The Overdue Life of Amy Byler

by Kelly Harms

  Added benefit: Dad is going to absolutely hate him.

  Love,

  Your heartless daughter, Cori

  —

  The great hall of Columbia’s main library is a crush. The American Library Educators Association has many smaller events all over the country, but this is one of the big ones—popular because of the fun destination, well attended because of grants for rural and urban teachers alike to stay on top of media trends. It attracts everyone from young MLS candidates to grizzled vets who are already collecting their pensions but just can’t quit the lifestyle. I fall squarely in the middle—decent credentials and a plum job at a spendy school, but no academic chops like the herd of PhDs who get invited personally.

  This evening’s event is sponsored by a publisher of early-reader material, so there are familiar recurring-character cardboard cutouts all over the room. Many grade school teachers are posing next to Flat Stanley, setting down their plastic cups of wine first so they can post the resulting pictures in their offices. For elementary school librarians, a picture of yourself with Flat Stanley is about as close as you can get to full-on street cred.

  There are passed trays of food, and I position myself near the door the caterers first come through and try to eat my weight in tiny quiches so I can have a glass of wine without toppling over. While I snarf, I review the program that was tucked into the gift tote the publisher’s PR youth handed me when I registered. All the while, I constantly check my phone. Nothing from Talia. I am starting to imagine scenarios where she was hit by a cab on the way to work. I know this is a ridiculous worry—Talia is famously scattered and disorganized and probably just put her phone down somewhere and hasn’t noticed it’s missing yet—but I still find myself trying to figure out what the hell I should do if I don’t hear from her by the time the event ends in a few hours. Call hospitals? Check with her mom back in Ohio? I don’t have the first idea of where I would start tracking her down.

  It is while I am juggling my phone, my conference brochure, and two—yep, two—crab tartlets that a woman comes up to me and tells me loudly, “You’re doing it wrong.”

  I look up and drop the brochure and then the phone. The tartlets, obviously, I save at all costs.

  The woman is a tall, imposing character with the face of a Disney villainess. Her nose comes to a sharp point that actually threatens me. “Am I in your way?” I ask, because I have no idea what else to say, and I’m kind of spooked.

  She laughs, and her eyes soften as she picks up my phone for me. “Here, you eat those—I’ll hold this.”

  Obediently, I stuff a tart in my mouth and free up a hand to take back my phone.

  “You’re supposed to guzzle the free wine first, before it runs out, and then gobble up the tiny food,” the stranger says, gesturing with her head to her own glass of red. “And you’re not supposed to look at that stupid brochure. It doesn’t have the important information in it.”

  I tilt my head at her. “What is the important information?”

  “The most important information is how few of the boring conference courses you can go to and still get your continuing ed credits. Like, for example, there are two guest speakers at this party, so even though there is free booze and food, it counts just as much as it would to go to two sessions early tomorrow morning, where they only serve weak coffee and bananas.”

  I frown. I am teaching an early session here tomorrow morning. “Oh, I see,” I say. “That explains why it’s so crowded.”

  “Don’t tell me you came for the speakers,” she says, her voice warm and teasing at once.

  “Well, I missed dinner due to some logistical snafus . . . so I’d have to say I came for the crab tartlets,” I say. “But after I get some more food in my stomach, I will be most interested in the speakers, yes.”

  “You’re the model citizen,” she says. “Or you just need some wine. I’m Kathryn. From Chicago Public Schools, and I don’t know another living soul here, but largely these attendees look about as fun as a rainy day in Cleveland. Have you ever seen so many embroidered polos? White or red?”

  “Red, please,” I say. “Nice to meet you. I’m Amy. Byler. From Pennsylvania.”

  “Be right back, Amy Byler.”

  While Kathryn fetches me a glass of wine, I check my phone one last time. I send a text and a Facebook message to Talia and call it out of my hands for the rest of the night. If I don’t hear from her by the end of the evening, I’ll . . . what? I guess I’ll find a Days Inn. Even the swankiest city in the nation must have a Days Inn. It will probably cost me a month’s grocery budget, but what else can I do? Maybe I can try for reimbursement from school when I get home.

