The Note

by Hunt, Angela

  Sinking into a vacant chair, Peyton crossed her legs and exhaled slowly in an effort to lower her rising blood pressure. King might be on the phone another ten minutes. He enjoyed talking about sports even more than he enjoyed reading and writing on the topic, and he had cultivated friends throughout the sports world. He could have an agent, a coach, or some athlete’s mother on the phone, but Peyton really didn’t care. She had never been able to understand why perfectly rational men came unglued while watching others run down a field or court with an inflated bit of leather in their hands. She enjoyed competition, she understood the emotional rush involved in a contest of brains and brute strength, but she never could understand why rational adult men could come to murderous blows over a game.

  She’d been a competent sports reporter when she worked for King, but still they’d had their run-ins. He was always pushing her for more—more details, more background, more of this and that—and she resisted all the way. She’d done a personality piece on Tiger Woods in ’98, driving two hours to interview Woods at the Pine Barrens golf course in Brooksville. After spending another two hours with the young golf pro, she’d come back and typed up a profile covering every who, what, when, where, how, and why any reader would want to know. She’d done a good job and she knew it, but she found herself stuttering in exasperation when King sent the story back for reworking. “It’s a collection of facts,” he’d said. “Nothing you couldn’t have pulled from the Web. Tell me something I don’t know about the boy.”

  They’d argued for three hours. Peyton insisted that a writer couldn’t delve deep into a media-savvy subject in one afternoon, while King maintained that if she’d gone in with all the facts, she could have pulled something new out of the golfer. “The story’s good,” he’d said, “but to lead on my front page it has to be great.”

  In the end, they’d compromised. He ran the story pretty much as she’d written it, but hardly anyone noticed it below the front-page fold.

  King Bernard’s tendency to drive Peyton crazy had been reason enough for her to jump at the chance to take over Emma Duncan’s orphaned column.

  With a brusque farewell to his caller, King dropped the phone into its cradle, then grinned across the desk. “Well, well, Peyton MacGruder. Feeling a little aggressive, are you? You never come to see me unless you’re looking for a fight.”

  She glared at him, irritated at the current that moved through her whenever he spoke her name. The senior sports editor was handsome in a just-rolled-out-of-bed sort of way, with strong features, tons of thick, dark hair, and the trim body of a man who spends regular time in the gym. Enough, she supposed, to make a woman look twice even when she didn’t want to.

  “I’m not looking for a fight; I just had one. Two, if you count the drop-dead glare I gave Cummings and Elliott.”

  “Really.” His dark brows shot up, framing brown eyes that sparked with mischief. “Sorry I missed that. Who’d you tussle with before you ran into the boys? The publisher or the executive editor?”

  She shot him a don’t-toy-with-me glance. “Nora Chilton. She raked me over the coals because my column’s numbers are down. Apparently most subscribers would rather read an IRS audit notice than ‘The Heart Healer.’”

  His mouth quirked with humor, but wisely he cleared his throat rather than release a laugh.

  “Things, um, sometimes go through cycles.” He swiveled in his chair to face her more directly. “Maybe this is a down cycle, and things will pick up.”

  “She gave me three weeks. If my numbers don’t improve, I’m going back to the pool, and she’s going to give my column to Janet Boyles.” A swift shadow of anger swept through her, followed by a possessiveness she didn’t realize she felt. Her column? All this time, even though her name appeared on the byline, she’d felt as if she were ghosting for Emma Duncan.

  King’s chair creaked as he leaned back, a finger pressed to his lips. “You know,” he said after a moment, “maybe Nora’s bluffing. Maybe she thinks you need a swift kick in the pants to inspire you to greater achievement.” He laughed softly. “It happens to the best writers, you know. We develop a decent product, and then we sit back and coast on our reputations.”

  She rubbed her nose, suddenly aware that the office smelled of his cologne. “I’ve only had the column ten months, so I doubt I’m coasting.”

