The Ex Talk

by Rachel Lynn Solomon

  I didn’t want to run the place. I only wanted to tell good stories.

  And here’s Dominic: our newest employee, fresh off a master’s program, already on the air.

  “Live in ten,” Jason says before I can answer Dominic, and I push away my jealousy so I can focus on what’s always been the best part of my job.

  I slide off my stool and make eye contact with Paloma, holding my arm straight up at an imaginary twelve o’clock. “Five, four, three, two—” Then I lower my arm, aiming a finger at her, and she’s on.

  “I’m Paloma Powers, and you’re listening to Puget Sounds,” she says in her practiced way. Her voice is dark chocolate, low and mature with a hint of femininity. There’s so much power in a voice like that, in the ability to make people not just listen but care.

  A music bed plays underneath her, a bright piano melody that Jason will fade out as soon as she finishes her intro.

  “Today we have renowned animal behavior expert Mary Beth Barkley in the studio for all your pet-related questions. Maybe you’re wondering how to introduce a new kitten to your home, or whether you really can teach an old dog new tricks. We want to hear from you, so call 206-555-8803, and we’ll try to get that question answered. But first, some breaking news from reporter Dominic Yun, who joins us live in-studio. Dominic, welcome to Puget Sounds.”

  Dominic says nothing. He’s not even looking at her, just staring down at his notes as though still waiting for a cue.

  Dead air is not good. We can usually survive a few seconds of it without listener complaint, but any more than that, and we have a serious problem.

  “Fuck,” Ruthie says.

  “Say something,” I mutter into his ear. I wave my arms, but he’s completely frozen.

  Well, if he destroys my show, at least he’ll go down with it.

  “Dominic,” Paloma prompts, still perfectly cheery. “We’re so happy to have you with us!”

  Then something kicks in, as though the adrenaline has finally reached his bloodstream. Dominic blinks to life and leans into the mic.

  “Thank you, Paloma,” he says, rocky at first, but then evening out. “I’m thrilled to be here. Yours was actually the first show I listened to before I moved to Seattle for this job.”

  “Wonderful,” Paloma says. “What do you have for us?”

  He straightens. “It started with an anonymous tip. And I know what you’re thinking. Sometimes an anonymous tip can be complete hearsay, but if you ask the right questions, you can find the real story. This one, I had a feeling—call it a reporter’s intuition—that it was right on. I investigated something similar about a faculty member when I was at Northwestern.” A dramatic pause, and then: “What I found out is that Mayor Scott Healey has a second family. And while his private life is his business, he used campaign funds to keep it quiet.”

  “Shiiiiiit,” Jason says, spinning in his chair to face Ruthie and me. Behind the scenes, we’re not exactly FCC compliant.

  “I knew there was a reason I didn’t vote for him,” Ruthie says. “I didn’t like his face.”

  “That—that is a big one, Dominic,” Paloma says, clearly shocked, but recovering quickly. “We’ve had Mayor Healey on the show several times. Can you tell us how you figured this out?”

  “It started at a council meeting last month . . .” He launches into the story—how he found the financial records and tracked where the money was going, how he eventually convinced the mayor’s secret daughter to talk to him.

  Two minutes go by. Three. As we approach five minutes, I try to signal Paloma to switch segments, but she’s too focused on Dominic. I start to wonder if it’s possible to sever a mic cord with my fingernails.

  “I can’t keep up with the phone lines,” Griffin’s voice says in my ear.

  I press the button to talk directly to him. “Take down their questions and tell them Mary Beth will get to the ones she can.”

  “No—they’re about the mayor. They want to talk to Dominic.”

  Oh. Okay. Gritting my teeth, I hop on our show chat.

  Calls coming in, is D open to ?’s?

  “It looks like we’re getting a lot of questions,” Paloma says after peeking at the screen. “Would you be open to taking some calls from listeners?”

  “Sure, Paloma,” Dominic says, with the ease of a seasoned reporter and not someone who played with a digital recorder a few times in college and decided why not go into radio.

