Cabin Fever (18 page)

He looked from one of them to the other with a look of concern on his face. “I don’t like the sound of that at all.”

Bessie shot her a look that clearly said to keep quiet. “It was nothing, Duane,” she said. “We were just swapping stories about the foolish old men we’ve known.” With that she was gone, leaving Duane more confused than ever.

Sarah watched her as she left. “I love Bessie. Don’t you just love Bessie?” she asked playfully.

Duane gave her a narrow look. “I like Bessie just fine.”

“Is that it? You like her? Or do you maybe feel something else?”

“I don’t know what you’re getting at,” he muttered, snapping open the pages of his newspaper.

“She’s not going to wait forever, Duane.”

He looked back at her with the expression of a boy with his hand in the cookie jar. “Who says I’m keeping her waiting for anything?”

“You two could not be more obvious, Duane. Why make it such a secret?”

He clearly had no interest in discussing the topic, but he also didn’t have much choice. “It’s not a secret that I think the world of Bessie. It just … it doesn’t feel right.”

“What doesn’t?”

“Chasing after another woman’s skirt so soon after my wife passed.”

“I heard that she died five years ago.”

He gave a glance in Bessie’s direction. “So the two of you have been talking.”

“A bit. She’s waiting for you, Duane, but she’s getting impatient.”

“I know she is,” he said, feeling tired. “And I don’t want her to wait forever, for me or anyone else. It just feels disrespectful of Julia’s memory.”

Sarah squeezed his arm. “I’m sure your wife loved you very much, and I’m sure that the last thing she would want is for you to be alone the rest of your life out of respect for her memory. She’d want you to be happy, Duane. Be happy.”

Duane didn’t reply, but he gave her a bit of a smile, as if to say “thanks.” She didn’t want to push it, so she let the matter drop.
 

The two of them chatted on about this and that as they ate their breakfasts, but inwardly Sarah found herself thinking about one thing: what would happen to Tall Pines when it no longer had a newspaper. The people who lived in these parts could get their information from other sources, of course, but deep in her heart Sarah believed that a local paper plays an important role in communities. A newspaper is like a water cooler in an office, it helps build a sense of shared identity. It would not be good for the town when the paper was gone, and she could only imagine the number of small towns throughout the country that were facing the same problem. Sarah’s eyes had been opened to a problem she had never seriously considered before, and she had a hard time thinking for long about anything else.

22

Lying in bed that night Sarah was still thinking about the problem. To her it was as plain as day. The country needed its newspapers, and newspapers were dying. She had no doubt that some publications would survive. The New York Times wasn't going anywhere, and as long as there were stockbrokers there would be a Wall Street Journal. But what about the rest? What about the small-town papers that had razor-thin margins even in good times? Sarah saw no prospect of them making it through, at least not unless they had wealthy benefactors. Soon it wouldn't be just a few newspapers going under, soon it would be normal for a town to have no paper, and something deep inside told her that this would be a catastrophe.

She was lying under the covers, and she had long since put her iPad away, but the light was still on and she wasn't even thinking about sleep. Instead she stared at the knot-holes in the ceiling and thought about what might be done. It was obvious that the economics of the newspaper business no longer made sense. Sarah was far from an expert on the topic, but it was clear to anyone who looked that things just didn't work the way they used to, now that CNN and Fox News and the entire Internet were just a click away. The newspaper model was built during a period when network television and radio were the only competition, and those days were gone for good. What the country needed was a newspaper model for the digital age.

Sarah knew that a website wasn't the answer. Most major papers had a website already and they were still struggling. Not everyone had a computer – especially if they lived out in the country – and those who did wouldn't necessarily want to use it for their daily reading. Sarah read almost everything on a screen, either her laptop or her iPad, but she knew that the next time her father had probably never read something longer than an email on a computer screen. In the world there were far more people like him than there were digital natives like Sarah, so any business plan for newspapers would need to be designed for the larger group.

