John Kenney - Talk to Me

Ted closed his eyes for a few seconds. More shame. There was no privacy anymore.

“I… yes… I just… lost control.”

“So it would seem.”

They practiced a two-minute drill. In college. On the football team. They practiced being down, late in the game, eighty yards from the end zone. A last gasp, no time-outs left. He always felt like there was a chance.

“I have one request,” Ted said.

“What is it?” Tamara asked.

“I’d like one final broadcast.” He surprised himself with this. Hadn’t seen it coming. Feared she’d say no. But he could almost see her calculating the ratings bump if they announced it beforehand. Ted Grayson. The Final Report Before His Death.

“Scripted,” she said finally.

“Yes,” he said. “But I want sixty seconds at the end.”

Tamara hesitated. Ted saw it on her face.

He said, “Almost twenty years. I just want sixty seconds to say goodbye.”

Tamara sighed. She felt unsettled. She stood and walked to the window.

“Anyone familiar with the short story ‘The Lottery’?” she asked, her back to the room. No response, which annoyed her.

“About a town that once a year has everyone draw a slip of paper. The loser is stoned to death by the town. The girl, Tessie, I think is her name. The one who draws the bad slip of paper, do you know what she says at the end. ‘It’s so unfair.’ And it is. But that’s who we are now. No one is willing to stand up. Should I? Maybe. But I’m afraid to get stoned to death.”

She turned and faced Ted.

“You have your sixty seconds. And I’m sorry, Ted. I hope you believe that. I’m actually sorry for all of us.”

Claire had just finished playing squash when she got the call. A regular game with her friend Julie.

“I assume you’ve seen the wonderful news?” her lawyer asked.

“No,” Claire said. “What?”

“Your husband has just been fired. And there’s a video of him jumping out of a plane. Might be trying to kill himself. Hard to tell. I just sent it to you. The timing couldn’t be better for us. Goes to character. And with Franny’s story, it’s gold. I’d like to suggest we up our ask. I think we can take him for everything.”

Her lawyer’s tone repulsed her.

“I’m going to have to call you another time,” Claire said, hanging up without waiting for a response.

The calls were coming in to scheisse , asking for Franny, asking for interviews. People , Us Weekly , the morning shows, the afternoon shows, and several urgent calls from a producer on Dr. Phil . But Henke wanted more. He needed more. It was no longer enough to run a story. You had to keep it alive. Update it. Find new ways to retell it.

Claire urged Franny to come to Bedford and stay for a while, until it blew over. But Franny said no, that she wouldn’t be bullied.

A few colleagues from scheisse had texted her.

So sorry .

Shit storm.

But a few others had been less kind, tweeting;

Sort of feel bad for her. But she’s also kind of a bitch sometimes.

It surprised her how much these hurt, how much it felt like grade school again. They were saying her name on TV. On cable news. On late-night talk shows. They were making fun of her and people in the audience were laughing.

Life is timing. It’s timing and moods and chance. It’s one-too-many cruelties experienced. One-too-many unkind words heard. It’s the unfairness of not being loved. It’s spring coming too late to western Massachusetts and the raw, damp cold making a person long for warmth, for human touch.

Lauren Loeb sat in the office of the director of the Greenfield, Massachusetts Social Services, listening to absurd and frankly cruel charges against her. Sexual harassment of female coworkers, stalking, calling them in the night. She herself would not use these words to describe the events that had transpired. Yes, there had been contact. But it was welcomed by both parties. Phone calls. Sure. She didn’t know they’d been made that late. And why can’t a person wait for a colleague in front of their home even though that person might not want that to happen?

She was being fired. For trying to be nice to others!

She cleaned out her things. Found a box and piled in her books and stuffed animals, her posters with sayings on them about being positive, her Northfield Mount Hermon diploma. She was under pressure. She was planning the reunion. She felt foolish. People were watching her. How could she have misjudged these people. Was it so wrong to want to be loved?

Lauren opened a bottle of wine when she got home. She felt shaky and she drank the wine and felt an anger rise. She thought it might feel nice to throw a plate at the wall so she did that. And she was right, it did feel good. So she threw another. And another. And another. Until there was a banging on the door and her landlord asked what in holy hell was going on.

“I was moving some dishes and they fell,” Lauren said, smiling, keeping the door largely closed to the sight of her apartment.

That seemed strange to the landlord, but Lauren had always been a lovely girl, easygoing if a bit weird. Come to think of it, she did look like she might have been crying.

“Okay… well… be careful. And maybe keep the noise down, please.”

She didn’t feel like cleaning up the broken dishes. She didn’t feel like doing anything. She sat on the couch, holding her wine, thinking that it might be time to start again. Leave western Mass. She checked her phone. Scanned the news. Checked her alerts.

Imagine Lauren Loeb’s surprise to see Franny Grayson’s story about her famous father. That awful misogynist. Except. Wait. She read it again, to make sure. Franny Grayson was writing that her father wasn’t there, that he never even bothered to come when his daughter was in the hospital with a sudden illness. No. That’s not true. Lauren was there. That terrible night. In the hospital. And it wasn’t an illness. Unless you call a drug overdose an illness. Lauren poured more wine. She was tempted to throw another plate. Franny Grayson was a liar. And Lauren Loeb was going to tell the world.

Kuh, Feinman, & Steuben, LLP, occupied the top three floors of the Bank of America Tower, just off Bryant Park. The building was LEED Certified Platinum. Solar panels powered all of the building’s heating. Rainwater captured from the roof was used to cool the internal systems. Automatic blinds gauged the sun’s position in the sky throughout the day, rising and lowering to conserve the energy.

In a small conference room on the thirty-second floor, overlooking Sixth Avenue and Forty-Second Street, Ted stood and stared out the window. The windows must have been very thick, perhaps double-paned or treated somehow, because Ted couldn’t hear any noise from the street below. He looked down at his shoes. The carpet was unusually thick, a deep blue with gold trim around the outer edge. He wondered how much it cost.

Polly sat at one end of a long polished table and texted. They waited. Polly occasionally sniffled. It had always annoyed him. The door opened and even with his back to the door, even without turning, he knew it wasn’t an assistant bringing coffee or water. He knew it wasn’t just the lawyers. He knew in a purely animal sense, a deep primal sense, that it was his family. He couldn’t bring himself to turn around. He no longer had the energy.

The lawyers followed. Everyone sat. It began.