Evie, the Baby and the Wife by Phyllis Rudin

Author:Phyllis Rudin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Inanna Publications
Published: 2014-08-16T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter 11

SO WHAT DID AARON WANT WITH HER after all this time? According to the voice-mail he’d left her while she was at lunch, she was being summoned to the boss’s office to discuss the Médéry file. There was a file? It was news to her. Normally Aaron wasn’t one to rehash, let alone months later. Why disinter and dismember previous prose? It was an abomination. Besides, even if he had suddenly found syntactical fault with the paper’s sendoff of Jean-Gabriel, Evie hadn’t been involved in the end product, as he was well aware. Despite all her prep work, JGM was too big a fish to toss into Evie’s skillet for a simple garnish of butter and parsley, so at the last minute Aaron flipped the playwright over to one of his maître-sauciers for a more lavish final treatment. A good thing, probably. For once Evie was grateful that all-stars didn’t fall into her hands.

Before heading over to Aaron’s office, she gave her colleague’s write-up a professional once-over. In fairness, it covered all the bases without descending into hagiography. Quebecers liked their defunct heroes a bit raggedy, and the text duly portrayed Jean-Gabriel with his halo chipped.

Her editor was leaning against the doorframe, waiting. He pointed Evie towards the single guest chair with a gracious gesture that his tongue didn’t know how to match. “Park your butt.” Evie balanced herself on the edge of the seat. “Coffee?” He poured some for them both from the insulated carafe beside him. Only once Evie witnessed him drinking from his own cup did she dare to drink from hers. You couldn’t be too careful. The head of the graveyard shift was making an effort; politeness to him didn’t come easy having been raised by wolves. His obsequiousness threw her off balance. If she hadn’t reread the union contract the week before, she would have sworn he was gearing up to give her the boot. Aaron passed her a vending machine danish on a scrap of brown paper towel and leaned comfortably forward as if he routinely invited the peons in for a chummy kaffeeklatsch.

“I solved a little mystery for myself today and I’m feeling pretty good about it.” Evie dismissed out of hand the possibility that he’d finally cracked the classic walking-while-chewing-gum conundrum. The office odds on that one were too long. She waited patiently to let the twerp have his big reveal, if that’s what his little mind was set on.

“Remember a while back when I emailed you Jean-Gabriel Médéry’s name as a dead duck and you double checked with me on it?” Evie nodded her recollection. “I wondered at the time why you were so curious about him. You’d never second-guessed me on anybody before, let alone an old fart. Why that old fart, I asked myself. It’s not like he wasn’t due to check out. I mean the guy was up there. Well now, out of the blue, I have my answer. A little bird told me this morning that you knew him.

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