Sarah seized on that thought and followed where it might lead. If she was designing a newspaper for her father, what would it look like? For starters, it wouldn't be printed on paper, because simply thinking about negotiating contracts with the printers and buying up that much newsprint and getting it delivered to the right addresses – each and every day of the week – gave her a headache. Whatever her newspaper of the future was, producing and delivering it would have to be a lot more streamlined. She toyed with the idea of a print-at-home option, but that didn't seem like it would work much better. If there was one thing that made her father furiously angry, it was how much he had to spend for the ink cartridges his printer required. Printing a paper at home would mean buying a lot more of those insanely expensive ink cartridges, and it wouldn’t be long before her father simply quit doing it.

So what did that leave? If the newspaper wasn't going to be printed and delivered in the traditional style, and if it wasn't going to be emailed to subscribers for them to print themselves, where else could it go? Sarah was just at the point of giving up on the question when she suddenly had a vision of her father, standing in his kitchen and making a cup of coffee. While he waited for the water to boil, he had his cell phone in his hand and was checking the sports scores.

His phone. His phone!
 

Her father was anything but a techie, but he was never without the thing. Sarah's heart began to pound. She felt that familiar rush of adrenaline, the one she got whenever she caught the glimpse of a solution to a difficult problem. This was no time for sleep. There would be plenty of time for sleep later, after she had captured this idea and ensured she wouldn’t forget about it later. She threw the covers aside and went for her laptop.

Four hours later, she was sipping down the cold and bitter dregs of her third cup of coffee and the gist of a business plan was beginning to take shape on her laptop screen. It wasn't ready to shop around for funding yet -- it was still rough around the edges, and there were many details to fill in, but deep in her gut she knew that the core of the plan was solid, and it might even be revolutionary. At its heart, her plan called for headlines and story copy to be delivered in an easy-to-read format to mobile phones, but readers who had iPhones or something equally capable could also share stories, discuss them, and even organize meetings and activities around shared interests. The plan asked very little of the customer – people like her father – in terms of technology or sophisticated use of the tools, but it was there for those who wanted it and provided a graceful means of scaling the service over time. In short, Sarah's plan started with a newspaper but was prepared for a future in which everything might be different, and probably would be.

Sarah leaned back in her chair, stretched her stiff back, and gazed with some bemusement at her work on the screen. She had come to Tall Pines because she needed some direction in her life, and for weeks she received absolutely nothing by way of inspiration. And then, right at the moment when she had forgotten what she was looking for, it came to her, out of the blue, as if postmarked from heaven.
 

Everything was different now. It was as if she had pulled the curtains and noticed that the color of the sky had shifted from blue to green. Part of her wanted to jump in her car and drive straight to San Francisco, but she knew that she had a lot to figure out before she could make her way back to the city. Her business plan wasn’t complete, but it was more than that. There was a lot that she wanted and needed in the Bay Area, but Brad wouldn't be there, and she needed some time to figure out how much she wanted and needed to be with him.

23

The next day she found Duane in his office, looking even more rumpled than usual. He had taken off his jacket and rolled up his shirtsleeves, while his tie was nowhere to be seen. Sarah paused at the doorway to take in the tableau. Duane's impression of Lou Grant was so good that she started to think that maybe Ed Asner had been doing an impression of Duane all those years ago.
 

She was here on business, though, so after a few self-indulgent moments she stepped into the office and walked up to Duane's desk.

His first glance at her was full of irritation at being interrupted in his work, but then looked back a second time. “Sarah,” he said appraisingly, clearly wondering why she was there.

“Duane,” she answered, pulling up a chair and sitting down.

“To what do I owe the pleasure?” he asked with a notable absence of pleasure, and he didn’t put down the pen he was holding or lean back from the papers on his desk. Clearly he didn’t expect her visit to last long.

She decided to get right to the point. “I’m here for a job.”

He snorted. “Not many of those to find around here. Maybe Bobby down the street could use some help with his filling station. Seems like there will always be people who want to buy gasoline.”