  I am just putting the useless phone away when Kathryn returns. “Kids?” she asks me as I take the generous glass of wine she brought back.

  “I teach in a K–12 private school,” I begin. “But I do adolescents—”

  “No, I mean do you have kids,” she interrupts.

  “Oh.” I nod. “Yes. Two kids, both in the upper school. One girl, one boy. The girl does—”

  “I have two children in diapers,” Kathryn interrupts again. “One year old and almost three. Both boys. Both hellions. I haven’t been out of my house without at least one of them clinging to some part of my body since the first one was conceived. Until today. Let me tell you, I have had more complete thoughts in the last three hours than I had in the previous three years. Do you know how many people’s butts I’ve wiped at this conference so far?”

  “Uh—”

  “Zero butts. And I will wipe zero butts for the next three days. Well, I will be responsible for my own butt. Unless there is a bidet in the hotel room! How great would that be?”

  “Uh—”

  “Still, one butt is a third as many butts as I usually have to wipe, so this is the greatest weekend of my life.”

  “I remember those days,” I tell her wistfully.

  “Tell me it gets easier,” she says. “You did this. You haven’t driven your car off a cliff yet.”

  I nod. “It gets so, so much easier,” I tell her. “My teenagers are totally potty trained, for one.”

  She laughs.

  “And you will come to get to know their personalities and really like them,” I go on. “That takes a little while, but it happens. Then things get progressively less intense. They start dressing themselves and entertaining themselves and feeding themselves, and then one day they are in driver’s ed scaring you out of your wits.” And abandoning you to hang out with your common-law ex-husband, I add silently.

  “That is very good to hear,” she says.

  “You’re in the thick of it,” I say.

  “Right now, my idiot husband is in the thick of it,” she says. “I told him, you put these babies inside me; now you are going to keep them alive all by yourself while I drink myself silly and dine out on world cuisine and sleep in until nine a.m. every day and watch Golden Girls repeats on the hotel cable.”

  I smile. “That is an excellent plan.”

  “Thank you. Why are you here?”

  “What do you mean?” I ask.

  “Are you running away from your kids too?”

  “Oh. No. Well . . . no. I mean . . . no, definitely not. If anything, they’re running away from me,” I finally finish.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well . . .” I take a swig of wine and try to decide how much to tell this vivacious, friendly, but definitely evil-looking woman. “My ex-husband has been out of the country for a while, and he came back to spend a week with them. So I had nothing else to do.”

  “Oh my god. You are the luckiest woman in the world.”

  I laugh. “I can see why you’d say that.”

  “So you’ll be spending an entire week in New York with no kids? That’s like . . . my wildest dream. You’re living the dream. Where are you staying?”

  I inhale. “I’m not . . . entirely sure . . . ,” I start. “I am definitely staying with a friend from c
ollege after the conference is over. But tonight I haven’t been able to reach her. So I think I need to find a hotel.”

  “You don’t have a hotel reservation?”

  I shrug, acting like I’m not shot through with panic over this myself. “It’s New York. Lots of hotel rooms.”

  “Lots of tourists too.”

  I force a confident smile. “Something will pan out.”

  “Hotels here are so expensive.”

  I take a drink of my wine. I’m starting to feel pretty freaked out. Does tonight end with me cowering on a park bench until dawn?

  “What time is the first speaker tonight?” I ask my frightening new friend.

  She looks at a pretty gold watch that dangles on her bony wrist. “Thirty more minutes until the first one. It’s that author who wrote the first twenty Dum-Dum Doofus Dorkface books. Groan.”

  I can’t help but agree. Tonight is the night the publisher gets to trot out the jewels in their literary crown, but this particular jewel is more akin to a thorn in the side of every early-literacy instructor. “She gets a lot of kids interested in reading,” I say charitably.

  “Hmph,” says Kathryn. “Reading about farts.”

