Silence. "I don't see why not. I'm planning to leave at five-thirty. Can you get here by four-fifteen at the latest?"

"Yes. Absolutely."

Wait a minute. No I couldn't. It was now three forty-five. I glanced down at myself; I wore jeanstight jeansand a see-through b.u.t.ton-down shirt with a camisole underneath. How would I have time to buy an interview suit? How would I have time to wipe half the gunk off my face?

"Great, Roxy, I'll see you at four-fifteen." Click.

Bold Books was four blocks from here. I had a half hour.

It had to be fate. Someone, someone who cared deeply, was telling me to go on this interview instead of to my wedding. The Fates of the universe had given me somewhere to go, something to do instead of marrying Robbie.

Don't let your life depend on this interview, I told myself. If it doesn't work out, don't make it be an either/or. You either want to marry Robbie or you don't.

I don't. I am so sorry, Robbie. But I don't. I don't.

I took out my cell phone and stared at it. All I had to do was call him and tell him. The phone shook in my hand. Do it. Just do it. I dialed.

"Hey baby!" he said. "I'm in my tux!"

"Robbie, I'm so sorry." I burst into tears.

"What's wrong, honey?" he asked. "What happened?"

"I can't."

"Can't what?' he asked.

"I can't marry you, Robbie. I don't want to marry you."

"Oh, Jesus, Rox, not this again. Not now. Not on the day we're getting married. Don't do this to me. I can't spend an hour rea.s.suring you that you really want to marry me, Rox. I have to get ready for my wedding. Rox, come on."

"Robbie, I'm in Manhattan. And I'm not coming home. I'm sorry. I love you but I want something else."

"Is this a joke?" he asked on a nervous laugh. "Rox? Did my a.s.shole cousin put you up to this? Yo, Tommy, I can hear you laughing, you loosah!" he shouted good-naturedly.

"Robbie. This isn't a joke. I'm not going to marry you. I'm not coming home. I'm sorry, very sorry."

"Roxy, you'd better come home right NOW! Don't pull this on me! Roxy, are you listening? Roxy!" I held the phone away from my ear. "Roxy, sweetie, come on, honey, I love you. Roxy? Roxy! G.o.ddammit! Are you there?"

"Goodbye, Robbie," I whispered into the phone and then I hung up. I took a very deep breath and waited. The phone would ring again in about two minutes.

Make that one minute.

"Hi, Mom," I said.

"Have you lost your mind? What in G.o.d's name is wrong with you? You get yourself on a subway back to Brooklyn this instant!"

"Mom, I'm not coming home. I'm not going to marry Robbie. I'm so sorry, Mom, but I can't do it. I thought I could, I thought it was what I should do, but I don't want to marry him."

"This isn't about what you want!" she screamed, and then there was dead silence. "Roxy, of course this is about what you want. I'm talking crazy now. But what you want is to get yourself back on the subway. You've got b.u.t.terflies, Rox. That's all. b.u.t.terflies. We've all had them. Me, your aunt Maureen, Carla. Even Jackie. Well, maybe not Jackie. Honey, b.u.t.terflies are normal. Come home right now, and we'll all do a shot of Baileys for our nerves."

"I'm not going to marry Robbie, Mom," I said on a sob. "I'm sorry. I'm not coming home. I love you and Dad, but I'm going to stay here and get a job and start a new life for myself."

Silence. And then, "What kind of life? Roxy, you have a wonderful life here! With people who love you. Robbie is crazy in love with you. Seventy-five people are coming in two hours to see you get married!"

"I'm sorry," I said.

"I don't know who you think you are, Roxy. But you're going to find out and you're going to be sorry. I don't know what else to say to you."

"Bye, Mom," I whispered, and turned off my phone, then pulled open the door of 1550 Broadway.

Chapter five.

Lucy I was the only idiot at the office today. Granted, Bold Books, Inc. had only sixteen employees, but fifteen of them, including the two who were after my promotion to executive editor, were spending the day after Thanksgiving shopping, watching televised sports, eating turkey sandwiches from turkeys that hadn't spent time on the floor, or whatever else people did, and I was here. At work.

