Please Remember This (5 page)

“We bought Sprawl Press a number of years ago, and we’re doing a routine update of their files. We can’t seem to locate our copy of
The Riverboat Fragment
contract. Could you fax us a copy of yours?”

The Riverboat Fragment,
Nina Lane’s incomplete manuscript, had been published twenty-three years ago. Why were they suddenly looking for the contract? And why did they need it faxed? After twenty-three years, couldn’t they wait for the regular mail?

“I don’t have it,” Tess said. Then, because she didn’t believe for one instant that this was routine, she added, “And that’s strange, because my grandparents kept all legal documents. They were afraid of lawyers, so they kept everything.”

“It might have been very brief, just an extension of the trilogy contract,” Ms. Surcast said. “We do have a record of a payment. This is simply routine updating, nothing to get concerned about.”

Tess wasn’t concerned, but she certainly was interested. What should she do? She knew only one person connected to publishing—Duke Nathan. Could she call him? Yes, she could.

Would you have felt so comfortable if he really had been your father?

No, of course not. His being her father would have complicated everything.

Duke answered his phone. She told him about the call from the publisher. “Did you start something?” she asked.

“Of course I did. Your grandparents might have signed another perfectly dreadful contract, but let’s be sure.”

“But if Sprawl Press did pay for
The Riverboat Fragment,
surely the legal issue is moot.”

“Maybe it’s moot legally, but morally … they have made so much money off Nina’s books. If her fans found out that none of it has gone to her estate, they’d be up in arms.”

“I don’t want Nina Lane fans finding out anything,” Tess said instantly. “I don’t want to have anything to do with those people.”

“I can understand that, believe me, I can, but they’re your leverage.”

“My leverage?” Tess wasn’t sure she wanted to have any leverage. “I’m afraid I’m out of my league here.”

“You could use good representation,” Duke acknowledged. “I would help you if I could. I hope you know that. But if my name gets involved with this, everything will become more complex than you can ever imagine. I can give you the names of some very good people I haven’t had any association with. You’ll have to pay them fifteen percent of anything they get for you, but it will be worth it.”

“These are agents?” How odd to think of herself as having an agent. So many people in California were always looking for agents, and now the highly unambitious Tess Lanier might be getting one.

“Of course.”

Tess took a breath and called the first name. She had to leave a message—her name and that she needed to discuss a literary contract.

“Ms. Turchon’s assistant will call you back in a day or so,” the receptionist told her.

That didn’t sound promising. For the second name on the list, Tess left a different message. “I’m Nina Lane’s daughter”—she hadn’t said that since Stanford—”and it seems as if there are some questions about her contracts with Sprawl Press.”

Barbara Ansell herself called Tess back fifteen minutes later.

By the end of the week the agent had seen a copy of the trilogy’s contract. The author and her estate were indeed entitled to nothing beyond the initial payment. “It’s completely legal,” Barbara said. “But it is a disgrace to the publishing industry, and this is not an industry that disgraces easily. I’m sure if Nina had lived, they would have renegotiated the contract, but without pressure from the estate, there was no reason to.”

The problem for the publishing company was
The Riverboat Fragment.
The check—which Barbara had also seen a copy of—was for exactly one-third the amount of the trilogy contract, suggesting that the terms of that contract had simply been extended. But no one could find the extension.

Barbara did locate someone who used to work at Sprawl Press, and he remembered what had happened. One of the other writers living in the Settlement community had sent the press Nina’s unfinished manuscript. “We started to negotiate with the parents,” the ex-employee said, “but it was clear we
could get away with anything as long as they didn’t talk to any agents or lawyers. So we decided to pay them one-third of the total paid for her first three books and have them sign a one-page rider extending the first contract. We kept telling them that it was routine. But I’d bet anything we never sent them the rider for fear that they would show it to a lawyer. We really were a bottom-feeder press, and we were just starting to make money off Nina Lane. We were terrified that we would lose her.”

