the street, as if they were robbing her of silver. I bought a pack of gum and, chewing like a cow, strolled to the car to drop a quarter in the meter. Three cars behind me a man in a brown uniform, a so-called brownie, was writing a parking ticket for an expired meter, and I felt like the luckiest gambler in Vegas as I dropped my quarter into the slot and cranked the knob. But instead of registering twenty minutes, the red EXPIRED flag remained in place.
“Dang it!” I shifted Dylan to my other arm, fished for the other quarter and fed the meter a second time. Again, without success.
I glanced up at the parking policeman, who was now circling the car behind mine. “Did you see that? I put two quarters in and neither of them registered.”
He stood beside the other car and stared through me, as if trying to assess whether he could get away with not answering me.
“This meter is broken,” I said. “I just put two quarters in it and nothing happened. Didn’t you see me?”
At last, he let his eyes meet mine from nine feet away. “You can’t park at a broken meter,” he said.
“But how am I supposed to know it’s broken before I lose my quarters in it?” I demanded, my temper flaring.
“I’m just letting you know, the policy is, you can’t park at a broken meter.”
“But I put two quarters in, and I’m waiting for my son’s prescription to be filled in the pharmacy.” I yanked a thumb toward the pharmacy door and hitched Dylan up in my arms as he let out a little whimper. There. That’d win the sympathy vote.
But the brownie wasn’t having any of my pity stew. He stepped toward the store, making a wide arc around me, perhaps to stay out of reach. He went up to the meter beside my car, twisted the knob and nodded.
“See? Broken?”
He flipped his ticket book open.
“It’s broken,” I shouted louder, thinking maybe he hadn’t heard me.
“Says expired.”
“Oh, for God’s sake…” Burning with righteous indignation, I unlocked the door of the car and proceeded to strap the baby into his seat, all the time muttering like a crazy person. “You try to pay for the damn parking, but no! You can’t! You can’t park at all! Unless you want to pay a forty-five dollar ticket!”
Burning with fury, I pumped the gas and my car shot out of its spot with a squeal of wheels. I had the mad desire to smash my car into the brown traffic cop’s, repeatedly, until his car was squashed into a toy car the size of a sardine can. Then I could kick it aside with my boot and swoop up his spot on the street.
But no. I stopped at the red light like a good citizen. I flipped on my blinker and turned right, kicking myself for not getting the brownie’s name and badge number. Like that would have mattered. Like anyone would answer my complaint to the City. I circled and circled and circled in a wider arc until I found a place to park in the surrounding neighborhood. By that time, Dylan had fallen asleep and I was sorely tempted to leave him in the car and let him rest. But it just wasn’t safe. What if he woke up, panicked and tried to get out of the car on his own? Or what if someone stole my car with him in it? I unbuckled his car seat and tried to hoist him into my arms as gently as possible.
It’s not easy to walk three blocks with a shifting thirty-pound weight. I braced myself, imagining that I was in the final paces of the gold medal round of the Olympic Baby-Carrying Competition, set to bring home the gold for mommies across the U.S. My arms and upper back ached, but this one was for the mommies, dammit!
By the time I got home I was exhausted and it wasn’t even ten yet. By some stroke of good fortune Dylan remained asleep, so I shifted him to his crib, stripped my clothes off in the hall and raced into the shower, hoping, for once, to be ready for my meeting with Morgan by the time Kristen arrived.
With my hair in a lather I felt a twinge of remorse over the situation with the traffic cop. It was rare for me to act out that way, but the man was ruining my quality of life and it was all just so…so wrong. That was a tight area for parking, but then so was most of Queens these days. Should I drive out to Nassau County to get my prescriptions filled? Just thinking about it had me tugging knots from my hair, so I stepped back into the hot spray and pushed the topic off till later…another day, another month or year when I wasn’t under deadline, pressed, stressed.
Wrapped in a towel, I checked Dylan. Still asleep, his downy lashes looking impossibly dark on that chubby cheek. A wave of tiredness doused me and I had to resist joining him in sleep, the steady ebb and flow of our breaths the only sound in the house.
Resist! The angry whir of my hair dryer in my ear cut short that dream.
Forty minutes later I began to worry about Kristen, my incredible, reliable babysitter who was now ten minutes late when, ironically, I was all made-up and blown dry and ready to go. Kristen had said she was finished with finals, hadn’t she? Had she forgotten about today? And why wasn’t she answering her cell?
The phone rang and I bolted for it, nearly turning an ankle in my Jimmy Choo boots.
“Hey, Rubes, how’s it going?”
“Fine,” I lied. “Except that Kristen’s late, not here, and if I don’t get out of here in the next ten minutes I’m going to miss my train. But anyway, how’s tricks in Texas?”
“You’ve got your meeting with Morgan.” He remembered aloud, and I was sort of surprised that he remembered at all, since my schedule is secondary to the calendar in Jack’s Blackberry. “I’ll let you go then. It’s just that I had some fast-breaking news and…never mind. It can wait.”
“What?”
“You go, finish getting ready. We’ll talk later.”
I could hear the pent-up tension in his voice. “What’s going on?”
“Well, the good news is that I’ve been offered a promotion,” he said. “Assistant general manager of a station. Turns out I was right about Bob taking a shining toward me. He likes me. He really, really likes me.”
“Assistant GM? That’s great!” It was the position Jack had his eye on, though we’d speculated that the current assistant GM, Byron Smith, would never leave the job. “So where is Byron going?”
“That’s the snag. The job isn’t at the New York station. They want me to relocate.”
My puff of happiness rapidly deflated. “To Dallas.”
“Actually, they want me in Portland.”
“Maine?” Images of fat red lobster tails and inky blue lakes sailed through my mind like an “I Love Maine” commercial.
“Oregon.”
“What?” I laughed, feeling as if someone had pulled a chair out from under me. “That’s way out West, isn’t it? Cowboy country?”
“Uh, more like lumberjack land, from what I’m hearing. Though apparently they have cowboys, too. Rodeos in the summer. Starbucks and Nordstrom and Nike.”
“Well, we wouldn’t have to give up coffee or shoes.”
“And lots of rain.”
“Like Seattle,” I said, thinking aloud. Seattle was the only thing I could picture from the Northwest, and that was thanks to the sitcom Frasier. Perhaps not the most accurate image. “Did you tell them thanks but no thanks?”
“I didn’t give them an answer. It was so out of the blue, I wasn’t expecting a promotion, and I’m certainly not planning to uproot my family and leave New York.”
His words placed me back on steady ground. Leave New York? Ha! Like that was ever going to happen. “Okay, now I can admit I’m relieved. I suspect your distinctive New York charm won’t play well in lumberjack land, though it sounds like your day is going better than mine.” The doorbell rang and I