasn’t keeping him from anything. He probably had somewhere else to be, I said. Everyone in New York has somewhere else to be. Henry said, Where would I be going? He rolled his shoulders to crack his neck and relaxed into the booth. He had tussled sandy hair, and a knobbled nose, and even though he was so young, he had white crow’s-feet by his eyes from being sunburned while squinting. I could see that boring tattoo on his arm, and when he smiled he had a snaggletooth. He had stillness, Henry. He wasn’t rushing away anywhere.
    I sit with Charley now, and I see this too is a family trait. They can sit quietly, these Lynches, for what seems like an eternity.
    Charley stubs out her cigarette in a coffee mug. “You’re hired,” she says. “Report to the redheaded felon out front.”
    I’m so relieved I almost laugh. It may be small, but I don’t even care, I’m just so happy to be back on the beat.

6

    Quinn
    I crane my head out our front window and catch the blue smell of wild grapes getting fat on the vines that choke the trees to death. The fall makes me so goddamn melancholy. Today is my birthday. My ex-girlfriend Sam called at midnight. She was out at some bar, drunk but thinking of you! I listened to her message three times.
    I go downstairs and sit on the steps of the Stationhouse. Today I’m on assignment with Leah Lynch, my new partner. What a person could have done wrong in this life to wind up both related to and working for Charley Lynch I can’t imagine. I thought I was hallucinating when this tall woman with a broomlike black ponytail walked into the Star office and sniffed the booze on me. Damn was she tall. Olivey-skinned with a wide, thin, serious mouth and eyes that showed exactly how disappointing she found the office. I listened in while Charley hired this sister-in-law, smoke drifting from her office, and I thought, Could you be the Woodward to my Bernstein? Are you the one I’ve been waiting for?
    I operate best in units of two. Once, it was Sam and me. When Marta got sick, it became Marta and me. Imagine our family portrait: a confused and suspicious balding woman in a blue gown stares ahead as her snarling redheaded daughter crouches nearby, a protective animal. That was us. And then Marta died, leaving me alone in the frame. That wench. We were two parts of the same whole, and when she was gone I felt a lightness, a heavy weight unlashed from me. It should have been relief, not having to take care of her anymore, but instead I felt like I was floating, barely there at all.
    Get me straight: I don’t need anyone, but old habits die hard. Sometimes, when I feel too nothingy for my own