Obituary Writer (9780547691732) by Porter Shreve Page A

something."
    "Well, it was very imaginative," I said.

    Back at my apartment that night, I wanted to call Thea to apologize, but my mother had made that impossible. I should have been angry with her for meddling in my affairs as she always did, but this time I could only blame myself.
    My alarm clock was at exactly 9:00 when I sat up from the living room couch. I waited for the red numbers to read 9:01, then swung my legs around and got up to make myself dinner. Most nights when I made dinner for myself, my repertoire generally limited to prepackaged meals for one—Swedish meatballs, pepper steak, macaroni and cheese—I turned on my scanner and listened to the police channels with the soft hum of the microwave in the background.
    Not many obit writers have a need for a scanner, but toward the end of summer I had become obsessed with its macabre details, tuning in every night from dinner until bedtime. It was vicarious adventure, but thrilling all the same.
    When the homicide unit was called, I would feel a rush, imagine the scene—a police officer cordoning off the entrance to a run-down housing complex. "What's the victim's name?" I'd ask, and coolly display my
Independent
ID.
    The phone rang as I was pulling my Swedish meatballs out of the microwave.
    "What were you going to tell me this afternoon?" my mother asked.
    "About what?" I cut open one of the packages, sliding the noodles onto a plate.
    "About this story you're working on," she said.
    "It's nothing, Mother. Just a little human interest story. No big deal."
    "That's not what you told me this afternoon," she said. "You implied you were on to something important."
    I cut open the meatballs, poured them over the noodles, distributed the gravy evenly with a fork.
    "Can't we talk about this when I'm further along with the investigation?" I said, filling a glass with milk. "It should be at least another couple of weeks. I'd rather we talk about it later."
    But she wouldn't let it alone. I sat on a stool at the kitchen counter, and as I held the receiver away from my mouth and quietly chewed, she reminded me of how much more my father had achieved by this point in his career.
    "I realize it was a different time then," she said. "Newspapers have gotten very competitive, but it only took him eight months before his byline was everywhere."
    I slid my plate aside.
    "I know you have to pay your dues," she was saying. "But your father had a great instinct, and that's what put him above—"
    I cut her off. "To be honest, I'm trying to finish dinner here, so I didn't want to go too deeply into it, but since you're so anxious, I may as well tell you that this story I'm working on
is
beginning to look like a breakthrough."
    I told her that I'd been snooping around at City Hall and had found a source who was talking about some unaccounted-for campaign funds. "Let's just say that the mayor's brother has suddenly found himself rich," I said.
    My lie wasn't even original; the story came directly from a piece I'd seen in the
Tennessean.
The mayor of Nashville had set up a fund for his contractor brother, and millions of campaign dollars had ended up in a golfing development for country-and-western stars.
    "Whatever you do, don't tell anyone in the J-school," I said. "This has to stay quiet while I get more details."
    And that wasn't all. I told her that my name kept coming up for a beat job, that I'd been making inroads with police administration, that I was keeping sharp with hard news by showing up at crime scenes and assisting the cop reporters. "I look at Obits as a day job," I said.
    I wasn't sure what had gotten into me, and already I was feeling the metallic queasiness of guilt. First Thea and now the lies I had to tell. My mother used to know everything—we kept no secrets between us—but now with my career under way, separated by a hundred miles, I no longer needed her reminders.
    When we hung up, I waited for something to happen on the scanner's reports.