BESTSELLERS & BEST FRIENDS
My book publishing blog, with murder mysteries woven through it.
If this is your first visit, be sure to start with “1. Let’s do it!”
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I felt like shit. Our apartment stunk of cigarette smoke. But Sally understood, she too is heartbroken. We sat. We sipped tea. We said little. We held hands. Nothing else seemed right.
I got a call from Peggy, Randy’s attorney. I had met her several times. She asked if she could drop by.
Peggy showed up at our place.“I feel awful, even guilty,” she said. “I should have seen this coming. Last week Randy was so focused on being sure everything was set, should something happen to him. He nearly drove me nuts.”
I think back to last week’s drinks at the Drunken Horse, the last time I saw Randy. Sigh, the last time I’ll ever see him or hear his voice or, and this is what I’m remembering, feeling his hug. We hugged good-bye sometimes, especially if we had had one martini too many. In reflection, that hug last week outside the Drunken Horse seemed a longer and intended one. It wasn’t an I’ll-see-you-later, it was a good-bye. In the moment, I completely missed that.
Peggy went through Randy’s instructions. His business was now mine. Peggy handed me an envelope with $45,000 in cash. “That,” she said, “is to hire somebody to shut it down. Dispose of his hundreds of contracts. They all have out-clauses, some will take months for the expiration to play out. Randy assumed this will cover the cost of a young or retiring lawyer, or a freelancer with experience in IP or publishing contracts.” I was thinking of somebody already, Bob Niegowski. We had worked together at Abrams Books. He was a contracts wizard but now semi-retired. He’d be perfect.
Randy was correct to anticipate shutting down the business of books bound-on-the-right-for-left-handed readers. Its moment had passed. With the market rapidly turning to ebooks and audio books, the binding no longer mattered. The numbers were no longer there for Randy. And the customers in Randy’s database were dying off.
Peggy coughed, to grab back my attention. “His loft is also yours, he’s left it to you.”
Holy shit! For a split second, “that’s so cool” slipped through my head. Along with Tom Hanks and how amazing my kids would think that was, for me to have that loft. But in another second, my thoughts and heart slammed back to Randy. And the image my memory now carried of him dead behind his building.
“You can do what you want with it,” Peggy said, “but Randy hoped you’d consider selling it and use those funds to establish a needs-based scholarship at the Columbia University Publishing Course,” she paused, “in the name of Gen Grau. So that somebody has the chance to do with her life what Gen was denied.”
“Absolutely,” I said, “Let’s do that. I trust you can help me?” Peggy nodded yes.
“We’re almost done here,” she said. “There will be no service. He insisted.”
“Understood,” I said, although I also hated that wish. Services —the gathering with others, the celebrating, the laughter that eventually shakes loose — are healing. And I was much in need of healing. “But I should send notice to the New York Times and the publishing journals, like Publishers Weekly.”
“Agreed,” she said, checking off something on her note pad.
“Once the morgue releases his body, he’ll be cremated,” she paused, then read from her notepad, “my ashes are to be scattered on Boston Common, as it all began there. Where Little Brown and Houghton Mifflin once kept [they both moved years ago] an eye on this wishful young publisher. And where, to my shock, I and a score of tourists discovered that Brallier had never eaten Chinese food.” He was among the group that lunched that day. And that’s when I started to cry.
Peggy looked up at me. “Yep,” I sniffed, “I’ll take care of that, the ashes”
“And one last thing,” she said, “He told me to give this to you the next time I saw you—”
She choked on her words, “Oh god. I just realized that Randy knew it would be this moment.” Peggy too started to cry.
Then she handed me a Snickers candy bar.
And I made that messy snorting noise when somebody laughs and cries at the same time.
Tomorrow: The mini-bar and me