Margot Early - The Things We Do For Love

When Cameron was gone, Mary Anne sat down in her cubicle and tried to read her piece on the Harvest Tea. She needed to edit it and complete the society page by ten tonight. Her title at the paper was associate editor, and in practice it meant she did a bit of everything. She edited sections on society and the arts, and she covered news and features as they arose.

Barbara Rollins, President of the St. Luke’s Catholic Church Altar Society, provided a light sponge cake…

The Harvest Tea just could not compete with the calamity of Jonathan Hale’s engagement. Though Jonathan always treated Mary Anne respectfully, he didn’t seem to notice her as a woman. Which might be appropriate in someone else’s boyfriend. Which he was.

Maybe Cameron was right. Maybe it was worth trying one last insane thing before it was too late. The love potion wouldn’t work. Mary Anne did remember the interview with Clare Cureux, though Cameron was wrong about the focus. Jonathan Hale’s focus had been rural health-care providers. Mary Anne, herself, had heard him give a firm negative to the questions of Graham Corbett, Logan’s insufferable radio talk-show host, who believed he’d single-handedly put Logan County, West Virginia, on the map. Jonathan had said, “She did not mention the love potions, and I didn’t ask.”

A love potion was a ridiculous idea. But Mary Anne wondered if she could find a pretext for dropping in at the radio station. Are they really engaged? Maybe the rumor was false. She thought for a minute, then rose from her desk, pulling on her gray wool blazer and slinging her leather handbag over a shoulder. Hurrying past the office of the editor in chief, she gave him a wave, glad he was on the phone and couldn’t ask where the hell she thought she was going. No need to fabricate a meeting of the Daughters of the American Revolution.

She hurried down the stairs of the brick building and outside. Fall was in the air, the smell of dried leaves, a brisk wind, no more sweltering summer days that made her hair limp. She stepped to the curb, looked both ways and waited for a pickup truck to pass before running across Main Street in front of an approaching stream of cars. She passed the soda fountain and hurried into the historic brick structure next door, the Embassy Building, which housed WLGN.

Don’t let it be true, she thought again. Maybe Cameron had the wrong information about Jonathan and Angie.

As she reached the radio station’s glass door, a man swung it open to hold it for her.

Mary Anne felt a rush of distaste, which she hoped showed on her face.

The man who had opened it stood six feet tall and wore his gold-streaked brown hair on the long side, so that it curled around his collar, waving back from his forehead. Frequently, people mistook him for the actor John Corbett, but Graham Corbett was not even related. Dr. Graham Corbett. Doctor as in Ph.D., not M.D. Though she knew he did see clients two days a week for counseling, Mary Anne still found Graham Corbett’s use of Doctor before his name to be just one more affectation. No doubt if he ever learned that Cameron referred to him as a deity, he’d build a temple in his own honor.

“Ah,” he said, “the woman with an ass made for radio.”

Mary Anne paused to give him a smile of sweet acidity. “And I thought you were the ass made for radio.”

“My angel,” he said, “how is the life of the has-been beauty editor and hard-biting reporter of local fashion shows?”

“I can’t wait till someone writes the unauthorized biography,” she said, “of you.” It lacked the power of her previous comeback, and she knew better than to respond to Graham Corbett at all. She should have remembered that his show was on this afternoon and that he always arrived a half hour early, punctual as a Rolex. Without waiting for his reaction, she stepped past him and into the station. Through the glass window of the recording studio, she could see Jonathan Hale interviewing a coal miner who had black lung disease and silicosis. Mary Anne had heard Jonathan talking about the feature only the day before. He was the station manager, but Logan was a small place, even if it was the county seat, and Mary Anne couldn’t imagine Jonathan ever completely abandoning reporting.

His eyes flickered at her briefly through the glass as she passed, and she responded with a little nod, then went to the computer terminal where she knew the archives were stored. Not because she needed anything from the archives but because that way she could pretend to have a reason for her appearance.

“To what do we owe this visit?”

Good grief, Graham the Sham had followed her! She said, “Isn’t there some other person whose day you’d rather ruin?”

“Absolutely not. I have some news for the society editor of The Logan Standard and the Miner. East of the Rockies magazine has named me one of the country’s most eligible bachelors, and People has chosen me one of their fifty most beautiful people.”

“They’ll need a two-page spread just for your fat head. Please go away.” Without glancing at him, she sat down at the terminal to see if there was anything online about the history of the Logan County Harvest Tea. There wouldn’t be, but that did not matter.

Graham Corbett crouched beside her to stage-whisper, “They’re engaged.”

Somebody’s half-finished latte sat in a paper cup beside the terminal like an accident waiting to happen. “Oops!” She knocked it off the desk, but he sprang back in time—catching the cup.

She did glance at him then.

He winked, gave her the grin that Cameron called “so appealing” and finally left her, tossing the coffee cup in a trash can on his way.