  When his eyes lock with mine through the glass barrier, all my loathing for him burns hot in my chest, turning my heart wild. The cut of his jaw makes him look more resolute than I’ve ever seen him, like he knows how badly I used to want this. His mouth tilts upward in a triumphant half smile. Delivering live commentary: another thing Dominic Yun is instantly perfect at.

  Kent bursts through the door. “Shay, we’re gonna have to reschedule Mary Beth. This is good motherfucking radio.”

  “Ruthie,” I say, but she’s already halfway out the door.

  “Great work, everyone,” Kent says, slapping Jason on the shoulder. “I’m glad we were able to get to this today.”

  I jostle my glasses as I rub at the space between my eyes where a headache is brewing. “This isn’t right,” I say after Kent leaves.

  “It’s good motherfucking radio,” Jason says in a singsong, imitating Kent.

  “It feels invasive.”

  “The public doesn’t have a right to know that the mayor’s a shady piece of shit?”

  “They do, but not on our show.”

  Jason follows my gaze, glancing between Dominic and me. Jason and I were hired within a couple weeks of each other, and he knows me too well not to realize why I’m upset. “You hate that Dominic is so good at this,” he says. “You hate that he’s a natural, that he’s live on the air a few months after he started working here.”

  “I’m—” I start, but stumble over my words. It makes me sound so shitty when he puts it that way. “It doesn’t matter how I feel about it. I have no desire to be on air.” Not anymore, at least. No point in wanting something I know will never happen.

  Ruthie comes back in, cheeks flushed.

  “Mary Beth’s pissed.” She clamps her headphones over her ears. “She says she had to cancel a private training session with one of Bill Gates’s kids to be here.”

  “We’ll send a groveling email later. No—I’ll call her.”

  “I don’t have enough lines,” Griffin says in my ear.

  “Ruthie, can you help Griffin? I’ll pitch in if I need to.”

  “On it.”

  “Thank you.”

  Dominic reads off each illicit payment one by one. The numbers are staggering. It’s not that this is a bad show—it’s that somehow, it’s become Dominic’s show, and I’m no longer in control. He is the star.

  So I sit back and let Paloma and Dominic take over. Dominic will win accolades and audiences, and I’ll stay right here behind the scenes.

  Ends: never.

  2

  Even though he was never on the air, my dad had the best radio voice. It was powerful but soft, a crackling fire on the coldest night of the year. He grew up fixing radios and owned an electronics repair shop, though of course he eventually learned how to fix laptops and phones, too. Goldstein Gadgets: my favorite place in the world.

  I inherited his love for public radio but not his voice. Mine is the kind of high-pitched voice men love to weaponize against women. Shrill. Unintelligent. Girly, as though being a girl is the worst kind of insult. I’ve been teased my whole life, and I still brace myself for cleverly disguised insults when I’m talking to someone for the first time.

  My dad never cared. We hosted radio shows in our kitchen (“Tell me, Shay Goldstein, what kind of cereal are you having this morning?”) and on road trips (“Can you describe the scenery at this middle-of-nowhere rest stop?�
��). I’d spend afternoons with him at Goldstein Gadgets, doing my homework and listening to game shows, Car Talk, This American Life. All we needed was a great story.

  I wanted him to hear me on the radio so badly, even if no one else did.

  When he died my senior year of high school after a sudden cardiac arrest, it shattered me. Classes didn’t matter. Friends didn’t matter. I didn’t turn on the radio for weeks. Somehow, I managed a B-minus average for the University of Washington, but I couldn’t even celebrate getting in. I was still submerged in depression when I landed my internship at Pacific Public Radio, and slowly, slowly, I climbed out of darkness and into a conviction that the only way forward was to try to rebuild what I’d lost. Here I am, twenty-nine and clinging to that childish dream.

  “Make people cry, and then make them laugh,” my dad would say. “But most of all, make sure you’re telling a good story.”

