Page 8 of Without a Clue

She’s now got her arm wrapped around me as we walk several paces behind the others.

“I’m never dating again,” I mutter as I grunt along, dragging our suitcases.

“We’ll never date again, together!” Neena agrees in a tone that suggests, Whatever you say here, I’m going to echo, darling. Because that’s what you need right now. A good corroborating spirit over facts. The captain of the ship glides past our periphery, and she follows his gait. “Except for men in hats,” she says. “I’ve always had a weakness for a man in a good hat.”

“You know, this could be an interesting start to kick up your novel,” Hugh says cheerily. The fact that all my dirty laundry has been and continues to be so obviously aired in group conversation speaks volumes to my mental state right now. And to our group closeness.

Regardless.

“I don’t have a novel,” I say automatically. “There is no novel.”

“Sometimes when you don’t have the inspiration, you just have to make it,” Hugh says in his I’m guiding voice. “Sometimes the best way to get your foot in the door if all the doors are locked is to simply build a new door.”

My brows cinch together. These “words of wisdom” are frequent, by the way.

He’s always trying to push me into writing and I’m always trying to push him out.

His brilliance just assumes everybody else’s mind can work the same as his.

“What?” I say. “What do you mean by just build a door—”

“Butt out, Hugh. This is my pep talk, not yours,” Neena says, shooing him off with her hand.

“You had to let it out sometime,” she says, squeezing my shoulders despite the fact that I’m now (a) being pushed along on a gangplank, (b) dragging two heavy suitcases, (c) with gusts of wind trying to blow me over the railing and into the water below.

“Nobody can live very long with that kind of passion inside without it eventually blowing up and out. It’s human nature. None of us are immune, no matter how much we sometimes wish it were so.” She gives me a kiss on the top side of my head (blinding me in one eye with her hat while doing so) like the doting-but-eccentric grandmotherly figure she is.

“You know what, love?” she says in an entirely new tone. “This really might be the perfect time to let me see that novel of yours—”

“That’s what I said,” Hugh interjects.

“Get your mind off things,” she continues, ignoring him.

“It’s not a novel,” I say.

“I heard you’ve got three chapters in!”

“I’ve been writing those same three chapters for three years.”

“I heard you entered it into a writing contest and earned fourth place,” she continues triumphantly.

“There were three contestants total,” I reply. And after a pause, “Somebody’s name was duplicated.”

Neena purses her lips.

Yes, Neena. Try to find something positive to say about that one. The sad little “novel” I’ve been writing on and off (mostly off) for the past three years is nothing. Really.

Those evangelical pamphlets people leave beneath windshield wipers are longer than my “novel.”

My new vacuum cleaner has a manual longer than my “novel.”

It was stupid of me to even try to write a while ago. But it was like cigarettes, really. When everyone around you just so happens to be a literary giant and eat writing, drink writing, breathe writing, you can’t help but pick up the proverbial cigarette eventually and say, “Hmm. What if I tried just one?”

The answer, in my case, was you cough and spasm and turn out to be totally, absolutely wrong.

“Hugh says one day you’re going to take the mystery genre by storm. And he knows,” she says, tapping her nose. “He has a sense for these things.”

“That I do,” Hugh chimes in.