Page 6 of Christmas at the Ranch
“Where did you get this?” She studied the black bottle tied with a gold ribbon.
“I was going to give it as a Christmas present, but I can get another, and you need it more,” he said smilingly. “Well, you and my wrist. I do need to get the feeling back before we land.”
The man introduced himself as Drew. He was about thirty and had dark hair and the bluest eyes Samantha had ever seen.
Drew asked the flight attendant for a cream and two cups, and she replied sharply that cream was reserved for coffee. Then she noticed Samantha sitting beside him and changed her mind. It was worth giving up a carton of cream so she didn’t have to deal with Samantha’s drink requests for the rest of the flight.
“Do you really get paid to use your imagination?” Drew asked after they both finished two Dixie cups of Kahlúa with 2 percent low-fat milk. It was the best the flight attendant could do; the cream was already gone.
Charlie had been right: those sweet milkshake-like cocktails did go down easily. Samantha already felt better. For a moment she wondered why she worried at all. The plane’s cabin was warmly lit and outside the window, the sky was full of stars.
The man in front of them was eating something out of a paper bag. The scent reminded Samantha of the cinnamon rolls sold at her favorite bakery at Christmas.
“Doesn’t that smell so good?” She inhaled deeply. “That’s what people don’t understand when they spend all their time on social media. You can’t taste baked ham with mashed potatoes by looking at people’s Instagram posts of Christmas dinner,” she continued, bleakly recalling her rival, Melody Minnow. “And you can’t fall in love with the hero of a book written by a pseudo-author who admits her writing influences are Harry Styles’s songs. Harry Styles is a great performer, but no one listens to the words, it’s all about Harry’s hair.
“A reader has to feel the author practically gave her own kidney when she writes. Not dictated an entire chapter into her iPhone while she simultaneously got a pedicure and shopped on Etsy.” She glanced at Drew hastily. “Not that I would give up my kidney easily. I want to save mine in case someone I’m close to ever needs a kidney transplant.”
Drew studied her carefully.
“You’re very interesting,” he said, and sipped his cocktail. “But you didn’t answer my question.”
Samantha couldn’t remember a man asking about her besides Charlie and the checkout person at the pet store where she bought Socks’s dog food. But they rarely discussed their personal lives. The conversation usually focused on whether she should switch Socks to wet food because his kibble was giving him a toothache.
It was probably the warm buzz of the Kahlúa combined with the unexpected smoothness of the flight, but she ended up telling Drew everything: how writing the Sloane Parker books not only rescued her bank account, it allowed her to stop dwelling on Roger and introduced her to a whole new world.
She enjoyed everything about writing for a living: working from her apartment and not having to pay five dollars every morning for a Starbucks double macchiato on the way to the office. Samantha rolled out of bed at seven thirty, took Socks for a quick pee walk, came home, made her beloved Krups double espresso with foam, and was sitting at the keyboard by eight. The Krups coffee maker was her second favorite thing in her apartment behind Socks.
She loved it when she really understood the characters in a book: how Sloane could fall for the handsome Englishman with the Henry Cavill smile even though she suspected he was part of a fake-handbag manufacturing ring. Even Victoria Beckham couldn’t resist a Hermès handbag; Sloane was no different. It was only when Sloane noticed the signature gold lock turned in the wrong direction that she was positive it was a fake. She immediately handed her new love over to the authorities and gave up the Hermès bag as evidence.
And she adored it when she typed “The End” and believed she had created something magical. A story that would now be distributed like Santa Claus delivering presents from his sled, for readers all over the world to enjoy.
Then she told Drew about the less wonderful parts of the job. How the marketing department created her online persona, and she was forced to pretend she regularly dived with sharks in the South Pacific. How Melody Minnow was stealing her readers eventhough Melody’s books were written in 280-character paragraphs as if she learned how to write on Twitter.
And the worst part of all was that writing about Sloane’s adventures made the risks in the world seem so real. After her brush with death in the Bahamas, using her imagination to come up with Sloane’s predicaments made her afraid of everything.
“I can see how that would be difficult,” he said with a grimace when she finished. “Have you told them that you don’t want to pretend anymore? Hire a photographer to take a cozy photo of you with Socks in front of your fireplace instead?”
“Charlie won’t even consider it,” she sighed, shaking her head. “Even Danielle Steel understands how important author photos are. And she started writing when they still used typewriters. These days, Instagram sells more books than any other medium. That’s why Melody is so popular.”
“If it’s any consolation I’ve never heard of Melody Minnow,” he remarked. “I’m not even on Instagram. Lots of people aren’t.”
Samantha didn’t know anyone without an Instagram account. The marketing manager assigned to her book even wanted Socks to have his own account. They showed her mock pictures of Socks sitting beside her in a 1940s-era fighter plane, flying over the coast of France. Samantha put her foot down. It was the same way certain celebrities felt about their children on social media. Samantha couldn’t make Socks do something without his consent.
“How do you not have an Instagram account?” she wondered.
“I’ve been living out of the country for five years,” Drew explained. “Building schools in underdeveloped countries. Many places don’t have internet.”
“I thought social media was everywhere,” Samantha said glumly.“It will be in space as soon as Elon Musk’s first flight goes to Mars.” She sipped her drink. “Working with children sounds so satisfying, you must love what you do.”
“Not always,” Drew reflected. “I once ended up in a village in the Amazon jungle where families had lost their homes because of big industry. The children were so sad and there was no way for me to help them. I didn’t have the resources to rebuild the entire village. And once, in a school in the Andes mountains, a little boy tried to swap his Choose Your Own Adventure books for another child’s packet of Fruit by the Foot.” He grinned at the memory. “From then on, I tried to keep a supply of fruit snacks in the school libraries. But mostly, I do love it. There’s nothing like seeing a little girl’s face when she takes a piece of chalk and figures out a math problem on the blackboard. As if that one piece of chalk were an airplane ticket to a better life.”
A sudden sadness settled over Samantha. When she first started writing, her dream was to personally deliver her books to women’s cancer wards. She hoped the patients would receive the courage to fight their medical battles from reading about Sloane’s adventures. But then she developed a fear of hospitals that was so bad, she couldn’t take Socks for his checkup at the vet without breaking into hives.
Perhaps her mother was right, she should ask Dr. Gruber to help with her phobias. It would be her New Year’s resolution. Then she could do some of the meaningful things on her wish list: take holiday dinners to the homeless in Manhattan, go on a nationwide book tour of retirement homes.
Suddenly the plane began to shake. At first it was one jolt, just enough to make Samantha spill Kahlúa and milk on her blouse. She was mopping it up when the second bump came.
She sat back in her seat and closed her eyes.