  I’m not sure how he would have felt about Ask a Trainer.

  * * *

  —

  I’m the fifth wheel at dinner tonight. My mother and her boyfriend Phil, and my best friend, Ameena, and her boyfriend, TJ are already seated at a Capitol Hill French-Vietnamese fusion restaurant by the time I emerge from rush hour traffic. Ameena Chaudhry and I grew up across the street from each other, and she’s been a constant in my life for more than twenty years.

  “Only ten minutes late,” Ameena says, jumping out of her chair to lasso me into a tight hug. “That’s got to be a new record, right?”

  TJ pulls out his phone to check the notes app. “There was one time last March we were all on time except for Shay, who was only three minutes late.”

  I roll my eyes at this, but guilt twists my stomach. “It’s great to see you, too. And I really am sorry. I was rushing to finish one last thing and lost track of time.”

  We try to schedule dinners as regularly as we can, but my mother and Phil are violinists in the Seattle Symphony with regular evening performances, Ameena is a recruiter at Microsoft, and TJ does something important-sounding in finance that I’ve never fully understood. On occasion—fine, most occasions—I stay late at the station to make sure everything’s prepped for the next day’s show. Today I was on the phone apologizing to Mary Beth Barkley for an hour.

  I hug my mom and TJ, then shake hands with Phil. I’m still not sure how to navigate my mother having a boyfriend. Until Phil, she didn’t seem interested in dating. They’d been friends for ages, though, and he lost his wife a few years after we lost Dad. They supported each other during the grieving process, which of course never really ends, until they eventually became a different kind of support system.

  I should be used to it by now, but by the time they started dating last year, I’d only just gotten used to the idea of my mother as a widow.

  “As much as I love bullying Shay,” my mother says with a half smile in my direction, “I’m starving. Appetizers?”

  Phil points at the menu. “The chili cumin pork ribs are supposed to be incredible,” he says in his Nigerian accent.

  After we order and exchange how-was-your-days, Ameena and TJ share a quick sideways glance. Before they started dating, Ameena and I were the ones sharing sideways glances, inside jokes. Being the fifth wheel is only slightly crushing when I realize I’m not anyone’s person. Ameena and TJ live together, so it’s natural that she shares secrets with him before me, and my mother has Phil. I am a solid second, but I’m no one’s first.

  I’m on a dating app hiatus, something I implement every so often when swiping becomes especially frustrating. My relationships seem doomed to never last longer than a handful of months. I want so badly to get to that place where Ameena and TJ are, five years of dating after they accidentally swapped orders at a coffee shop, that it’s possible I rush things. I’ve never not been the first to say I love you, and there are only so many times you can stomach total silence in response.

  But I won’t lie—I want to be that first person someone tells everything to.

  “I have some news,” Ameena says. “I’m interviewing with the Nature Conservancy tomorrow. So it’s not news, exactly, but news adjacent. It’s just the first phone interview, but . . .” She trails off with a shrug, but her dark eyes are bright with excitement.

  When Ameena started at Microsoft, her goal was to gain enough experience to ultimately recruit for an organization that does good, ideally for the environment. She was the president and founder of our high school’s Compost Club. By default, I was the vice president. She’s a slow-fashion aficionado who buys all her clothes at thrift shops and rummage sales, and she and TJ have an impressive herb garden on their apartment balcony.

  “Are you serious? That’s incredible!” I say, reaching for a rib the server places in the center of the table. “They have a Seattle office?”

  Her expression falters. “Well, no,” she says. “They’re in Virginia. I mean, I doubt I’ll get the job.”

  “Don’t reject yourself before you’ve even interviewed,” Phil says. “Do you know how many people audition for the symphony? The odds were never in our favor, either, although I still claim it’s nonsense Leanna had to audition three times.”

  My mother squeezes his arm, but she beams at the compliment.

  “Virginia is . . . far,” I say intelligently.