  King leaned forward, then parked his chin in his palm, his dark eyes searching her face. “So what are you going to do to bring the numbers up?”

  How like him to assume she could do something about it! She was writing a good column, she was being as complete and thorough as she could be, yet here he was, demanding that she do something else—

  Her voice coagulated with sarcasm. “What in the Sam Hill do you expect me to do? Wear a sandwich board and recruit readers out on Kennedy Boulevard?”

  “I think you need to write a better column.” His voice was light, but his eyes were serious, with challenge and sympathy mingled in his gaze. “I think you need to pull your material from deeper within instead of giving them step-by-step instructions about things like repotting Easter lilies.”

  Peyton straightened in her chair. “I’ll tell you what I’m going to do. Tomorrow I’m going through my reader mail to find the wildest, most outrageous letter of the bunch. That’s the question I’ll answer next. My regular readers might think I’ve lost it, but if they write in, at least Nora will know someone’s reading.”

  She tilted her head, amazed by a sudden thought. “Wait a minute . . . you read my stuff?”

  His gaze shifted. “I read everybody.”

  “You didn’t when I worked in this department. You said the lifestyles columns were nothing but fluff and sentiment, and you couldn’t be bothered to waste your time.”

  “I changed my mind, okay?” A muscle clenched along his jaw, then he closed the laptop on his desk. “It’s late and I’m hungry.” Pressing his hands to the desk, he pushed himself up, then looked at her. “You got plans for dinner?”

  Abruptly distracted from her train of thought, Peyton glanced at her watch. “I was supposed to play tennis, but it’s too late.”

  Rolling down his sleeves, King shot her a grin. “So—you want food?”

  Caught off guard, Peyton shook her head. “I don’t know. If you want to know the truth, I don’t really feel much like eating.”

  His grin faded. “No problem.”

  Peyton continued to stare up at him. Had he just asked her out? Or was the dinner invitation one of those casual, grab-a-bite-with-a-coworker things? He had never asked her to eat with him when she worked in his department.

  “By the way, that reminds me”—his broad hand reached across the desk and flipped the pages of his calendar—“are you free Sunday afternoon? Tom Kaufman is speaking at a dinner for the Bucs season ticket holders and I’ve got two tickets.”

  Peyton felt a smile twitch at the corners of her mouth. He was asking her out. A Bucs dinner would be a working occasion for him, but not for her, and he knew it. So the only reason he’d invite her along would be because he enjoyed her company.

  “I’m not sure about Sunday.” She gave him an uncertain look. “I’ll have to check my calendar.”

  “Well, if you’re free, you can have the two tickets.” He winked. “Maybe you can invite that new guy who’s covering Polk County courts for the news department. I hear he’s single.”

  Flinching under an odd twinge of disappointment, she looked away. “I’m surprised you’d give away Bucs tickets. I know you’re a fan.”

  “I wouldn’t miss it ordinarily, but it’s Father’s Day. I need to be home for my kid.”

  Peyton cocked her head, not sure she’d heard correctly. King’s nineteen-year-old son, Darren, was a sophomore at USF, and quite independent. She didn’t know Darren, but from her association with King she knew that father and son were not close. King had divorced Darren’s mother when the boy was sixteen, and her death two years ago had done little to bring father and son cl
oser together.

  “I didn’t know”—she kept her tone light—“that Darren was living with you. For some reason I thought he had an apartment near campus.”

  “He does.”

  “So why don’t you take him to the Bucs dinner? Sounds like it’d be a great thing for you to enjoy together.”

  An expression crossed King’s face then, a look Peyton had never seen him wear. Bewilderment and pain flickered across his strong features, mixed with a strong stamp of embarrassment. “Because Darren hasn’t called to say what he wants to do,” he said simply, his gaze shifting to the phone on his desk. “And I want to keep the day open.”

