The Accidental Bestseller (2 page)

“There you are!” Mallory St. James moved quickly and surely toward Kendall, a tall, elegant figure in sleeveless black silk. Velvety brown hair brushed slim shoulders and diamonds glittered at her ears and throat. The two women next to Kendall gasped in recognition, but Mallory’s smile stayed firmly in place.

“We thought maybe you’d pounded Plain Jane to a pulp over dessert and been carted off to jail.” Mallory pronounced their nickname for Kendall’s new editor with relish and managed to avoid making eye contact with the obviously eavesdropping women. “Tanya and Faye are holding down our table. The wine is on its way.” She slipped her arm through Kendall’s then acknowledged their gaping audience. “Ladies,” she said with both warmth and enough distance in her tone to prevent a request for autographs. “My friend here has to be rushed to our table. She’s clearly in desperate need of a drink.”

Kendall marveled at Mallory’s social dexterity; she’d become a master at making the readers who bought her books and kept her on the lists feel good without encouraging them to become too familiar.

The taller one’s hand flew to her chest and a delighted smile washed over her angular face. “You see,” she said to her companion as Mallory led Kendall into the bar. “I told you we needed to come in here. Mallory St. James actually spoke to us!” Her voice vibrated with excitement. “I bet that was her friend Kendall Aims.”

The bar was knee-deep in men and women of all shapes and sizes. Rings of chairs surrounded too-tiny tables. It looked and sounded as if all two thousand conference attendees had tried to cram themselves into the lounge at the same time.

“Good grief, you’ve just made their entire conference,” Kendall said, as they worked their way through the crowd. “They can’t wait to get out of here to tell somebody they talked to you. They didn’t even notice me until you arrived. I used to have a career of my own. Now I’m Mallory St. James’s friend.”

Mallory shrugged her bare shoulders, unperturbed. Kendall hated the whine that had crept into her voice. Normally the four of them laughed over the idea of anyone being in awe of any of them. They’d started together and held each other’s hands through the giddy heights and rock-bottom lows that were an inevitable part of publishing. Envy and resentment had never been factors in their relationship, and Kendall was horrified to be feeling both now.

“I know that was not a note of self-pity I just heard in your voice.” Mallory nodded to a knot of women who’d fallen silent to observe their progress.

“A note.” Kendall snorted. “That was a fugue. A full-fledged symphony. My entire career is in the toilet. I just keep praying that nobody flushes.”

“Interesting metaphor.” Mallory continued to nod and smile, but never checked their pace enough to invite interruption. “But there’s not going to be any flushing. All you have to do is walk off with the Zelda Award tomorrow night and Scarsdale will be looking at you in a whole new light.”

A woman at the bar pointed them out to her friends. Two more tables stopped talking as they passed.

“Do you think we should have just had a bottle of wine in the suite?” Kendall could feel the weight of the eyes on them, assessing, wondering, trying in a glance to glean Mallory’s secret for making all those bestseller lists. Curious how close she was to Kendall, whose career was nowhere near as big.

“No, no hiding.” Mallory’s lips barely moved behind her smile. “Besides the WINC board wants us published folk to be visible. You and I are bona fide evidence that a writer’s dreams can come true.”

“Maybe we should warn them that sometimes those dreams turn into nightmares,” Kendall said. “I don’t remember them covering that in any of the conference workshops.” She smiled evilly. “Let’s propose a workshop for next year—‘Caught in the netherworld. Stranded in the mind-sucking midlist.’ ” She referred to the dreaded spot in the middle of the publisher’s list of offerings in a given month. The top slots, the books the publisher was most excited about, got the biggest orders and the most publisher support, perpetuating those authors’ positions at the top of the publisher’s and ultimately the bestseller lists. The rest of their authors were thrown out there, much like shit flung at a wall, while the publisher waited to see who “stuck,” or so it seemed to Kendall.

Kendall had originally clung to the wall and even begun to inch up it; now she seemed to be sliding back down at an alarming pace.