The publishing conglomerate, which had purchased Sprawl Press primarily because of its rights to Nina Lane, had over the years fought several legal battles against pirated editions of the trilogy and amateurish attempts to finish
The Riverboat Fragment.
In the latter case, the company had been protecting rights that it didn’t have.

“They are screwed,” Barbara said cheerfully. “Totally screwed.”

The first few days of the following week seemed to Tess as if they were happening to someone else. Every morning the publisher would make an offer, threatening to take it off the table if Tess didn’t accept it by five that afternoon. Every afternoon at five-fifteen, her agent said no, thanks; for that kind of money they’d take their chances in court. So the next morning the publisher would offer more. After four days of this, Barbara had terms that she liked.

Tess would receive a lump-sum payment for the previous unauthorized publication of
The Riverboat Fragment.
A new contract provided for royalties on future publication of that work. Barbara Ansell had also renegotiated the trilogy contract so that royalties
would be paid on the future sales of those books as well. So from now on, Tess would received 12
½
percent of the cover price of every English language edition sold in North America, and various other percentages on other editions in other markets, etc., etc. The contract went on for pages, and the numbers seemed like Monopoly money to Tess.

But it wasn’t Monopoly money. It was the actual stuff. Within thirty days some of it would be in her checking account, waiting for her to spend it.

She was rich.

“No, you aren’t,” Duke told her. “Don’t think you can wing off to Paris for the weekend every time you get bored, but if you are halfway sensible, you can send your kids to private school and you won’t have to worry about what their summer camps will cost.”

That sounded rich to Tess.

She could do anything. She could quit her job; she could live alone; she could buy a computer, a computerized sewing machine, a computerized car. She could get a cell phone. She could buy theater tickets for full-scale, all-effects-included productions of touring Broadway shows. She could go to New York and see the shows on Broadway. She could shop for her clothes in Beverly Hills. She could stop in at Starbucks on her way to work. She could stop in again on her way home. She could stop in every hour on the hour. She could drink overpriced cappuccino drinks until her bladder burst.

She couldn’t sleep. Her mind raced.
Why me?
“This makes no sense,” Tess said to Barbara Ansell. “What have I done to deserve this kind of money?”

“Don’t say that,” Barbara pleaded with her. “Don’t say that to anyone. Of course you deserve it. Your mother would have wanted you to have it.”

When the residents at Willow Place said things like that, Tess smiled and listened politely because that was what she was paid to do. But she was not being paid to listen to Barbara Ansell. In fact, she was paying Barbara Ansell to listen to her. “My mother may not ever have changed a diaper, and then she committed suicide when I was three months old. I don’t think we can say that she had my interest foremost in her heart.”

Barbara couldn’t quarrel with that. “Okay, how about this—the law wants you to have it. How’s that?”

“That’s all right, I guess.” Tess had always been very law-abiding.

But she still couldn’t sleep.

Of course, this wasn’t just a little extra income. There was some serious money here. It wasn’t the money itself that worried her—although she knew nothing about investments, about the stock market or mutual funds. Okay, so the money itself was worrisome, but the real source of her anxiety was change. She was afraid of change.

Here it was, the beginning of July. Surely by Christmas, even by Thanksgiving or Labor Day, her life would have completely changed. She would be living somewhere else, doing something else, and she had no idea what or where.

There was nothing weird about being disconcerted by that.

She didn’t want to not work. She knew that. It
would be too easy for her to retreat into a nunlike world of vintage linens and lacemaking. That was what she had done when her grandparents were alive, and she had felt like Cinderella watching everyone else her age get ready for the ball. She wanted to be with people. She wanted to have friends and activities. To live alone and work with people—that was what she wanted. That was a start. That was some kind of decision.

But live alone where and work at what?

Not at a retirement home. She had gotten her job at Willow Place because she had understood so much about the elderly. It was time to learn about the rest of life.