She shook her head. “No, Duane. I want to work here. With you.”

He leaned back and looked at her curiously. “And why would you want to do that, when I told you just yesterday that I’d be shutting the paper down in a few weeks? By the time I got you trained there wouldn’t be any work anymore. Not that I have any money to pay you.”

“I don’t want money. And I know that you don’t have much to offer me, in terms of time or on-the-job experience. But still, I want to learn whatever I can from you before you close the paper. I want to be your apprentice.”

He looked at her the way he might look at an inmate of an asylum. “And why on God’s green earth would you want to do that? You’re on vacation! You should be enjoying yourself.”

She shook her head. “No, this was never a vacation. I came to Tall Pines because I needed a break, sure, but mostly I came to clear my head and figure out what the next thing for me was. And last night I figured it out. It’s the newspaper business.”

He laughed. “There is no newspaper business. Not anymore.”

She nodded. “You’re right, the old business model is gone, and it’s not coming back. People have lots of places to get their news now, and they’re not going to be paying for classified ads when they can put an ad in Craigslist for free. But newspapers play a very important role in our society, and that’s not going away. When the papers fold, people are going to feel the itch – the itch that newspapers used to scratch – and whoever can figure out how to scratch it, in a new way that can be profitable in today’s world … well, they’ll write their own ticket.”

He looked at her skeptically. “And you’ve figured that out?”

She offered him a half smile. “I have a few ideas. I have enough of a plan that I think I can get some venture capitalists back in the Bay Area to fund my business. But I can’t just jump into the newspaper business and figure it all out from scratch. I have loads of experience of how things are done in San Francisco, but I don’t know nearly enough about how things are done in towns like Tall Pines. I can’t pretend that I can solve a small town’s problem so long as everything I know about small towns is what I’ve learned the past few weeks. I need to learn from someone with decades of experience, someone who’s close enough to retirement that he won’t see me as competition and might be willing to help a girl out. Someone like you, Duane.”

She waited for his reply in a silence that seemed to stretch for ages while he stared at her in silence. She was right on the point of thinking that she had figured wrong, that he was going to send her away without helping, when finally he shook his head and gave her a quizzical smile.

“I think you’re crazy to go down this road, Sarah, and I like you too much to lie to you. I believe in my heart that you’ll waste years of your life and a whole bunch of other people’s money on something that’s not going to work. But I enjoy your company, and you’re the prettiest thing this town has seen in years. If you want to do something crazy like spend your time with a fat, bald, old man like me, I won’t tell you not to.”

She laughed in delight. “Duane, there’s no one in Tall Pines that I’d rather be with. Thank you.” It was almost true, what she said. It was close enough to the truth that her conscience didn’t bother her for saying it. Even as her mouth was forming the words, though, a picture of Brad was hanging in her head. That was the part of her new arrangement that hurt a little bit: every moment that she spent with Duane, learning the ins and outs of the newspaper business, would be a moment that she could not spend with Brad.

24

She spent as much time as she could with him, though, and in fact Brad was soon regularly spending the night in her bed. There was never any thought of going back to his place – it wasn’t his place, not really, not with his father there. Sarah liked John, she truly did enjoy speaking with him and listening to his down-to-earth opinions on the world and the people who inhabited it, but when she was with Brad she wanted to be with him and only him, and pretend that the two of them were the only human beings on the entire planet. And that meant staying at her place, where they could have as much privacy as they wanted.

Her life had fallen into a comfortable rhythm. During the day she was in the office with Duane, talking through the day-to-day details and unavoidable realities of running a small-town paper. There were innumerable things to learn, from how he handled subscriptions to the editing software he used on his computer. During the evenings, and deep into the night, she was with Brad – eating with him, talking with him, cuddling with him, and making love with him. Sarah was as happy as she could ever remember. She truly felt as if she had everything that she wanted, and that her life had an almost perfect balance between business and pleasure, personal and public.