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He moved past her. “Stop interfering in my life.”
“I’m just trying to help you.” She followed him. “I’m really at a loss here. I don’t know what you need.”
He stopped suddenly and she almost ran into his wide back and black nylon jogging pants.
“You are the only person I’ve ever worked for that doesn’t have an impossible list for me. You don’t have a list at all. Tell me what you need for me to do for you.”
His back straightened. “I don’t need you to do anything for me.”
She moved in front of him and looked up into his face. Light from the front of the house slashed across his nose and the top of his chest. His mouth was compressed even more than usual. “The Chinooks are paying me good money to be your assistant.”
“Whatever they’re paying you, I’ll give you double to quit.”
Somehow she doubted he’d give her twenty grand. “It’s not CIt& just about the money,” she lied. “I get satisfaction from my work. You need me and—”
“I don’t need you.”
“—and,” she continued as if he hadn’t interrupted, “if you don’t tell me what I can do to help you out, I’ll just have to keep coming up with stuff on my own.”
“Fine. You can write back to all those seven thousand hockey fans you’re so concerned about.”
It wasn’t like she hadn’t ever answered someone else’s fan mail before. “What do you want the e-mail to say?”
“One e-mail is so impersonal.” He continued around the stairs and headed down the darkened hall. “I think you need to answer each individually.”
She called after him, her Kate Spade wedges suddenly rooted to the tile. “What?”
“Write to each of the fans individually,” he repeated, his voice trailing after him.
Dread weighted her feet, and she forced herself to follow. “I thought a mass ‘thank you for your concern,’ yada yada, e-mail would be nice.”
“Yada yada isn’t personal.” He moved into a huge room with one of the biggest televisions she’d ever seen, a big leather couch, a large chaise, and three poker tables. She stopped in the doorway.
“Mention how much their letters mean to me,” he said over his shoulder. “And include something about their own letter so they’ll think I read it myself.”
“What a tool,” she whispered.
He turned and looked at her across the room. “Did you just call me a tool?”
He might have fractured half the bones in his body, but there was nothing wrong with his hearing. She pointed to the poker tables and totally lied. “No. I said, ‘That’s cool.’ Do you play a lot of poker?”
“I used to.” He grabbed the television remote from an end table and turned toward the television. “You better get going on those e-mails.”
Tool, she mouthed to his back. Then she turned and made her way back to the office in the front of the house. Her wooden wedges thumped across the tile floor like a death knell. “Seven thousand e-mails,” she moaned. Ten thousand dollars.
She pulled out the chair Mark had been sitting in earlier and called her sister. “I need to know who to contact to get access to Mark’s guest book page on the Chinooks’ Web site,” she explained. “The e-mail addresses of the people who signed it are hidden.” After a few minutes of further explanations, she grabbed a pen and a pad of sticky notes from a drawer. She wrote down a name and a number and called the senior manager of the Web site. After some back-and-forth, he determined that she wasn’t some wacko trying to get access. He gave her the link to the administration panel, username, and a password she could use. Within minutes she was in. Easy, cheesy, lemon squeezy. Now came the hard part, replying to all those letters.
The first dozen notes expressed the writersR Che 17; best wishes for Mark’s recovery. They were filled with concern, recollections, and hero worship. Chelsea hit reply and wrote basically the same message in all of them:
Thank you for your concern and for taking the time to write. Your caring support means a lot to me. I am doing well and feeling better every day.
Mark Bressler
After forty-five minutes of mind-numbing work, she came across:
Hi Mark,
This is Lydia Ferrari.