“Great idea,” Mallory said. “Except no one wants to hear the truth. Just like no pregnant woman actually wants to listen to those delivery horror stories. Everyone wants to believe that once they sell their book the struggle is over, when it’s really just beginning.”

Kendall looked at Mallory, whose rise had been nothing short of meteoric, and an ugly pocket of envy filled her heart. How had she sailed through so unscathed when Kendall felt so badly bruised and beaten?

Kendall pushed the bitterness away as Mallory slowed. She looked up as Tanya and Faye, still dressed from their publisher parties, waved their hellos.

“Hey, over here!” The youngest of their foursome, Tanya Mason was thirty-five with blond hair that could only be described as “big” and an oval face dominated by a pointy chin and cornflower blue eyes. Her accent was pure country and so was her attitude. She wrote stories about single mothers like herself for Masque Publishing, with the occasional NASCAR hero thrown in.

“You are way behind, Miss Kendall,” Tanya crowed as Kendall and Mallory reached the table and dropped into their seats. “I had to slap Faye’s hands away to save you a glass of this fine red zinfandel. Of course, I could barely move my arms to get at her after the white-water rafting trip through the Hudson River Gorge that Darby dragged us on today.”

Kendall felt the room and the curious eyes recede as she accepted a glass of the red zin. “I think Masque should be paying you a bigger advance to compensate for the inevitable hospital bills,” Kendall replied. Tanya’s editor, Darby Hanover, was both highly competitive and a notorious jock with a passion for hair-raising adventure. Her favorite authors often found themselves a part of those adventures, even those like Tanya whose spirits were willing, but whose muscle tone was weak.

“Hazardous duty pay,” Tanya said, “that’s it for sure. And to think I came in a whole day early to lose the use of both of my arms.”

Faye rolled bespectacled eyes at Tanya, though the eyeglasses couldn’t hide the twinkle that resided there. She was sixty, referred to herself as “full figured,” had cropped salt-and-pepper hair, and was the wife of the charismatic televangelist, Pastor Steve, though you’d never hear it from her.

A former film and broadcast producer, Faye wrote novels for the increasingly popular inspirational market. She was also their group’s head cheerleader and chief organizer, planning their biyearly brainstorming retreats and keeping them all in touch with each other.

Where, Kendall wondered, would she be without the three of them? Still standing on the outside with her nose pressed against the glass looking in, no doubt. None of them, not even Mallory, would be where they were without the others.

“OK,” Mallory said, raising her glass. “I propose a toast to Kendall Aims, soon-to-be winner of the Zelda.”

“Here, here.” They clinked glasses and drank, the wine sliding easily down their throats as the warmth of friendship wrapped its comforting cloak around them.

“We better drink to that again. Because if I don’t win, I won’t be held responsible for my actions.” Kendall held her glass out for a refill.

They drank in silent accord and ordered a second bottle. At that moment every one of them believed better things lay ahead, that wanting could make it so, and that the bonds of their friendship had already been sufficiently tested.

2

—EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY

 

 

 

Kendall came awake slowly, her subconscious aware of her unfamiliar surroundings before the rest of her. Her head pounded slightly and her mouth felt thick and wooly. Her jaw ached from laughing and talking.

After too many bottles of wine, they’d come back to the suite and sat up talking until almost 3:00 A.M.—hours that had been remarkably good for the soul but not so good for the eyes and skin.

Last night Kendall had felt optimistic, if not the master of her destiny at least a participant in her future. But that was when the awards ceremony was still a comfortable day away, when the one thing that might rapidly revitalize her career seemed attainable. They’d hashed out her odds last night, pronouncing them highly favorable, dissing her competition, and imagining the look on Plain Jane’s face when Kendall was called up to the podium to accept her Zelda. Which would, in an omen of good things to come, they’d decided, be presented to her by Mallory.

But now the comfortable cushion of time had been ripped away and the fear had begun to steal in. Not winning was unthinkable, but the ceremony was tonight, the winner’s name already written and stuffed inside the envelope; no amount of positive thinking or deal making with God at this point would change the outcome.

She lay still beneath the covers with her eyes tightly shut, wishing she could block out what was to come as easily as her eyelids blocked out the morning light.