Mary Anne did not watch him go. Instead, she reflected that if he knew anything about her, he wouldn’t have tried to impress her with his mention as a most eligible bachelor, never mind People—if that was what he’d been doing. She detested celebrity, thought that even journalists only remained dignified if they kept out of its limelight. Nobody became famous and retained his dignity. Graham Corbett, as far as she was concerned, was no exception. He was, however, becoming famous, his voice as familiar to many people as Garrison Keillor’s, and his following stronger than Dr. Laura’s. He’d been interviewed on several major television network talk shows already.

She looked toward the recording booth, seeing Jonathan’s compassionate expression as he interviewed the coal miner. Being a journalist was different. Jonathan wasn’t a celebrity and never would be, even if he someday won a Pulitzer. He was interested in other people, in things outside himself.

She had no idea what Cameron saw in Graham Corbett. But, as for Jonathan…Oh, hell, a love potion couldn’t possibly work. But it might be kind of fun to try. She pushed away from the computer console, met Jonathan’s eyes for one brief electric moment through the glass of the recording booth and as she left the studio reached in her purse for her cell phone to call Cameron.

BACK AT THE WOMEN’S resource center, Cameron resumed dealing with the details of her work. Calling a plumber to fix pipes in the safe house. Phrasing an ad for the newspaper inviting volunteers to train for the helpline. Checking in with the woman who was presently covering the helpline.

Cameron did her turn on the helpline, too. She knew she was reasonably good at counseling women in trouble, getting them to take advantage of the center’s resources. But every time a woman finally made the decision to leave a partner, Cameron felt so much empathy it was as if she, herself, had endured the ordeals. The husband who disassembled the car to prevent his wife from using it to flee. The cop boyfriend who sat with his service revolver, threatening suicide, in front of the single mother and her three-year-old. Then, there were the calls from men. Threats against her, every employee of the women’s resource center, the ex-spouses and ex-girlfriends, the runaway wife, the volunteer.

Graham Corbett, Cameron reflected again, would be the perfect man for her. He was kind on his show, and he gave damned good advice. No way could Cameron imagine him turning into a controlling, possessive type. And he was smart.

Cameron suspected that Graham had the hots for Mary Anne. She’d felt the currents running between them. She even wondered if Mary Anne felt it, too, but was in denial, too fixated on Jonathan. Besides, Mary Anne’s father was an actor and musician, an attractive celebrity whose exploits had been covered in international tabloids, a big deal. Mary Anne detested this, and she was never going to go for a man who lived and worked in the public eye.

The love potion had been a fun idea. But a deep part of Cameron badly wanted Mary Anne to succeed with Jonathan, for the simple reason that she herself wanted the chance to date and get to know Graham Corbett—who clearly preferred her cousin.

She should forget the radio star.

Her cell phone rang and she looked at the screen.

Mary Anne.

Cameron smiled and answered, wondering if she was going to learn that her cousin was willing to try a love potion after all.

“WHAT ARE YOU KEEPING those for?” obstetrician David Cureux asked his ex-wife. He had followed Clare into her basement to discover an entire bookcase stocked with foam meat trays. Those were not the only things stored in the basement. There were old magazines, including every copy of Midwifery Today ever printed, a stash of gift boxes that took up twenty-four cubic feet of space, the infamous box of rubber bands, another of twisty ties. The woman never threw anything away, but for the life of him David had no idea what she planned to do with those meat trays.

“We’ll need these things when it all falls apart,” she said.

It, David knew from long and turbulent experience with this woman, was civilization as they knew it. She’d raised two children, who now spoke with a sort of hushed horror of growing up amidst the ominous predictions of a woman they still believed to be a seer, even though they’d finally learned to tune out her prognostications of global disaster.

“I guess you could put them together with duct tape and build yourself a house,” he reflected of the meat trays. “Or a coliseum.”

“Never mind that. Let’s move these upstairs.”

These were more than twenty boxes too heavy for the sixty-eight-year-old woman to carry up the cellar steps by herself. They contained telephone directories for the years 1968 to 2005. Not just phone directories that had belonged to Clare, but most of the discarded phone directories for the state of West Virginia—or so David suspected.

“I have to get this done,” Clare said, referring to the delivery of the boxes to recycling, which her ex-husband had promised to do with his pickup truck. Clare was reluctant to part with them, but she’d realized that every issue of Birth Journal could no longer be kept upstairs. So those magazines were coming downstairs and the phone books would have to leave. “We need to hurry. Someone’s coming about a love potion.”

A person who knew Clare less well would draw one of the following conclusions: One, she’d made a previous appointment with someone who wanted a love potion. Or two, she’d received a phone message or written message asking her to be home at a particular time to greet a customer interested in a love potion.

David, however, understood that Clare simply “knew” someone was going to come by. Enough people approached her about love potions that it wouldn’t be a huge coincidence for her to receive an unannounced visitor requesting one. If such a person arrived in the next few minutes, David would chalk it up to the popularity of his ex-wife’s brand of snake oil. Their lives had been full of these instances of Clare supposedly “knowing” things were going to happen. Like the time she’d made them pack up from fishing because Bridget had broken her arm. “Bridget’s been hurt. We have to go home,” she’d said.