Free Younger by Pamela Redmond Satran Page A

“Isn’t there any other way?”
    Maggie shook her head. “This is it. And depending on my hormones, it may be my only chance.”
    All this year, I’d been the one who’d needed Maggie. All this year, she’d been there for me, taking my midnight phone calls about Gary, holding me upright at my mother’s funeral. And now she was asking for something, the first thing, back.
    â€œOf course,” I said, squeezing her hand. As the vision of the whip-cracking Teri rose up again, I whipped her back. “Don’t worry; I’ll figure something out.”

Chapter 6
    â€œA lice!”
    My bottom had just touched the seat, but already Teri was calling me back into her office. It had been like this all morning.
    I rushed to her deskside.
    â€œMy coffee’s cold,” she said, without looking up.
    â€œBut I just poured you a fresh cup.” As in, 1.5 seconds ago. “I even put it in the microwave, to be sure it would be super-hot, like you like it.”
    The woman drank her coffee so hot, her mouth must be lined with asbestos.
    â€œMicrowave hot is not the same thing as real hot,” Teri said. Still without looking at me, she lifted her cup and dropped it into her wire mesh wastebasket—I mean a real cup, not paper, full of hot coffee, which was even now seeping onto the floor.
    â€œYou’ll have to clear this away,” Teri said. “And bring me a new cup of coffee.”
    As I carried the dripping wastebasket from the office, I told myself that if I wanted a young person’s job, I had to be willing to be servile, obedient—to act, in other words, like a young person. An extremely meek, self-effacing young person, much like the young person, in fact, I’d actually been.
    Except now I was determined to be different—and the fact was, I actually was different. All those years of life had made me more self-possessed, better able to know what I thought and more willing to say it out loud. That was the spirit with which I wanted to invest my new young self.
    But my new boss would have none of it, I could tell. She wanted an employee even quieter and more frightened than the real entry-level Alice Green had been.
    I could do it, I told myself. If I could bring my smarts to bear to get myself this job, I could put them to work keeping it, whatever that involved. Teri Jordan might act like a terror, but the truth was she was younger, more overwhelmed, and a way bigger jerk than me. I could definitely handle her.
    I brewed a new pot of coffee, adding an extra scoop of coffee to the filter, running the water until it was really cold, waiting until the entire pot had dripped through so that Teri’s cup would be of maximum strength. Then, arranging a smile on my face, I carried it to her.
    â€œFuck,” she muttered.
    â€œI made a whole new pot,” I said, wondering what I’d done wrong this time.
    â€œNo, it’s this report,” she said. “Like every other publisher, we want to market to the book group ladies, and like every other publisher, we have no fucking idea what they want.”
    This was funny to me, because Teri Jordan could very easily be one of the “book group ladies” herself. She was a mom, she lived in the suburbs, she was balancing job and home and marriage. And, presumably, she liked books. But for some reason, she saw the women in the book groups as “them,” very different creatures from “us” here in our bastion of publishing know-how.
    â€œI think they want what we all want,” I said, “a book that’s going to keep them awake beyond half a page at the end of a long involved day. A book that’s going to feel like it was worth the fifteen or twenty bucks they might have spent on a new top or a nice lunch with a girlfriend because it lifts them out of their lives for a few hours. A book that’s rich enough to make that book group night—which might be the