Southern Living

T
his is a letter from your mother,” said the attorney, reaching over the desk to hand Margaret an envelope the color of stoplight red. “She wrote this a month before she died.”

Margaret noted her name in her mother’s craggy, impatient handwriting, which looked like the line of ink on an erratic EKG. She tore open the sealed flap, pulled out and unfolded the letter, then began to read:

B
y her own choice, Margaret’s workday began at five
A.M.
, about the time that Louis, the janitor, began buffing the terrazzo floor of the lobby of the
Selby Reflector
. Her job, transcribing four to five hours of thick, middle Georgia patois, required great concentration, and the daily arc of life in the newsroom did not begin until around nine o’clock, when the first reporters, still puffy-eyed from indulgences of the night before, began to mill in. Clutching brown-stained, steaming coffee mugs from Starvin’ Marvin’s, they would walk into the darkened room and find Margaret sitting at her computer, headphones on, her face ghostlike from the glowing, gray light of the monitor. The only sounds were an occasional squawk from the police scanner and the whispering clickety-clack of Margaret’s keyboard.

For three months, Margaret had been editing the new phone-in-and-vent column named Chatter, and in that time it had grown to be one of the most popular features in the
Reflector
. People quoted it on elevators in the Perry County Courthouse downtown and on the benches outside Johnny Chasteen’s Seafood Shack. Local disc jockeys called it the redneck Internet, quoting it daily with a whoop and a holler. One day, when Margaret was picking up a pair of leather slides she had had resoled at The Peach Cobbler, she
overheard a woman say, “Y’all treat me good or I’m gonna call Chatter.”

Anywhere from fifty to two hundred people called the Chatter hotline each day to leave a comment or query at the sound of the beep. They wanted recipes for homemade fried pork rinds. They wanted to know who stole the sofa off their front porch or who could tell them where to find the best barbecue in Perry County. They called to condemn the owners of the new We-Bare-All that had opened up in the old Stuckey’s building on the interstate west of town.

Lonely alcoholics would call in the middle of the night, verbally stabbing at anything that might make them angry: news anchors who talked too fast, teachers’ vacation time, a neighbor’s barking dog, an editorial that frightened them, dishonest refrigerator salesmen, Dillard’s underwear ads. As the first and only Chatter editor, Margaret felt like Selby’s psychiatrist. Despite her newcomer status, she had a feel for this city’s collective values and paranoias, a verbal patchwork quilt composed of nonmatching yet oddly compatible sound-bite squares: Jane Fonda and guns and smoking and Jesus Christ and rude cashiers and chitlins and birth control and kind strangers on the corner of Mulberry and Second.

“ ’Mornin’, Margaret.”

Harriet Toomey walked up and set a pile of manila folders onto her desk, then patted the back of her impeccably tamed silver beehive. Even after three months, Margaret still could not stop staring at Harriet’s hair, voluminous and oblong like the cotton candy she remembered from the Erie County Fair. When she first saw it, she thought, “So
this
is why it’s called a beehive!” It was easy for Margaret to imagine something going on inside.

The
Reflector
’s food editor for sixty-one years, Harriet appeared to be about eighty, and she produced on her own an entire page of food news for central Georgia readers every Wednesday. Her column,
Thanks for Askin’
, answered readers’ questions about the food in their lives, even though for lunch each day Harriet ate Wheat
Thins topped with processed cheddar cheese from a can she kept in her desk.

Margaret took off her earphones. “You’re here early today,” she said.

“I’m fixin’ to leave town,” Harriet answered. “I’m goin’ down to Valdosta to see my great-granddaughters, and I got to get these pork recipes done.”

Harriet sat down in the cubicle next to Margaret’s, the only other cubicle in the newsroom free of rebellious, visual declaration. Most journalists seemed to have a burning desire to be noticed and unique and irreverent, and they used their desks to make statements about themselves. Some had pinned up cutouts of comic-book strips with disparaging remarks about some authority figure. There was also a dancing porcelain hula girl on springs, and a bust of Shakespeare entwined with a feathery purple boa. Jason Nohr, the education reporter, kept a headless Barbie on his desk to use as a stirring stick for his coffee. The doll’s legs, permanently stained, appeared to be covered in suntan-colored pantyhose.

“You look tired, Margaret,” Harriet said.

“I was up late, Harriet. My cat’s stuck in a tree behind my house.”

“Oh, no!”

“He’s been up there for five days.”

“Five days!”

Margaret nodded.

“Five?”

“Shouldn’t I be worried?”

Overnight, while dusting Harriet’s desk, Louis had nudged a bookend of gold-painted plaster hands in prayer from its position, and the cookbooks had fallen over and lay on the desk like a row of expired dominoes. Harriet set about pushing them back into place and aligning the spines so they were flush.