  I cough on my wine. “And boogers,” I add, when I have my breath back. “Who else is tonight, again?” I ask, because somehow despite staring at that stupid program five minutes ago, I cannot keep the many keynotes that this conference offers straight.

  “It’s last year’s Library Educator of the Year. The hot one,” she adds gleefully.

  “I didn’t realize there were hot library educators,” I admit.

  “You mean besides the two of us?” Kathryn laughs gaily. “Yes, this is that super hot guy from the inner city who Dangerous Minded all the kids into reading Shakespeare in 4K or something.”

  I nod because this is vaguely familiar. “It wasn’t Shakespeare. It was Bradbury, and they were sixth graders, but they were reading above grade level by the end of one semester. So it’s pretty astonishing.”

  She nods. “Plus he’s super hot. You’ll see. Oh! Are you single? It sounded like you were single. I wonder if Hot Educator of the Year is single. How do we find out?”

  “Maybe they’ll say when they introduce him. ‘Our Hot Educator of the Year studied at Caltech, specializes in ELL coaching, and loves long walks on the beach.’”

  “Heh!” says Kathryn. “Perfect. Then we just have to do your star charts, and we’re set.”

  “Kathryn,” I say slowly. “Would you mind saving a seat for me for the Dum-Dum lady? I am starting to have flop sweats over my hotel situation.”

  She smiles obligingly. “I wouldn’t mind one bit. You’re my only friend here, after all,” she says teasingly, and I have to laugh that a woman who looks so much like the bitch boss from a rom-com is so delightfully chummy.

  “One friend is all you need if she’s standing close enough to the crab tarts,” I say. “I’m going to make some phone calls and find you before the keynotes start. Hopefully it won’t take long to get myself a bed for the night.”

  “If you strike out, there’s always the Hot Educator of the Year,” she says with a wave. “I’m sure he’d be happy to share.”

  —

  I call the Upper Manhattan Days Inn. I call three other nearby places with similarly low star ratings. These places are all booked. It is Friday, after all, and they are very sorry, but did I realize a library convention was in town?

  I start calling affordable-sounding places in Lower Manhattan, and they, too, are booked. A bloggers’ convention. A nursing convention. A convention for conventioneers. It’s the first weekend of summer in the most fantastic city in the world, and all the people on budgets in the entire United States—nay, the world—are in town right now, and they made reservations. There are no hotel rooms in my price range.

  I check to see if I can still get an online deal, but no luck—the sites don’t let you book day-of rooms after six p.m. I look at the train schedule to see if I can get back home tonight. Nope, last train leaves in four minutes. I text Talia again. All illusion of being cool and all hope of not being a pest are gone, so I just send a message that reads, “SOS HOMELESS,” and stare at the screen for two minutes, waiting for three dots that show she might respond to my message. There are no three dots. I call the offices of her magazine. I slowly type her last name into the directory and then go straight into her voice mail.

  Finally, desperate, I call the Hotel la Provençe. After all, my luggage has been enjoying their hospitality for hours now. Maybe I can live like the other half, just for one night. I can always get a part-time job to pay it off later. Maybe it’s time I learned to be a fry cook.

  “Hello,” I say, sounding as stilted as I feel, when a human answers and thanks me for calling the Hotel la Provençe. “I’m wondering if you have any rooms free for tonight?”

  “Oh yes, I’m sure we can find you something,” says the friendly feminine human. “Two doubles or a king?”

  “I . . . well.” I don’t care, as I can’t afford either, so I say, “What rates are available?”

  “Rates, ma’am?” says the voice. “No special rates at the moment, I’m afraid. Well, there might be a fill rate. Could you please hold?”

  I hold. I try to imagine numbers she might say. If she says less than $150, I will just do it, because I need to sleep somewhere. But what if she says more? Then I guess I will just do it, still, but it will hurt.

  She comes back on the line. “Wonderful news, ma’am,” she says. “We do have a king room available, and it’s at our lowest available rate, which is thirty percent less than our regular rate. Would you like me to book it?”

  “Um,” I say. “How much?”

