A Special Place for Women, Laura Hankin [brene brown rising strong .txt] 📗

you have to trust me. I will get you a story.” Still no sigh, just a long stretch of silence. “Are you still there?”

“Look,” he said quietly. “If you want to keep going, you keep going. I hope you can turn it around, I really do. But I can’t give you any guarantees that we’ll publish it, and I can’t give you more money in the meantime.” Another part remained unspoken: that if I’d wasted the magazine’s time only to screw it all up, it didn’t just mean that I’d never get this article published. It meant that I’d never get anything published. Not in the New York Standard, or maybe, depending on how much editors talked among themselves, not in any reputable publication.

“I get it,” I said, trying not to cry. “That makes sense.” Three heavy raps sounded at my door. “I’m busy!” I shouted.

“We just need to get into your room for a sec!” Sara said from the hallway.

“Shit, I have to go,” I said into the phone. “But I’m not going to let you down.”

He made a noncommittal noise and hung up.

I tried to swallow, but my mouth was dry. I flung open the door to see Sara and Rob, plus a large man holding a clipboard. Their contractor. “George just needs to get a sense of the layout before he can start work on the renovation,” Sara said, a big smile on her face. George barged into my room and began looking around. Oh God, how I hated them all.

“Look,” I said to Sara and Rob, as calmly as I could. “I’m going to need you to give me a little bit more of a heads-up about these things in the future.”

“Mm,” Sara said. She and Rob exchanged a look.

“In that case, we wanted to give you a heads-up that George is going to be starting work soon,” Rob said. “Like, next week.” No. What? No, no, no.

“And we know that you’re going through a tough time, and we totally don’t want to kick you out onto the street,” Sara said, still smiling brightly as my stomach dropped into the floor. “But we’ve been patient for a while, and now we think it would be best if you found another place ASAP.”

SEVENTEEN

You’d think that losing your mother would put everything else into perspective. What does it matter if you have nowhere to live and your editor/object-of-lust thinks you’re a disappointing speck of dirt? At least nobody’s dying. But, as I dragged myself to Nevertheless that night, perspective proved elusive.

Now that all the smoke and mirrors of getting into the club were a thing of the past, logistics turned out to be practical. I’d received an e-mail newsletter that afternoon with a schedule of special events for the week—it came from a bland e-mail address and said nothing about Nevertheless itself, so if you were to forward it to anybody, it wouldn’t prove anything. But still. An e-mail, just like the 92nd Street Y might send.

On the schedule for tonight was something called a “Concerns Circle.” What the hell was that? A time when women could bring up their feelings of hopelessness over the rollback of women’s rights across the country? Or simply a time to complain that the cleaning staff weren’t doing their job as well as they were supposed to? I needed to find out. Besides, the house didn’t feel like home anymore, now that George the Contractor had left a bunch of equipment all over the place, with a promise to return soon with more. I’d spent much of the afternoon searching through rental listings online. Surprise, surprise, everything was either far too expensive or a hellhole. Or both at once, as in the case of one listing for an $1,800-a-month bedroom in a sixth-floor walk-up, which claimed that it was actually a good thing that the room had no windows: one less way for intruders to get inside to murder you! There was no way that I’d be able to pay New York City rent and Nevertheless dues, if I wasn’t able to get everything done in this first month.

I’d texted Raf earlier that afternoon to see if I could crash on his couch for a little bit. I got his response in the elevator: For sure. I just went out of town for a couple days to speak at this thing (“this thing” turned out to be a fancy-schmancy culinary conference, I saw later when I Googled that modest fucker) and didn’t leave a key, but when I get back?

I was reading it as I walked into the clubhouse, my mask of control slipping right as Libby hurtled toward me. “Hey, lady!” she said, giving me a hug. She drew back, taking in my face. “What’s wrong?”

I hadn’t been planning to share the news with anyone, but in the intensity of her focus, I melted, giving her the headlines as we pulled up chairs into a makeshift circle. Her expression grew too sympathetic. “It’s not a big deal,” I said. “I’ll figure something out.”

“Well, sure, you can find a new place, but it’s not just that. It’s also losing yet another part of your mom,” she said. I blinked a few times, quickly, as around us, other women laughed, helping one another push couches into formation, complimenting one another on their upper-body strength (“Thanks, I’ve been taking an amazing boxing class at an all-female gym!”) or making self-deprecating remarks about how they’d been focusing so much on spin classes lately that they’d been neglecting their biceps.

A circle of chairs shouldn’t have a head, but this one did. Caroline and Margot sat next to each other, and the attention flowed to them. “Let’s open up the space for sharing,” Margot said, clad in wide-legged denim, hugging one knee to her chest.

“Yes, if anyone has any concerns, whether personal or more global, with which the group can help, don’t be afraid