The Perfect Day

Jackie

Yay, the perfect day for writing. Three friends agreed they would extend their usual two-hour write-together date into a daylong feast. “Labor Day—for our labors of love,” Jackie said, and she reserved the big meeting room at her office for the three of them. They would each bring their work-in-progress.

Jackie’s husband was away on a weekend retreat; her time was truly her own. She set out on her bike an hour early, planning to get a head start. But her front tire had a slow leak so she had to stop twice to pump it.

The second time she stopped, she saw a button had popped off her shirt. She wondered how long she’d been showing off her lacy bra. Oh well, safe cycling was all about being seen— so what if she’d given fellow travelers an eyeful.

She was in an unsinkable mood. She was in the honeymoon phase of drafting a deep psychological thriller. A murderous choreographer was gaslighting impressionable dancers. Jackie was well rested, and had already spent Saturday and Sunday with her ageing parents, mind-mapping the novel when not building jigsaws and reprogramming their PVR.

The office had everything the threesome needed. Coffee, paper, printers, Wi-Fi, comfy chairs and the big meeting room where they were accustomed to doing evening bursts of writing once a month. They could tune each other out, yet share encouragement during breaks.

As she cycled along, Jackie was so wrapped up in devising the next scene of a dancer’s demise that she almost missed the ghost bike.

But there it was, a totally white bike, with flowers, soggy teddy bears, and messages mourning the loved one tied to a lamppost.

The latest fatality. Jackie slowed down, recognizing the face in the blurred photo. A young woman, vocal at the cycling community meetings. Crushed by a right turning cement truck. A lump rose in Jackie’s throat. Damn, what a loss. When would they hold a commemoration? Should she help organize it?

No: The Perfect Day. Get with it, she told herself.

Jackie arrived at her block, dismounted, and walked her Brompton A-Line to the bike stands.

A man was shouting about the end of the world. His hair was wild and matted. His Lakers T-shirt was grimy and spotted; his Adidas sweatpants had bagged-out knees. She sighed. Second time this year. Marcus, the “prophet,” was a former lecturer in architectural history who could list the Art Nouveau edifices all around town. Should she call his social worker, let him know that Marcus was off his meds again? As she locked her bike and detached the panniers, he drifted down the street so she didn’t have to make the call, thank heavens.

Right. Back to The Perfect Day.

When she reached the front door, she saw the tell-tale reddish yellowish patch of vomit. Ugh. Right in front. Not atypical, considering the nightclubs in the area, including Jackie’s favorite, the Karaoke Klub.

Normally she would step over the mess, leave it to the building caretaker. But today was a holiday. She didn’t want Larry and Caitlin to see that bit of urban ugliness as soon as they arrived. It would be a bad omen. Of course, for gritty urban realists, the vomit might become a plot point. But not for Larry (Mr. Romance) or Caitlin (Ms. Historical Fiction).

Jackie unlocked the front door and went to the alcove where the broom, shovel, and bucket were kept. The stiff bristles made cleanup fast, and soon she was taking the stairs up to her office two at a time.

With a clunk, she dropped the panniers on a table in the meeting room and went to make coffee. Thinking juice. It was a drip machine, and when she began to fill the carafe, she noticed a long jagged crack in the glass. Wow, that wouldn’t stay intact through another brew cycle.

The carafe had been fine on Friday.... Hm. Jackie flipped through the likely suspects, wondering who the culprit could be. She worked for a small non-profit and it gutted her to think one of her team members was as anti-social as this. To ruin a carafe—and not say a peep about it! An apparently tender-hearted modern martyr was in fact sly and underhanded, depriving her and her guests of necessary java.

Bam. Exactly the protagonist she needed. Forget her current villain, clichéd right to the ends of his twirling moustache. She would base it on her colleague Peter, who was the likely sneak.

Jackie tingled with excitement. Oh, but wait. She still wanted to make coffee—the universal aroma of morning welcome. She went to the storage closet and dug out the old French press. Yep, sometimes hoarding paid off. No wonder she had trouble downsizing. Her mind veered into the heaps of hodgepodge that cluttered her attic, but she sternly reminded herself: Focus.