  I hear typing. “Before taxes and fees . . . oh! It only comes to two hundred and seventy dollars per night.”

  My brain statics out, and I audibly moan. If I have to stay there for all three days of the conference, I will be out eight hundred bucks on hotel bills I wasn’t expecting to pay. That is many, many pizza nights with my kids, many trips to Wegmans, a whole week of sleepaway camp per child. I do not want to spend it on a stupid hotel room in stupid New York. I will only be in the hotel for a few hours, and most of them asleep. This situation makes me so mad.

  “I’ll take it,” I say.

  “Very good. And when would you like to check out?” she asks politely, as though I haven’t just groaned into the phone like a sexual predator.

  “Tomorrow, thanks,” I say.

  “Ok, one night, then, and what credit card would you like to use for the reservation?”

  Then it hits me. Credit card. John’s credit card. Which he gave me for emergencies. “This is an emergency,” I think out loud.

  “Sorry, ma’am, did you say an emergency? Do you need me to call someone?”

  “No, no, sorry, I just . . . hang on and let me get my card.”

  I read her John’s credit card number, she tells me the total, and I flinch again and then try to make myself laugh. This is what the card was for, right? For emergencies. John told me to use it. I bet he didn’t think I’d put $300 on it, but so what? Screw that guy. He owes me way, way more than that in emotional damages.

  Still . . . will he be angry? Will I have to apologize when I get back home, or worse, pay him back?

  But I can’t know the answers to any of those questions, so I read out the card information and pray for the best. Just before I hang up I tell her to put the reservation under the name Sondra Sawyer because that way it will match my luggage and also because that is the most elegant name in the world, as mentioned.

  After all, Amy Byler does not stay in the Hotel la Provençe. But Sondra Sawyer does, using her ex-husband’s American Express. And she might even order room service.

  —

  What I wake up to the next morning is not real life. It is Sondra Sawyer life. I am lying in a sumptuous king bed with beautiful pressed cotton linens, down pillows, and a coverlet that smells faintly of lavende
r. Next to me on the marble-topped nightstand is a bottle of Perrier, and in a matter of minutes someone will be knocking on my door with a hot breakfast—oh, and they’re here now! I grab a hotel-provided robe, noting with great pleasure the way it perfectly matches the hotel-provided slippers and hotel-provided sleep mask, and throw it over my worn T-shirt and jammie pants and open the door.

  I feel like a princess in a fairy tale. Yesterday I was scrubbing mildew out of a teenage girl’s swim cap. Today a smiling young man has brought me breakfast, and he’s setting it up now on my bed. There’s a carafe—an entire carafe!—of coffee, and pastries and freshly squeezed juice and artisanal bacon and perfectly poached eggs over asparagus, and I think I have died and gone to heaven. Within moments I am alone again with this feast, and I simply cannot believe my good fortune. I settle back into bed, pull the tray of food close, and then, in an act that would earn either of my kids a lecture, I turn on the TV and eat to the soothing nonsense of a network morning show.

  I do not know which I find more delicious—the food, the hotel room, or just knowing that I do not have to rush. I linger over every bite, reminding my body how to chew, how to taste, how to breathe and eat in turn. I pour tiny cups of coffee, add just the perfect amount of cream, and drink them one by one, while they are hot. I have no one to drive anywhere, no missing items to find, no breakfasts to make and then be criticized for; I am not party to a confusing conversation about something a child promised to bring to school in twenty minutes but did not yet procure. I do not have to brush my teeth while peeing, because I have time to do each task separately, and no one is waiting for me to finish in the bathroom. This is sweet, sweet paradise. The only task I must accomplish in the next three hours is to get myself back to Columbia to teach my presentation. “E-reader Anthologies for the Next Generation of Passionate Readers” is what I called it. Not very snappy, and if Kathryn was right last night, I’ll have a nice, manageably small crowd, put forth my little concept, and then spend the rest of the day in other people’s presentations, learning how to be better at a job I love. For lunch, maybe Thai food? Eaten alone, with a book. My god! Sweet peace! Why didn’t I do this years ago?