Free Last Things by Ralph McInerny

breakthrough novel, sweetheart. Diurno loves it. How soon can you get me a one-pager I can get a contract on?”
    Jessica’s enthusiasm for the literary life, never high, had suffered from the events of recent days. It is a sobering experience to stand at one’s father’s bedside in intensive care and see the digital monitoring of his vital signs wink in green and red while fluid drips into his veins from a plastic bag. How evanescent everything seemed.

    â€œThey like it?”
    â€œDiurno likes it. Meaning he is eager to sign a contract.”
    â€œHow did you describe it?”
    â€œI? You did. The saga of a Midwestern Catholic family, from order to chaos, from rules to what the hell, disintegration. But with tears.”
    â€œThat was my description?”
    â€œI paraphrase, of course. You deal with me; I deal with publishers. I know Diurno’s mind, such as it is. The man is a cash register. I doubt that he has read half a dozen books in his lifetime. He knew a man who turned down Gone With The Wind when the novel was only the whisper of a breeze in the mimosa. For him novels are one page long.”
    â€œSo what do you need?”
    â€œDrama. Gut-wrenching episodes. A dying fall.”
    She thought of her father. Suddenly her great idea seemed an exploitation of her family, of real tragedy. Raymond was at the heart of it, but how could she make Thunder or Diurno understand what it meant for a man to abandon the priesthood, destroy his parents’ pride, flee to California, and join the fruits and nuts? She promised to send the one page.
    â€œFax it. When can I expect it?”
    â€œGive me a deadline.”
    â€œWhat time is it there, nine o’clock? How does noon sound?”
    â€œYou’re kidding.”
    â€œI have never been more serious in my life. I nurtured you, sweetheart. I loved your first two novels, you and I and four thousand buyers. Plus two hundred reviewers, which is the important thing. They were the prelude; this novel is the main act. Think big. Noon, okay?”
    â€œI’ll try.”
    â€œSucceed.”

    He hung up. Jessica had difficulty thinking of what she wrote as a commodity, but of course that is what it was for Thunder and even more for the cash register Diurno. They thought in terms of dust-jacket hype. Had Thunder actually read her novels? His only suggestion was to soften the religious motif. “This is a neopagan age, sweetheart, like it or not. I speak as a lapsed Catholic.”
    â€œI didn’t know that.”
    â€œI don’t mention it in Who’s Who . What’s the point? Nobody is what he was.”
    â€œI am.”
    â€œSweetheart, that is your charm, your strength.”
    â€œThis novel could be pretty religious.”
    â€œI’m counting on that,” Thunder said with breezy inconsistency. “I want you to put the fear of God into us backsliders.”
    She called Sorensen’s and said she wanted to take the morning off. The reaction made her think she could have asked for a week and gotten it. Then she sat at her computer and stared at the screen, but all she could see was the monitor above her father’s bed in intensive care.
    The phone rang. It was her colleague Walter. “Is anything wrong?”
    â€œNo.”
    â€œI heard you had called in sick.”
    â€œMy father is in the hospital.”
    â€œIs there anything I can do?”
    Dear Walter—gifted, dumb, unimaginative Walter—who tried desperately to understand that her writing was more important to her than her work in the lab. For Walter Sorensen’s lab was the world; the slides he worked on rerum natura. Make-believe was a distant childhood memory. Their work determined what surgeons would do, what physicians would tell their patients, whether flesh and blood people would live or die. Walter never forgot that.

    â€œHe’s better now. They’ve moved him into a room out of intensive