Free I'll Be There by Iris Rainer Dart Page A

out of the window and out of sight. And then Piglet floated out of the window and out of sight.” Nina had stopped after reading that paragraph aloud to Cce Cec and asked, “I)o you think Piglet wrote ‘Help Piglet’ and then signed the note The’? Or do you think he wrote ‘Help’ at the top and The’ at the bottom and then only had room in the middle to sign it ‘Piglet’? Or do you think he wrote ‘Help Piglet’ and then thought he should explain that the note was written about himself so he wrote The’ in the middle of the page?” Cee Cee couldn’t believe the worried expression on the little girl’s face while she waited for the answer to those questions. And that was the way her compulsive little mind worked all the time.
    “Honey, I think,” Cee Cee had said, putting an arm around her, “that when the water’s too deep, we just blurt out the message and don’t stop to think how it comes out.” That seemed to satisfy Nina for the moment, and as they read on, Cee Cee thought about her own life. Like Piglet she was in too deep. When Larry Gold called and said Peter Flaherty at the network had finally agreed to “take a meeting” with her, she knew she was supposed to be happy, but instead she felt afraid, because she was so desperate for it to work out.
    “Tell them I have a child now, Larry. Tell them I’m the new Nixon. Say I need to work more than ever. One of those people must have kids, somebody there should understand that.” She couldn’t believe his response.
    “Trust me, you’re gonna have to kiss a few asses to pull this one off. Cee Cee, you know what the numbers were. You cost them a million five by walking out and going to be with your sick friend. And don’t get me wrong, because I understand that kind of stuff, I cry at the drop of a hat, but you’re nuts if you think Peter Flaherty gives a shit. Remember the joke about the guy who needed the heart transplant, and he couldn’t find a donor? And finally they brought in Denton Cooley, the specialist, who looked the patient over and said, ‘I recommend giving him Peter Flaherty’s heart. After all, he never
     
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    uses it.’ I promise you, Cee, the network only cares about people who are dying if there’s a Movie of the Week in it.”
    The next morning on the way over to the meeting in Larry’s Jaguar xjs convertible with the top down, the wheel of which he was barely tall enough to see over, he said, “It’s pretty amazing that even after the article on the front page of the Calendar section, Flaherty is still in that job. I mean, you know every word of it was true.”
    Cee Cee wondered as she looked at Larry Gold’s tiny hands clutching the wheel of the Jaguar, then at his serious little face, if when he drove the car and there was no one in the passenger seat, whether people who were driving behind him thought his car was a runaway vehicle. The idea of that made her smile.
    “Yeah, pretty funny, wasn’t it?” Larry said, taking her smile as a response to his question.
    “Wasn’t what?” She hadn’t heard a word.
    “That article in the Times. Oh maybe you were in Carmel when it came out. About Flaherty and the psychic?”
    Cee Cee had no idea what he was talking about, and she could see that Larry Gold warmed to the telling of the gossip the way the old women on her front stoop in the Bronx always did, just after some neighbor passed by whom they were eager to trash.
    “Flaherty actually had some girl on the network payroll, with a three-year contract, and the girl was. a psychic who told him which shows to pick up and which to cancel and where to slot them in the lineup.”
    “Didn’t seem to do him any good,” Cee Cee said, pulling down the visor in front of her and looking at herself in the mirror. “His network is still number four out of a possible three.”
    “Which is why after two years of bad predictions, Flaherty dumped the girl, who was not too happy about