  Peyton lowered her gaze, overcome by a sudden feeling that she’d managed to stumble into forbidden territory. In all the time she’d known King Bernard, she’d never ventured near the wall around his personal life. Something told her this wasn’t a good time to press forward; better to cut a hasty retreat.

  “Thanks for reminding me,” she said, standing. “I ought to get my dad a card.”

  King smiled, but with a distracted look, as though he were thinking about something else. “Your father still living?”

  “Yeah.” She turned toward the door, then paused and looked back over her shoulder. “We don’t have much to do with each other these days. He’s in Jacksonville.” And then, because her words seemed to hang in the air, she added, “I haven’t seen him in ages, but if I send a card, at least he’ll know I’m alive.”

  King nodded. “Call me if you want the Bucs tickets.”

  She tried to give him a confident smile, but the corners of her mouth wobbled uncertainly as she looked up at him. “You keep them. Maybe Darren will surprise you and show up.”

  Comment by Kingston “King” Bernard, 45

  Senior Editor/Sports

  The thing I like best about the newspaper biz is that you never know who’s going to walk through the door. You could’ve knocked me over with a breath a minute ago when Peyton MacGruder came into my office—the princess of practical doesn’t often come slumming in the sports department. I was kind of glad to see her—as long as she didn’t have a gripe with me. I’ve tussled with thirty-pound grouper that are easier to handle than Peyton MacGruder in a huff.

  Don’t get me wrong, I like the lady. She’s got a brain like a steel trap—not that her brain is the first thing a man notices—and the rest of her’s not bad, if you get my drift. But the old adage about red hair being a sign of temper is true in her case, and I’ve felt the sting of her sharp tongue on more than one occasion.

  Since I’m being honest here, I might as well confess. When Emma Duncan kicked the bucket and the higher-ups wanted to keep her column, I told Nora Chilton she could do a lot worse than Peyton MacGruder. It had come to the point where the red-haired wench and I either needed to part as friends or kill each other, and I definitely preferred the former.

  Now it looks like Nora’s having the same kind of problem with Peyton I did—you can learn a lot from your coworkers if you read between the lines. Peyton’s good, and fast as blazes, but she’s all surface.

  I’ll never forget the Friday morning she drove out to Brooksville to interview Tiger Woods. I was thrilled when she came back with four cassette tapes—she’d talked to the guy for two hours! With visions of sports journalism awards dancing in my head, I congratulated her, sent her off to write, and reserved a lead spot on the front page of our Sunday sports edition. That could have been a lead story—and in the hands of almost anyone else, it would have been. Trouble is, it would have taken any of my other writers six hours to pull their notes together.

  An hour later, Peyton sends me the file and I print it out. My temper starts to boil as I read a thousand words of elementary stuff—where Tiger was born, where he went to school, how his dad coached him, how he got his start in golf. My son, who’s no writer, could have written that piece without even going to Brooksville. I could have written it without doing any more research than popping up a few Web pages.

  So I send it back to Peyton and ask for more depth. By now it’s three o’clock, I’ve got no story, and we’re nearly at deadline. The next thing I know, she’s in my office going on about how she’s covered all the bases, and I keep telling her she hasn’t even scratched the surface. She tells me I’m acting like an editor for the Enquirer, that all I want is dirt and scandal, and I tell her she’s way off base. I don’t want scandal, but I do want a story, not facts and trivia. I want to know the person of Tiger Woods, I want to see this whiz kid, but all I’ve got from her is boring biography.

  We probably would have carried on all night, but the deadline stopped us both. Peyton made a halfhearted effort to rewrite, but all she did was rearrange her facts. I ended up running her story, but I placed it below the fold and moved Bill Elliott’s Bucs Report into the lead spot.

  Peyton MacGruder is . . . exhausting. You know, now that I think about it, I wouldn’t be surprised if those Tiger Woods interview tapes contained nothing but dead air. Tiger probably answered a few of her questions, recognized trouble when he saw it, and played on by, leaving her in the clubhouse.