Better here than at the apartment, where I'd be waiting for Larry to come home from the office so I could continue tracking his facial expressions. That was how I'd spent my morningpeering at him closely for signs of impending abandonment, looking for clues in how he ate his scrambled eggs and the way he folded his newspaper. How had Larry spent his morning? Like every other morning. He showered. Jogged. Dressed. Read the Times. Watched MSNBC. Walked Amelia to her friend Lizzie's. If he hadn't called his every relative to apologize for his "crazy behavior" last night with a "Hee-hee, it was the stress, the sugar withdrawal... Glad you enjoyed the Chinese food. See you soon. You take care too" I might have wondered if I'd dreamed the entire thing. For me there was, "Sorry about last night, Luce" and a quick dry peck on the cheek. Then he went to work himself.

His mother had called just as I was leaving for the office; had she left her reading gla.s.ses at our apartment? She hadn't even mentioned the turkey. My aunt Dinah e-mailed to ask if she should submit the photo of Larry, veins popping in his neck, hands gripping the turkey platter, for her course's final exam.

Larry had flipped out, Larry had apologized, Larryand everyone else, apparentlyhad moved on.

So perhaps there were no signs. Perhaps it was possible for someone to act completely "normal" while planning to walk out the door on people, on a life. I'd once asked my mother if she thought about usme and Miranda and our dadwhile she was walking around a strange town or reading Stephanie Plum novels, and she said, "Not really." It took me a while to learn that not thinking was the entire point.

But you couldn't plan to leave your wife, your marriage, your daughter, your life of twelve years and not think about it, could you? Then why had Larry acted so...normal this morning? Where were the surrept.i.tious glances? Where were the sorrowful looks? Where were the signs?

I wondered what kind of prep you did for a resolution like Larry's. New Year's resolutions always required prep. For diets, you cleaned out your kitchen cabinets of anything fun to eat while watching television, like cookies and chips and c.o.ke and full-fat ice cream or my personal favorite, Doritos. For an exercise program, you joined a gym or bought free weights and a giant rubber band and cute clothes made out of Lycra. You subscribed to magazines like Self and Fitness and taped up diets and workout programs on your refrigerator.

If you were going to leave your wife, how did you prepare? You'd need a new place to live, I supposed. Unless you were moving in with someone. A girlfriend, for example.

Tears stung the backs of my eyes and I gasped from the sudden pressure in my chest. Stop thinking about it. Stop, stop, stop.

I'd been at work for three hours and all I'd accomplished was staring out the window and tapping my pencil and calling potential a.s.sistant editor candidates whose resumes pa.s.sed muster. If I was going to get through the next six weeks, I needed an a.s.sistant editorand right away. Each Bold Books senior editor had only one support person. And forget about asking Miranda to pick up some slack. Wanda Belle would go screaming to Futterman, our editor in chief. And someone would make noise about nepotism. Anyway, Miranda was more of a slacker than a slack-picker-upper.

Roxy Marone was due here in fifteen minutes. If she had a single brain cell, she was hired. I'd interviewed six people for the position already, and not one was right for the job. There was the young woman who told me she thought the entire concept of disaster books was despicable for capitalizing on the suffering of others. She wasn't wrong, but if you wanted to work at Bold Books, the leading publisher of disaster books, that philosophy wasn't a great one to have. Then there was the young man who wanted to be Stephen King's editor. When I let him know that Stephen King wasn't one of our authors and that I wasn't the editor of horror novels, he thanked me for my time and actually got up and left.

None of the resumes I'd received this past week stood out, and of the four people I called today to arrange an interview (as if Bold should have a Human Resources department), only one had actually answered the phone. Why had I scheduled an interview I wasn't remotely up for? I was going to ask an eager beaver coherent questions and then listen to her answers? I was going to make a judgment on anything today?

I pushed aside the Cobb ma.n.u.script and threw down my pencil. Was I nuts for not confronting Larry the second he came out of the shower last night? But what was I going to say? I rummaged through your pockets and found your New Year's resolutions, and not that you've ever kept one in your life, but you're not really gonna leave me on January 1, are you? Actually, yeah, I could have said that. But every time I opened my mouth to say something this morning, it closed.

If I told Larry I found his resolution and asked point-blank if he intended to leave me, he'd say, No, honey, of course not, I was just angry last night and thinking out loudon paper. And then on January 1, he and a suitcase would be walking out the door. I knew my husband.

What I had to do was change his mind without ever bringing it up. Make his home life very pleasant. I could do that, couldn't I? Larry was clearly going through a midlife crisis. What was the big deal if I tried to make his life a little more bearable while he sorted things out for himself? If paper plates and plastic cups were such a big faux pas (as they apparently were to Larry all of a sudden), I'd haul down the good china from the hutch. If a fisherman sweater was such a big deal, I'd wear something else. Clogs offended him? Reminded him of nurses, perhaps? I'd wear loafers. Too many grays? Some Miss Clairol would take care of that. I'd gained a few pounds? Maybe I'd cut out some sweets too. We could do South Beach together.

