Read The Nightgown for Free Online

loved, just like any other human being. And, if I was being honest with myself, I regretted that we hadn’t at least provided ourselves a chance to figure out what we could be together—a failure I hoped to rectify at some point in the future.
    As I slid into her office with a copy of Nancy Marino’s obituary in my hand, those unresolved feelings were floating around, somewhere above her desk but below the fluorescent lights.
    “Hey, got a second?” I said.
    Tina was a yoga fanatic and could usually be found sitting in one contortionist position or another. This time, she had a knee drawn up, with one arm wrapped around it and another stretched at an odd angle while she read something on her computer screen. Call it an Ashtanga Pixel Salutation.
    “Please tell me you have a big story for me,” she said, already looking defeated by the day. “If Lester runs another floater photo of some bikini-clad, Snooki-wannabe bimbo on the pretense of it being a slow news day, I’m taking a baseball bat to the morning meeting.”
    I grinned. Lester Palenski, our photo editor, was a notorious pervert who dedicated no small amount of resources to documenting the young, female population that migrated toward the Jersey Shore at this time of year.
    “Well, it’s a story. Maybe not a big story. But it’s one I’d really like to do,” I said, then slid the obit page at her. “Read Marino comma Nancy.”
    Tina moved her attention to the newspaper, frowning as she scanned it.
    “You want to write a story about a dead waitress?” she asked.
    “A waitress and a newspaper delivery person, yeah.”
    “What killed her?”
    “Don’t know.”
    I grabbed the obit from her desk as she narrowed her eyes at my mouth.
    “Were you sleeping with her?”
    “Tina! Have some respect for the dead!”
    “Well, were you?”
    “Oh, yeah, I was shagging her rotten,” I said. “I’d throw a quick one in her every morning. Her customers complained their papers were late if I took more than five minutes so it was always wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am.”
    Tina often claimed I had certain tells when I was lying, though she would never say what they were. For a while I tried sticking to the truth, but it just made me feel even more self-conscious. Since she became my editor, I had changed course and lied to her whenever possible. She knew this, of course. But I had to keep her off balance somehow.
    She scrutinized me for a moment then said, “Okay, so you didn’t know her. Why do you want to write about her again?”
    “I don’t know. It would just be a nice story about the kind of everyday person you don’t miss until she’s gone—call it a Fanfare for the Common Woman.”
    “All right there, Aaron Copland, knock yourself out,” Tina said. “What killed her, anyway? Anything good?”
    Only a newspaper editor would describe a cause of death as potentially being “good.” Only a newspaper reporter would know exactly what she meant by it.
    “Don’t know yet. I’m sort of curious about that, actually.”
    “Well, unless she died of some exotic and heretofore undiscovered strain of swine flu, you’re not going to get more than sixteen on this. So don’t go crazy and file forty or anything.”
    We measure stories in column inches, and the Incredible Shrinking newspaper had a lot less of them than it once did—especially in the middle of July, the absolute doldrums of the news calendar. It was a bit of a problem for me, as I was notorious for writing like we still published a paper as thick as a phone book every day.
    “I won’t go so much as a word over budget,” I promised.
    “How many times do I have to tell you,” she said, as I departed her office. “I know when you’re lying.”
     
    There’s no easier way to report a story about the newly dead than to attend a service in their honor. You have to be somewhat discreet—leaning on the casket, flipping open your notebook, and asking for comment as people pass by is considered