  I was hoping she’d do well with that features column—through “The Heart Healer” she could boss people around to her heart’s content and bring Emma Duncan’s readers into the twenty-first century at the same time. Guess it’s not working out the way I’d hoped.

  You know . . . for a moment, when I mentioned the tickets for the Bucs shindig, she had sort of a deer-in-the-headlights thing going on in her eyes. I almost laughed. She probably thinks I wanted to take her to the dinner myself.

  Not that I’d mind—ordinarily. She’s a great gal, lots of spunk, always has an opinion. She knows I’m no saint, but she still speaks to me, so that’s something in her favor. I once ran into her in the parking lot of the Hyde Park United Methodist Church near downtown. She was covering a 10K race, and actually thought I was checking up on her until I explained that I had come to the church for my AA meeting. She let it slide and didn’t say anything else, but she was one of the few people who didn’t give me grief when I chose to drink fruit punch at the office Christmas party—or is it holiday party? I can’t keep up with all the PC lingo we’re supposed to employ.

  Peyton’s also been pretty sensitive about Darren—nice of her to say that maybe he’d surprise me so I’d get to use the Bucs tickets anyway. I doubt it—I sometimes think Darren would rather undergo oral surgery than spend time with me—but if he’s needing money, he might call and play the dutiful son on Father’s Day. I can always hope.

  So while I wouldn’t mind having a sandwich and coffee with Peyton MacGruder, I don’t think I’d want to take the relationship beyond that. I could, of course, now that she no longer works in my department . . .

  Nah. Like I said, she’s exhausting. And I have enough trying people in my life.

  The last thing I need is the heart healer.

  Ninety minutes later Peyton was standing in an Eckerd’s drugstore on Hillsborough Boulevard, poring over a colorful array of Father’s Day cards. She dismissed all those with sappy messages, and cringed at most of the funny ones. Her relationship with her father wasn’t the kind of thing that could be summed up or acknowledged in a card, unless Hallmark decided to publish a line of greetings for those who wish to bestow only a perfunctory nod to the occasion.

  But still . . . Father’s Day came only once a year, and if it had not been for Dr. Mick Middleton’s biological contribution, she wouldn’t exist.

  She picked up a card with a picture of a woman gazing through a photograph album. When I think of love, the caption read, I think of you.

  The sentiment made Peyton’s throat tighten. When she thought of her father, she thought of a squalling mob—at least, that’s what had filled his house the last time she visited. Her father and his wife, Kathy, had six children, all of them spaced two years apart. The youngest had been a toddler when Peyton left Gainesville, but by now the youngest was probably—she paused to count on
her fingers—eighteen years old.

  She winced. Had so much time passed? How could the baby have progressed from infancy to adulthood while Peyton remained in the same season of life?

  Sheesh. She glanced toward another section on the display rack, a sparse selection of graduation cards. If the baby of her father’s new family had graduated from high school, then the oldest kid must be finished with college by now. She closed her eyes in order to riffle through her memories. She’d received all kinds of graduation announcements over the years, from her half-siblings as well as from Kathy’s relatives, people whose names were as unfamiliar as the faces in the stiff photographs. How could they expect her to keep up with them all?

  It wasn’t like she and her dad had ever been close. Mick Middleton, a proud native of Jacksonville, Florida (“the biggest city in the world!”), had married Elaine Huff at eighteen and buried her at twenty-two. During the three-year marriage, he fathered a child—Peyton.

  Because Peyton’s mother had died of a severe asthma attack—an event Peyton mercifully had not witnessed— Mick Middleton turned his young mind toward medical science. Peyton stayed with her grandmother while her father put himself through medical school. When her grandmother died from complications of diabetes, the new Dr. Middleton enrolled his daughter in the Bolles School in Jacksonville, a private coeducational boarding facility with an emphasis on arts.