And maybe I'd start pushing dinner off tables, too, ruining major holidays for the entire family and scaring my daughter.

Screw him. How dare the b.a.s.t.a.r.d! You want to leave me? Go right ahead, you immature nuisance! You potbellied p.r.i.c.k!

He pushed a turkey off a table on Thanksgiving because he was offended by a paper plate? Who the h.e.l.l did he think he was? And when had he become Martha Stewart?

I will be fine. I will vacillate between getting a complete makeover and wearing clogs every day for the next six weeks to dare him into leaving me. I slumped over my desk, dropping my head onto my hands. Take deep breaths, Lucy. Deep breaths. You have a daughter to protect. You have a job. A promotion to win. Focus. Focus. Focus.

I sat up, picked up my pencil and tapped it against page two hundred four of the Cobb bio. Then I gnawed my lower lip and swiveled around to look out the window. The credenza against the window was piled with the proposals I'd found buried in the a.s.sistant editor's drawer. Hmm. I was the senior editor of female-oriented nonfiction. In my piles of proposals there had to be at least a few self-helps for saving your marriage from the twelve-year itch. I pawed through my stacks. Ah. Here was one. Make Your Husband h.o.r.n.y! Where was my REJECT stamp when I needed it? I was supposed to make Larry stay with me because I finally learned how to give a decent b.l.o.w. .j.o.b? Because I paraded around in s.l.u.tty see-through teddies? I had self-respect!

I flipped through Make Your Husband h.o.r.n.y! Here were some of the nons.e.xual suggestions: Ask him about his day and really listen! When he comes home from work, don't complain that he didn't ask you about your dayask him about his! That's how you make your husband h.o.r.n.y!

Really? The last time I asked Larry about his day he told me he preferred not to spend his non-episiotomy hours talking about st.i.tching up a woman's v.a.g.i.n.a.

Put on those high heels. Buy a pair of fishnets. Put on some perfume. And not your expensive stuff. Buy some cheap musk from a drugstore. He'll go wild!

Larry had allergies. He'd go wild from sneezing and hives.

I put a needs-a-read sticky on Make Your Husband h.o.r.n.y! and set it aside. There were at least four other proposals for making your husband fall in love with you all over again. I grabbed them all, put my feet up on my desk and flipped through. Work and receive counseling at the same time! How was that for the efficiency Futterman was always after us to achieve.

Before I could read one sentence, my phone rang. It was the security guard downstairs alerting me that Roxy Marone was here to see me. I told him to send her up, then headed out to unlock the door to the office for her.

The elevator pinged open, and a strikingly pretty but heavily made-up young blonde in a wedding veil, jeans and a puffy hot-pink down jacket walked out, looking to the left and then the right.

"Roxy?" I said, praying she was simply lost.

She turned around so fast that the veil wrapped around her head. She fought it for a second, her face turning redder and redder. Was she suffocating or just embarra.s.sed?

"Are you getting married today?" I joked, pointing at the veil.

Forget her having a brain cell. Now I had to waste fifteen minutes "interviewing" her so she couldn't later claim discrimination againstwhat? Brides? Who showed up to an interview in a bridal veil and/or p.o.r.n-star makeup?

Her face turned red and then white. She grabbed the veil off her head, mutilating her chignon in the process. "I'm so embarra.s.sed. I was so focused on preparing for the interview that I forgot it was even on."

I offered a smile. "Well, then, you must be marrying the right guy. Otherwise it would have itched or something."

She burst into tears. I had to remember to ask her what kind of mascara she used. Not a single black skid mark. Okay. Focus here, Luce. Your interviewee is not only wearing a wedding veil, she is crying. Hard. Offer the poor girl a tissue!

I led her to my office, handed her my box of Kleenex and gestured for her to sit. "Are you all right?" I asked rather unnecessarily.

She dropped down on the chair and dabbed under her eyes with the tissue. "I can't believe this. For years I've dreamed of getting an interview at a publishing house like Bold Books. And here I am, and I've blown it in the first five seconds." She shook her head and buried her face in the veil crumpled on her lap. "Maybe I should just go home and marry Robbie Roberts and try to be happy. If I leave now, I can probably make it on time."

My mouth dropped open. "You came here instead of going to your wedding?"