  “Let’s just ignore the Virginia part for now.” Ameena brushes a stray thread from the vintage charcoal blazer we fought over at an estate sale last month. “I’m really not going to get it, though. I’m the youngest recruiter on my team. They’re probably going to want someone with more experience.”

  “I miss being the youngest,” I say, taking to heart Ameena’s “let’s just ignore the Virginia part” suggestion. Virginia isn’t something I can even wrap my mind around. “It feels like the interns are getting younger and younger every year. And they’re all so earnest and fresh faced. One of them actually told me the other day that he didn’t know what a tape looked like.”

  “Like that reporter you’re always going on about?” my mother says. “What’s his name again?”

  “Dominic something, right?” Phil says. “I did like that piece he did on arts funding in Seattle compared to other cities.”

  “He’s not an intern, he’s Kent’s favorite reporter.” And apparently the new star of Puget Sounds, based on the social media snooping I did after the show. Twitter loved him, which proves Twitter is a hellsite.

  “Talk to me when you’re thirty,” Ameena says. We celebrated her thirtieth two months ago, in December, and it’ll be my turn in October. I’m still in denial.

  My mother waves a hand. “Please. You’re both still babies.” She says this, but my mother is gorgeous: dark red hair, sharp cheekbones, and a closet full of chic black dresses that would make Audrey Hepburn quietly, beautifully weep. In a symphony of fifty musicians, she steals the show every night.

  I tug my hair out of its usual low ponytail and finger comb my long bangs that skim the top of my tortoiseshell glasses. Thick, brown, and coarse: the only adjectives that describe my hair, and all of them are tragic. I thought I’d have learned to style it by now, but some days I fight with a straightener and other days I fight with a curling iron before I resign myself to another ponytail.

  It’s only when I examine my mother, searching for the physical similarities between us—spoiler: there are none—that I notice she’s acting strangely. She keeps rubbing at the hollow of her throat, one of her telltale signs of nerves, and when the food arrives, she pushes it around on her plate instead of eating it. She and Phil are usually pretty affectionate. We had a body language expert on the show a while back, and the way she talked about people falling in love described the two of them perfectly. Phil is always resting his hand in the small of her back, and she’ll often cup the side of his face and skim her thumb along his cheek.

  There’s none of that tonight.

  “How�
��s the house?” Phil asks, and I respond with a dramatic groan. He holds up his hands and lets out a soft laugh. “Ah, I’m sorry. Didn’t realize it was a sore subject.”

  “No, no,” I say, even if it is a bit of a sore subject. “The house is fine, though I wish I’d waited for something smaller.”

  “Isn’t it a three bedroom? One bath?”

  “Yeah, but. . . .”

  For years, Ameena and I shared an apartment in Ballard before she moved in with TJ. Buying a house seemed like the right next step: I was nearly thirty, had saved up enough money, and wasn’t leaving Seattle anytime soon. Working in public radio is like serving on the Supreme Court—most people are there for a very long time. Even if I wanted to be on the air, I wouldn’t be able to find a job at another station. It’s impossible to get a hosting gig without experience, but you can’t get that experience unless you already have some experience under your belt. The joys of job hunting as a millennial.

  So because it seemed like the next step in the how-to-adult manual, I bought a house, a Wallingford Craftsman my real estate agent called cozy but more often feels too large for one person. It’s always cold, and six months after picking out the kind of furniture I thought I wanted, it still feels empty. Lonely.

  “I guess I just have a lot of work to do on it,” I finish, though I’m unsure what exactly “it” means.

  “It was a good financial decision,” Phil says. “Buying a house is always a good investment. And one of my kids would be more than happy to help you out with any painting or repairs.”

  Phil has three sons and a daughter. All the Adelekes are tall and fit and happily married, most with kids of their own. A couple months ago, my mother and I had our first Christmas with Phil’s large family, forgoing the Jewish tradition of Chinese food and a movie. I’d been hesitant at first, if only because I liked spending that time with my mother, but everyone had been warm and welcoming, and it was impossible to stay bitter.