Chapter 2

“Hey, Dr. Feelgood,” I purred. Lee laughed. Encouraged, I told him, “I have a bit of a problem. Maybe you can help?”

“A medical problem?” I heard the smile in his words. “Or is this something I can take care of when I get home? Two hours, hon. Surely you can hold out ‘til then. What’s up?”

With a goofy grin on my face, I tried to sound coy and failed miserably. “I don’t know, Doc. Got something hard and long shoved down the front of my pants. I wondered if maybe you could come by and take a look?”

Chuckling, Lee lowered his voice. I could almost see him curled around the phone, speaking low into the receiver so no one would overhear. “Much as I’d love to sit here and let you talk dirty to me,” he said, “I’ve got to cut this short, Curt. I have a little girl waiting to have her arm stitched up. What do you say we wait ‘til I get home to play doctor, alright?”

“How much time can you spare me right this second?”

In my mind I saw him glance at his watch, the Rolex I bought him last Christmas. “She’s in prep. If you can be quick—”

I couldn’t resist one last remark. “If that’s the way you like it. I got an envelope.” I waited while my words sank in. “From the grant committee. Ellen said they were mailed the first of the week.”

“And?” Lee asked, excited. “What’s it say?”

“I haven’t opened it yet.” Though from all the picking and tearing I’d done, I was almost there. “I thought I’d do it while we were on the phone—”

His laughter was boyish and sexy. “I’m not even going to comment on that one. So open it already. Open it, open it!”

With his permission I tore into the envelope. Inside was a single sheet of tri-folded letterhead. “Dear Mr. Schrivner,” My gaze wandered over the page as I tried to take in all the words at once. “As you well know, Richmond College offers its faculty and staff the opportunity to receive prestigious grants in the art and science disciplines.” I skimmed through the paragraph. “Yadda yadda, a stipend of twenty-five hundred dollars a month for up to one year, during which time we ask that the recipient focuses his or her creative energy toward achieving success in their chosen field. A lot of jargon, Lee. You know the routine.”

“Where’s it say if you got it or not?”

I was well aware that he had somewhere else he needed to be. A little girl possibly bleeding to death while I read to him over the phone. “Next paragraph. The candidates for this year exceeded our expectations, but in the end we could chose only five recipients from various departments within the college to receive monetary funding. Please take a moment to recognize these five extraordinary individuals—”

My breath caught in my throat as I looked down the short list and saw my own name. “I got it!” I cried.

Sandwiched in the fourth position, between Martin Parent from the biology department and Vanda Treese in media studies, my name looked almost foreign to me.

In my ear, Lee hooted in delight. “I knew you’d get it,” he said.

I nodded to myself, stunned.

“Didn’t I say don’t sweat over it?” he continued. “Congratulations, hon. You need this.”

I really did. Ten years of teaching freshman comp and advanced fiction workshops left me little time to work on my own writing. The drawers of my file cabinet were filled with abandoned stories, one or two s down this path before I lost interest and switched to something else, another few pages in that vein before I took another route.

I didn’t have the time to write, I complained. If only I could take off a couple of months, hammer out a story from start to finish, without worrying about how I’d pay my half of the bills or put food on the table, I was convinced I could bang out something literary, something good.

Hell, I would settle for something finishedat this point. The grant had been Lee’s idea. One day when he stopped by campus to eat lunch with me, he’d seen it on a flyer tacked to the bulletin board outside the English department. “Look into it, Curt,” he said over pizza at the Rattskeller, the college’s own pub and karaoke bar. “This might be just what you’re looking for, you know? Why don’t you submit that piece you worked on after Christmas?”

It was as simple as that. With Lee’s encouragement, I edited and re-edited those few pages of what I hoped would become my magnum opus. A heady story, full of passion and angst and emotion, the next Farewell to Armsor Great Gatsby. When I sent that first in with my grant application, I felt that it was definitely my best work, bar none.

Staring down at the sheet of paper in my hands, for a second I wondered who else from my department applied but it didn’t matter because it was my name in the letter. Someone read my writing and saw potential in that unpolished gem. I was the one receiving the grant.