She nodded and dabbed under her eyes again. "I guess that doesn't exactly demonstrate my sense of commitment and responsibility and stick-to-it-ivness."

"Unless he's the wrong guy for you," I said. "Then it demonstrates those things just fine."

"How?" she asked.

"If you leave the wrong guy at the altar, you're being responsible to yourself. That's pretty important."

Her eyes widened and she sat up straighter. "Thank you. I can't tell you how much that means to me."

She should have stopped there, but because she was young and nervous and highly emotional at the moment, she talked and talked and talked and talked, mostly in circles, about how she'd known for a long time she shouldn't marry Robbie but she just went along, letting her mother and future mother-in-law plan the wedding. I wondered if this was how Larry felt. You're ambivalent about something, such as getting married or leaving your wife of twelve years, so you act weird for a while, like saying yes to a swan ice sculpture and polka-dot mashed potatoes or shoving a turkey off a table, and then you slowly spontaneously combust until the day you just walk away. Roxy had walked away because she had a gun to her head. Larry chose New Year's Day because he liked making resolutions. He never kept one, but he liked making them and was very serious about them. A few years ago he'd resolved to run the New York City marathon and joined the Road Runners Club and bought one-hundred-fifty-dollar Adidas sneakers and ten pairs of running shorts made out of wicking material. He'd resolved to learn Spanish, become a vegetarian, handle his anger at the barking Boston terrier next door. He'd lasted a week at most with all of them.

Ah. So even if he did leave me, he'd come back in a week. And then I'd slam the door in his face! How dare he!

I had no idea what I would do.

"I'm so sorry," Roxy said, blowing her nose. "This is so embarra.s.sing. You must be so busy, and here I am sob"

"How do you know?" I asked her, leaning over my desk. "I mean, without going into personal details, of coursehow do you know for sure you don't want to marry this man?"

How does Larry know for sure he wants to leave me?

"If I married Robbie Roberts," she said without hesitation, "I would slowly suffocate. I'd be sitting at my desk at work, writing my Neighbors in the News section, or I'd be home, making ravioli, his mother hovering by the stove to make sure I didn't overboil the pasta, and I'd just slowly stop breathing."

Larry had resolved to leave his marriage because of an orange paper plate. Grounds for divorce: she used paper products for a holiday dinner! A national holiday! Roxy, on the other hand, had had to choose between marriage and living.

"So let's go over your resume," I said, and her entire face lit up. I scanned her work history again; her only experience was a neighborhood weekly newspaper, the kind that you get free in your supermarket or bins on the street. But her clips were great, very well written, engaging and concise. "I really enjoyed reading your clips," I told her. "You have an intelligent and entertaining writing style."

She beamed. "Thanks!"

"Tell me about the last story you worked on," I said.

"Well, I recently edited a story my mother wrote for the paper. It's about how she's trying to get us into the Guinness Book of World Records for the fact that in the history of our family, there's never been a single divorce. She wrote about how my aunts and cousins and grandparents and great-grandparents have been through it allwar, illnessmental and otherwisejail, this, that, bad breath."

"Interesting!" I said. "Hey, at least you're not going to ruin her chances to get into the Guinness book."

She brightened. "I didn't think of that." She smiled again and visibly relaxed.

I liked this girlin many ways, she reminded me of my younger self, so focused on her dream of being an editor. She didn't have experience working on books, but reporting and editing for a weekly paper required hard work and time-management skills and dealing with many different kinds of personalities. Plus, her specialty and what Bold Books produced weren't all that far removed. She dealt with neighbors who had news. I dealt with celebrities (well, not with them) who were news and daytime TV talk-show issues. She had to understand timeliness, what was interesting to people.

"Who is your favorite author?" I asked her. If she said Joan Didion or James Joyce, she was out.

"My very favorite is Nora Roberts" was her response.

She was hired. I had to check her references and go through the motions of showing Futterman her resume. He had no time or interest in new hires who weren't senior level or above. He'd pretend to glance at her resume and clips, then say, "If you like her, hire her." It was the one plus of not having an HR department.

So welcome to Bold Books, Roxy Marone.

"Okay, well, thank you so much for coming in, Roxy," I said. "You'll be hearing shortly."

Her face fell again, and then she sat up straight. "Okay." She stood and extended her hand. "Thank you very much for meeting with me on such short notice. It would be a dream come true for me to work at Bold Books. Thank you for your consideration."

Was I ever that earnest? That hopeful?

I smiled. "Roxy, I don't think there's any harm in letting you know that you're a very strong contender for this position. A front-runner, actually."