Рон Рэш - The Best American Short Stories 2018

When Kirsten arrives at work twenty-five minutes late, Frank appears on the threshold of her office and gleefully whispers, “There. Is. A. Shit. Storm. Brewing.”

Calmly, Kirsten says, “Oh?” This is the way Frank greets her approximately twice a week. But it turns out that a shit storm is brewing: someone on Kirsten’s team stored sample data, data belonging to a national courier company, in the area of the server where production can access it, even though the agreement with the courier company hasn’t yet been formalized. Their boss, Sheila, is trying to figure out who messed up, whether anyone from production has used the data, and, if so, how to remove it.

As Kirsten steels herself to speak with Sheila, Frank, who is still standing there, says, “Has your copy of your girlfriend’s book arrived?”

“I didn’t pre-order it. I’m stopping at the store on the way home.”

“Well, as soon as you finish give it to me. Because I am not putting one penny in the coffers of that whore.”

“Yeah, so you’ve said.” Kirsten squeezes past him.

She definitely isn’t the one who failed to sequester the sample data, but it’s unclear if Sheila believes her. They have a forty-minute conversation that contains about two minutes’ worth of relevant information and instruction and thirty-eight minutes of Sheila venting about how at best they’ve embarrassed themselves and at worst they’re facing a copyright lawsuit. When Kirsten has a chance to check Lucy’s various websites, she finds that they’re all filled with book promotions. On Twitter and elsewhere is a selfie of Lucy and the host of The Mariana Show in the greenroom; their heads are pressed together, and they’re beaming.

After two meetings and a conference call, Kirsten gets lunch from a sandwich place around the corner, and it’s while she’s waiting in line for turkey and Swiss cheese on multigrain bread that she receives Frank’s text: a screenshot from the website of a weekly celebrity magazine, with a headline that reads, “Prairie Wife Comes Out as Bisexual.” The first one and a half sentences of the article, which is all that’s visible, read, “Sources confirm that cookbook writer and television personality Lucy Headrick, known to fans as the Prairie Wife, revealed during today’s taping of The Mariana Show that she has dated multiple women. The married mother of three, who—”

Another text arrives from Frank. It reads, “OMFG!”

Back in the office, Frank says, “Do you think she mentioned you?”

“No,” Kirsten says, though, since receiving Frank’s text, she has felt very weird, almost nauseated.

“What if she’s carried a torch for you all this time and she looks directly at the camera and says, ‘Kirsten, please make haste to my quaint rural farmstead, pull off my muslin knickers, and lick my evangelical pussy’?”

“Jesus, Frank,” Kirsten says. “Not like there’s anything private about what I told you.”

Her phone rings, and she can see on the caller ID that it’s Casey. To Frank, she says, “I need to answer this.”

“Ian has strings practice after school, and he forgot his violin,” Casey says. “I know this is annoying, but could you get it? I have a meeting with the superintendent.”

“I don’t think I can,” Kirsten says. “Sheila’s in a really bad mood today. Anyway, maybe Ian should deal with the consequences. You want him to develop grit, right?”

“You think he should just sit there while everyone else practices?”

“I can imagine more traumatizing childhood experiences.” Kirsten is nevertheless about to relent when Casey says, “God damn it, Kirsten.”

“I thought we didn’t swear anymore,” Kirsten says. There’s a silence, and she asks, “Did you just hang up on me?”

“No,” Casey says. “But I need to prepare for my meeting. I’ll see you at home.”

Which, if either of them, is delivering the violin? This is how Casey wins, Kirsten thinks—by not insisting on resolution, which compels Kirsten toward it. On a regular basis, Kirsten wonders if Casey is using middle-school pedagogical techniques on her.

She stews for the next ninety minutes, until she has to go home and get the violin or it will be too late, then she stands and grabs her purse. Like an apparition, Frank is back in her office.

He says, “If we leave now, we can go to Flanagan’s and watch Lucy on Mariana. And I do mean on. ”

“I’m sure it’ll be online later today.”

“Don’t you want to know if she mentions you?”

Kirsten hesitates, then says, “Fuck it. I’ll come with you.”

“For realsies? What were you about to do instead?”

Kirsten sighs. “Good question.”

It is seven minutes to three when Kirsten and Frank enter Flanagan’s Ale House. Four other patrons are there, two old men sitting side by side at the bar and two younger men sitting by themselves at tables.

Frank gestures toward the TV above the bar and says to the bartender, “Can you change the channel to The Mariana Show ?”

“We’ll buy drinks,” Kirsten adds. But then the thought of returning to the office with beer on her breath makes her wonder if Sheila will fire her, and she orders seltzer water and French fries; Frank asks for a gin and tonic, and when their drinks are in front of them he clinks his glass against hers and says, “To lesbians.”

Kirsten has only ever seen clips of The Mariana Show, and it turns out that there’s a lot to get through before Lucy appears—Mariana’s monologue, then a trivia contest among audience members, then a filmed segment in which Mariana takes a belly-dancing class. Plus endless commercials. As the minutes tick by, the afternoon is drained of the caperlike mood it had when she and Frank left the office. They speak intermittently. She says, “I don’t think she could mention me, even if she wanted to. Like, from a legal perspective, since I’m a private citizen. And I’m sure she was involved with other girls.”

Finally, after more commercials, Mariana introduces Lucy, and Lucy walks out to energetic cheering and applause. She sits on a purple armchair next to Mariana’s purple armchair, and the cover of Dishin’ with the Prairie Wife is projected onto an enormous screen behind them.

Lucy looks great—she’s wearing a short-sleeved, belted blue dress with a pattern of roses—and she’s also palpably nervous in a way that Kirsten finds surprisingly sympathetic. Lucy is smiling a lot, but she keeps widening her eyes in an oddly alert way, and she appears to be shaking.

Lucy and Mariana discuss a recipe in the memoir for raccoon stew; Lucy says that she personally isn’t crazy about it but that it was given to her by her mother-in-law.

“You weren’t raised on a farm,” Mariana says.

“I wasn’t,” Lucy says. “I grew up in the suburbs of Phoenix. My dad was an engineer, and my mom was a teacher.” Her matter-of-factness also elicits Kirsten’s sympathy. Even if her fame is country-fried, even if she speaks in a nebulous drawl, Kirsten cannot remember ever seeing Lucy outright lie. “A few years after college, I enrolled in social-work school at the University of Missouri,” Lucy continues. “It was while I was doing field work way out in the country that I met my husband. And that was it for both of us. I never expected to fall in love with a farmer, and he never expected to fall in love with a food blogger.”

As the image on the screen behind them changes from the book to a photograph of Lucy and a handsome man wearing a checked shirt and a cowboy hat, Mariana says, “Something in your book—and it’s a fantastic read—but something that surprised me is before you got married to the Stud in Overalls, as we fondly refer to him, you describe how you dated women.”