Page 71 of Vera Stein Is Fine
“You coming back next time?” he asked.
“I think this might have been a onetime thing for me.”
“You said you had a script, right?”
“Yeah. I lost the file and it probably wasn’t working anyway.” I almost threw my survey away, but I hesitated as I hovered over the trash can before folding the paper and putting it in my back pocket.
“You know, your work is more than a file. Years ago, when we were on typewriters, you were fucked if you lost a page or even a whole stack. But you might find that losing it and starting over again is a blessing. A clean slate. Or hell, you could just write something new.”
“Maybe one day.”
“You’d think working at a place like this would teach you not to put so much faith in ‘one day.’” He huffed, his frustration growing.
“All right, all right,” I said, trying to lighten the mood. “You’ve inspired me, okay? Are you happy?”
His bushy brows rose with delight as he stood up with the help of his cane.
“So are we throwing a funeral?” I asked.
“That depends. Are you gonna write me something I can read?”
I shook my head. “I didn’t say this was a negotiation.”
“Do you really think I should do this living funeral thing?” he asked.
“I do.”
“Well, I think you can’t be a writer if you don’t write.”
Ouch.“I never said I was a writer.”
“No, but you wanted to be once. Didn’t you?”
That sunk in for a moment. The thought of Ruby the other night was fresh on my mind. All the things she wished she would have said or done. My own grandmother, who I was certain would never in her lifetime own up to regretting anything. “I’ll book the community room for you,” I finally said. “You choose the date and time. And I’ll... I’ll see about the writing.”
“Chop, chop,” he said as he put his papers back into his Louis Vuitton folio.
* * *
At lunch, I thought about searching for Eli. Surely we should talk about what happened.
But maybe we didn’t have to. Maybe he was right and it didn’t have to be awkward. I wasn’t foolish enough to think that it could have been the beginning of something bigger, but the thought was nice. Going to him now, though... that would just be desperate. I didn’t want to scare him away or make this into something it wasn’t.
I opened a blank document on my work computer. I didn’t even havethe proper software to write a screenplay. But I guess if Leonard could rough it on a typewriter all those years, I could live without my snazzy formatting software.
The cursor flashed on beat with my pulse.
Everyone had to start with a blank page, right? I’d gotten that far. That was something.
Forty-five minutes later, the only thing I had to show for it was the design I’d traced in my hummus with a pita chip, my own personal Zen garden.
I had just a few minutes before I had to go set up for the knickknack swap meet I had scheduled for this afternoon, so I began to type.
Dear Leonard,
You asked me to write something.
So, SOMETHING.
