The Game Changer, стр. 2
Mary Jean mercifully finished destroying the article and slid it across the desk, then removed her cheaters and set them on her disaster area of a desk and attempted a smile. “Don’t look so glum. It’s just a rewrite. Didn’t they ever make you do a rewrite at that Chicago paper of yours?”
“Of course they did.” I just wasn’t writing about giblet gravy in the first place.
“It’s still missing something, though.” She picked up her glasses—a different pair this time, that seemed to appear out of nowhere—and lightly chewed the plastic earpiece before pointing at me with them. “Did she give you the recipe?”
I shook my head. “I tried.”
Mary Jean’s eyes narrowed. “That Esther Igo can be stubborn as the day is long. She knows the town is itching for it. She’s toying with us. And you pressed her?”
I nodded. “She wouldn’t budge.” Although, to be fair, I hadn’t pressed all that hard. I liked Esther, and if she wanted to keep her recipe to herself, I didn’t see what the harm was. “But, I mean, why would she reveal it? It’s her new prized recipe. People are lining up for it. If everyone can just make it themselves, won’t they stop going to the Hibiscus?”
Mary Jean gave me a curious look and then laughed.
“First of all, if someone around here gives you their prized recipe, you can guarantee it’s missing an ingredient or two. Or maybe has an extra one added. Or a measurement that’s just a little off. That way yours comes out okay, but not quite as good as theirs. They look generous, but they’re still the better cook.”
“That’s devious,” I said.
“That’s tradition,” she corrected. “Secondly, nobody would stop going to the Hibiscus for any reason. People have been going there since Parkwood was a stop on a dirt trail and the Hibiscus was a table in Esther’s great-great-grandmother’s kitchen. That is also tradition. People want the recipe to the new giblet gravy. That doesn’t mean they want to make it.”
“But wh—” I started, but then thought better of it. The answer was likely to be tradition.
“Go read that through,” Mary Jean said, pointing at the article. “Pay close attention to the giblets. And then, I need you to go back to the Hibiscus and get that recipe. Offer her something in return.” She gathered up what seemed like the most random and unchecked assortment of papers and whisked away from her desk.
I followed, clutching the article in one hand. “Offer her something? What do I have to offer Esther Igo?”
“A deal,” she said over her shoulder. “Offer her a deal. Tell her she can read the article and make whatever changes she likes before it goes to press.”
I gasped and nearly fainted. I could feel the cosmic force of all of my University of Chicago Journalism School professors and all of their professors and the professors before them gasping and nearly fainting with me. “Let her see—I can’t do that. That’s…unethical. It’s censorship. It’s partiality. It’s—”
“It’s not a big deal and we do it all the time.” She slapped the random papers on our part-time receptionist’s desk. “Joyce, I need you to file these,” she said.
Joyce set down her sticky bun in slow motion, licked two fingers clean, pulled out an earbud in even slower motion, swiveled in so-slow-she-was-almost-backward-in-time motion, and said, “Huh?”
“File these, please,” Mary Jean repeated. She turned to me and put a motherly hand on my shoulder. I must have looked as much in the throes of journalistic panic as I felt. Plus, sometimes I was pretty sure Mary Jean saw herself as a surrogate mother, since mine was so many miles away. She was always trying to feed me, make me wear a jacket, tell me I looked like I needed sleep—it was as if she had a direct line to my mom. “We’ve been making that deal since this paper opened. We aren’t reporting cutting edge exposés here, Hollis. We’re running a small-town paper. It’s for the people, and they have expectations. Whether or not we have a job on Monday morning depends on whether or not our customers keep reading. And they’ll keep reading if they can get their eyes on that recipe.”
Joyce was slowly picking through the random papers. She’d gotten a manicure over the weekend—extra long, extra pointy, and extra shiny. It looked nice, but also cumbersome. “Where exactly am I filing these? I think this is your dry cleaning receipt, Mary Jean.”
Mary Jean ignored her and headed back toward her own desk. “You should hurry over to the Hibiscus so you can get back before the parade clogs up the square. Eat something while you’re there. You look hungry.”
“I do?” I looked down at myself. How exactly did I look hungry?
“Afterward, go on over and cover the parade, then take the rest of the day to rest up for the game tonight. You’ll be covering that, too.”
Oh. Right. The game. The high school homecoming football game. The biggest event in town. Everyone would be there.
And I would be there, too. Not to cover the game itself. That honor would go to long-time reporter Ernie Holden, who would sleep through one hundred percent of the game, but would still somehow instinctively know what had happened when he woke up, like he had been telepathically tuned in. Or like he had been using the same article for thirty-five years and just changing the names. Which was much more likely, especially since that article used the phrase