She set up the tray with sugar, spoons, and cups. Whoa, that milk smelled sour. She dumped the rest of the carton into the toilet. Her work colleague Magda bought her own milk, so Jackie poured half of that into the milk pitcher, resolving to buy a new carton for Magda first thing tomorrow. She wrote IOU J à M on the coffee room whiteboard.

But what about the broken carafe? Everyone would assume—weeeee! Weeeeee!

The building alarm went off.

Caitlin

Heart pounding, feeling the hint of criminality clinging to her, Caitlin froze inside the front door. A flashing LED said, “Enter security number.” She regretted she had come to the “Labor-of-Love Day,” as Jackie and Larry called it.

Her Perfect Day had started off well. Her mind was full of the research she’d been doing about real-life English highwaymen circa 1660. She was averaging a thousand new words a day, the first draft of a novel about two estranged brothers, one a reputable carriage driver and the other a notorious highwayman.

Sitting on the subway, Caitlin imagined the rocking motion of a stagecoach. Then the train had lurched to a halt, and she strained to comprehend the overly loud announcement that echoed through the tunnel. Something about shuttle buses.

Everyone exited the subway car and trudged toward the same escalator. Rats. She would be late for Jackie’s lovely writing day.

Caitlin shouldered her way onto the very next bus. Buzz, buzz. Her cell phone sprang to life with a pseudo-authoritative demand for extra payment on her taxes. She ignored it.

Urgent! your bank balance, said the next message.

She hit delete twice.

Her finances were in a terrible mess at the moment, but she didn’t want to poke a pin into the rising bubble of inspiration. The dialog was forming in her head: challenge to a duel between the two English brothers. She dismounted the shuttle bus and hot-footed it to Jackie’s office, past the weird guy yelling down the street about the end of the world. But she knew it wasn’t for her; she would be the last to be notified.

She got inside the building and suddenly—the alarm.

“I’ve got it,” Jackie called down the stairs. “Come on up.”

Caitlin made her way to the meeting room. When she sat down and opened her laptop, she couldn’t remember the first line of dialogue between the brothers. The alarm had rattled her terribly, so bad that her hands were shaking.

Once, when she was sixteen, a man had ambushed her in the stairwell of the apartment building where she lived with her single mom. He’d tripped the alarm, and it was blasting while he was trying to choke her.

Maybe that’s why historical fiction appeals to me, Caitlin thought. No jarring electronic noises. Sure, screams and clanging swords. But no ear-splitting alarm.

Too frazzled to compose, she got out her laptop and mouse to research James Hind and other real-life highwaymen. But the Internet was down.

Jackie said, “Oh, I put in a call to IT. They’ll get it going soon.”

Caitlin stared at what she’d written last night. Now a grammar question bedeviled her. Her grammar was weak. She was an ESL child, one who pretended English was her first language. But who was she kidding?

Bump, bump. Slam.

The weekend cleaner appeared in the doorway, her hair sticking from a polka-dot scarf. Caitlin moved away from the table so the cleaner could work efficiently. Her mom was a night cleaner in offices. She thought, I should help Mom write her memoir. She’s had such an interesting life. She’s so much more than a night cleaner.

At last the cleaner moved to another part of the building. Jackie was sitting, working, and Larry had come in, too.

Caitlin could hear faint yelling and murmured, “What are they yelling about?” But neither of them heard, they were so deep into their work.

She went to the window that looked down on the street and saw a protest march. Bullhorns. People marching. People chanting. Then the Labor Day air show began overhead. Fighter jet F-18s were dive-bombing.

The noise was terrible, like a missile would land any minute. Oh no, to think that her mother lived in a war zone for years!

The Highwaymen fell by the wayside, as Caitlin began to outline her mother’s bio.

She saw Larry, sitting in the meeting room, writing away. She envied him. Such an assured writer. Well, he had no war trauma in his family. Must be nice writing romances.

Larry

What would cause an impetuous arsonist to look twice at a level-headed firefighter? The night before the Perfect Day, Larry had fallen asleep with a puzzle on his mind.

Dorothy’s snoring woke him up in the night and he fretted some more. Except now he reframed it: what would cause a lovely young impetuous arsonist to look twice at a tall, handsome level-headed firefighter? The first rays of sun glinted through the window and Larry knew he would have some fun with this premise for his romance.