Sound sifted through the heavy drapery—car horns and construction, irate voices, the hum of a big city waking up and going about its business. At home she’d be hearing the neighbor’s sprinkler system, birds conversing over the feeders in the backyard, the hum of a lawn mower.

She was going to have to leave this dark, safe, unexposed place. She was going to have to spend the day getting ready for an awards ceremony that could expose her in ways she could not let herself think about. Her heart beat too fast and fear churned in her stomach.

The sound of hushed voices in the living room of the suite reached her, and Kendall knew she couldn’t hold off the day much longer.

Forcing herself into an upright position, she opened her eyes. Perched on the side of the bed, she probed carefully inside herself for the courage she needed, but found only a pronounced sense of dread. Still she managed to draw on her robe and stand, then padded into the living room, where she found Faye curled up on the couch with her feet tucked up beneath her fuzzy pink robe.

Tanya stood at the coffeemaker, already dressed, her back to the room. The garish flower arrangement Scarsdale had sent Kendall perched on the bar beside her along with the untouched bottle of champagne. Kendall had decided she’d open it tonight—but only if she won. She’d drink it to toast the bargaining chip that would finally force Scarsdale to invest in her.

The sound of fingers striking a keyboard came from behind Mallory’s closed bedroom door. “She’s already working?” Kendall asked.

“She said she had to do her twenty pages before we left for brunch.” Faye shrugged, clearly not feeling the flash of guilt at not working that immediately smote Kendall—not that Kendall had all that many twenty-page days even when she was writing.

Faye’s face was devoid of makeup, her black-rimmed glasses stark against the white of her skin. She untucked her legs to reveal fuzzy slippers that matched her robe. “Some of us are obsessive compulsive about our work. Some of us are not. Some of us aspire only to breakfast and a day at the Red Door Spa.” She smiled warmly. “And a Zelda for a friend.”

Kendall dropped down on the sofa next to Faye and laid her head on Faye’s fuzzy pink shoulder.

“How are you feeling?” Faye’s tone was soothingly motherly.

“Queasy.”

“I told you you shoulda taken those two aspirin last night
before
you went to bed,” Tanya said, as she brought a steaming mug of coffee to Kendall. From a distance she could have passed for a teenager in her denim miniskirt and layered tees, her hair pulled back off her face with a wide headband. “It’s always better to head off a hangover at the pass. Otherwise you spend the whole next day trying to get rid of it.”

Kendall took a tentative sip of coffee, welcoming the liquid burn on her tongue and the jolt of awareness it shot through her. “I was surviving hangovers when you were chasing boys on the elementary school playground,” she said, though she didn’t think her queasiness had anything to do with the amount of alcohol she’d consumed. “I’m fine.” Or she would be once she got through this day. She really should call Melissa and see how her trig exam had gone yesterday. And she probably should check in with Cal—she had a vague recollection of trying to reach him too late last night but there’d been no answer.

“I’m glad to hear it,” Tanya said. “I slept like a baby. The note in my room says those sheets are Egyptian cotton with a six-hundred thread count. When I hit the list, I’m going to buy two sets of sheets just like that. Though they might look kinda out of place in Mama’s double-wide.” She sighed. “Do you think there’s really a job where all you do is count the number of threads in a sheet? It sounds a whole lot easier than the Laundromat and the diner.”

Gretchen Wilson’s “Redneck Woman” rang out in the suite. Tanya reached for her purse and rooted around for her cell phone. “Oh, Lordy. I hate this thing.” She lifted the phone to her ear. “My number one fantasy is no longer stealing Brad from Angelina; it’s being completely unreachable.”

“Somebody better be bleedin’ or on the way to the hospital,” she said into the phone. “I’m at conference. You remember I told you that’s the same as workin’.”

Tanya sank into the wing chair across from the couch and crossed her long legs. Her feet were encased in strappy sandals with a heel that made Kendall’s feet ache in sympathy. Her wide mobile mouth turned downward.

“No, Loretta, I told you, you could
not
go to the mall this weekend. You are supposed to be helping Granny with Crystal.”