“What do you want to do with your life?” Duke Nathan asked her during one of their frequent phone conversations. He was the only person besides her agent who knew how very much money she was getting. She had merely told her roommates and the people at work that her grandparents’ estate had been settled and she would be getting “some” money. “What are your dreams, your fantasies?”

“I don’t think I have any.”

“Everyone has dreams.”

“I don’t. I suppose as a child I wanted to live someplace where it snowed, all Southern California kids do, but that never became my life’s ambition.”

“That what has been your life’s ambition?”

“I don’t know. I probably just wanted to please my grandparents, to make things easy for them, and they were always so anxious about money that the best way to do that was to never want anything.”

“Why couldn’t my kids have picked that route?”
he sighed. “They’ve never wanted to make things easy for me, or if they did, I don’t want to know what difficult is.”

Difficult.
Duke had said that his wife would have hated to take Tess into their home, fearing she would have to raise another Nina, selfish and difficult.

As she lay in bed that night, it occurred to Tess that her grandparents had probably felt exactly the same way. They, better than anyone, would have known how difficult Nina had been; they, more than anyone, would have dreaded facing that again.

Nina had tortured them with her longings and ambitions, her dreams and fantasies. So what had happened? The next child they raised hadn’t been allowed to have any dreams or ambitions.

As soon as it was 9
A.M
. on the East Coast, Tess called Duke again. He answered the phone.

“I wanted to be Miss Kitty of the Long Branch Saloon.”

“Miss Kitty?” He was puzzled. “Oh, you mean from
Gunsmoke?”

“It was my grandfather’s favorite show.” Surely Nina would have mentioned that. The show had originally aired throughout much of Nina’s childhood. “Whenever he told me bedtime stories, it would be about the
Gunsmoke
characters.”

“And, of course, you wanted to be Miss Kitty.” He had a daughter. He understood little girls.

“Who wouldn’t? She had the best clothes in town. She didn’t really fit in”—Tess was too used to feeling different from everyone else to imagine herself ever truly fitting in—”but she belonged. She had put down roots. And she had a business that was at the
center of everything. It was a place where people could meet, where they would feel less isolated.” “So open a bar.”

“I’m not going to do
that.”
Tess’s roommates went to bars to meet men. Bars only made her feel more isolated. She hated the smoke; she disliked the drinking. “I could open a shop selling vintage linens, but that could be a truly isolating experience.” A card table at a flea market was one thing; a whole store was quite a different matter. “I think I might be spending all day every day alone if I do that.”

Duke admitted that he wasn’t likely to patronize such a shop. “Do you want to know what Nina would have done with that money?”

“I don’t mind knowing, but her answers aren’t likely to be the same as mine.”

“She would have gone back to Fleur-de-lis and bought the Lanier Building and the Prairie Bell School.”

“The Lanier Building? There’s a building named after my family?” Tess hadn’t known that.

“It’s downtown. One of your ancestors built it back in the 1880s. It was looking pretty seedy twenty-five years ago; I can’t imagine what it’s like now. But it was made of stone. I’m sure it’s still there.”

“What kind of building is it? I wish I had known when I was there. I would have liked to have seen it.”

“I think it was originally a dry-goods store, whatever that is. But the economy was so bad when we were there that I don’t think it was much of anything. I don’t know what Nina would have done with it,
but she was obsessed with her family’s history, at least the Kansas part of it.”

“So what did the schoolhouse have to do with family history? And why can you buy a school?”

“It isn’t a school anymore, just the building. It was the one-room country school that your grandfather had gone to. Apparently going to California really tore him up, and the last thing he did before his family left was sneak back to the schoolhouse, crawl behind the bushes, and scratch his initials into the foundation.”

Her grandfather had done that? Tess hadn’t known.

There hadn’t been money for many family photographs, but she had one of her grandfather as a boy. He looked bright-eyed and pixieish, nothing like the weary, gentle man Tess had lived with. What a gesture that had been, to scratch his name on a building.
I will be back.
Kansas had been his home, and he was determined to return.