On the Perfect Day, his steps quickened as he went to his car, thinking of the arsonist and the firefighter, and truly motivated to join his writing group. He set out a half-hour earlier than usual, munching toasted bagel, but arrived late by car. Traffic was stop-and-go due to an accident, and the nearest parking lot was full, so he had to circle two extra blocks. It seemed cyclists kept passing him as he waited. Hm, a possible meet-cute: car driver and cyclist. Arguing over what, greenhouse gases?

With the carbon footprint stomping through his mind, Larry huffed and puffed up two flights of stairs, where Jackie met him and pointed him to the meeting room, where Caitlin was already ensconced.

He slid the laptop from his man-bag. Oh no, the ON button was not working. Had he forgotten to plug in the power adapter? Had he unwittingly bumped the keyboard?

“My laptop’s on the fritz,” Larry muttered to Jackie. “Guess I’ll have to do this the old-fashioned way.”

Jackie smiled. “Quills and parchment are kept yonder.”

Larry retrieved a pen-jar and legal pad from the cupboard. The pen did not work.

He got a new pen. Sludgy. Another pen. Too thick. After a few scribbles, he found a pen that worked. He squared his shoulders and wrote several pages about some firefighters putting together a charity calendar, posing in cheesecake photos, and how the small community responded.

Then he ran out of clean yellow lined paper. “Jackie, are there any more legal pads?”

Jackie looked up, startled. “More paper? Sorry, Larry, we’ll have to change to GOOS paper.”

“What’s goose paper?” Larry knew the old joke about printed matter fit only to line a bird’s cage.

“It’s the acronym for Good On One Side,” said Jackie. She pulled out a tray that had five inches of paper printed only on one side. “Help yourself.”  

Caitlin wandered over in a trance-like state they knew too well. She nodded at Larry as she picked up several sheets.

Larry snapped GOOS paper onto a clipboard. He wrote “the.” No more words came to his mind. He turned over the paper. He glimpsed phrases like “above-named case” and “pursuant parties thereto” and his mind went immediately to his caseload.

Oh, right. Jackie was also a lawyer. Would they ever be working opposite sides to the same case? Hm, possible meet-cute: two lawyers, opposite sides.

It was snack time. Larry had worked up an appetite and he slipped his hand into his man-bag to get his granola bar. It wasn’t there. He suspected Dorothy had “borrowed” his snack.

Hunger distracted him, and he went to the coffee room to refill his cup. Sure, they planned to order pizza, but it was only mid-morning. He noticed, on a shelf, a box of granola bars with the initials A.B. on it. Surely, he could borrow one granola bar out of the six in the box and A.B. would be none the wiser. Larry devoured it, then strolled nonchalantly from the coffee room back to the meeting room. He passed a familiar face on the wall of photos. His law school classmate, Andy Buchanan. Nearly bald. Egads, what bitter rivalry. Over what? Larry scratched his head. Oh yeah: that guy was a self-centered narcissist intent on enabling drug profiteers such as Martin Shkreli, who amassed fortunes by jacking up the price of standard lifesaving drugs.

In the meeting room, Larry ran his fingers through his hair. Head down, he put his pen to paper. A model of industry to the others, he hoped, even if he could only write “I hate Andy” over an entire GOOS page.

“Hic.” Ten seconds later. “Hic,” Jackie said.

Oh, no, hiccups. Larry belonged to the school of scare-away-the-hiccups but figured it might be hard to do, since she was a hardened writer of psychological thrillers. Or maybe it was a reverse effect, where her heart was in her throat so much that one more scare would put her over the edge.

Larry shifted to Caitlin’s side of the room, where he heard the small bursts of typing. The sentences caused sighs, then huffs, then sniffling that she tried to hide. What was going on in her storyworld? War, he guessed. Historical fiction was all bad news. Shipwreck, slavery, pandemics, burning at the stake…

Irritation rippled through him. Every wave of bad news eroded more of the shoreline of his story world of romance.

Then, guilt crept in. Larry recalled how supportive Jackie and Caitlin had been during his recent cancer scare, and he felt he shouldn’t ignore his writing partners. Maybe he should give up, and the arsonist would never cross paths with the firefighter. But there was an opportunity for a meet-cute between two writers, one writing to entertain, the other to raise social awareness.

Larry sighed. It was time to order pizza.

The End