By the Book Read online

  By the Book

  Mary Kay McComas

  To everyone who ever worked at

  Bantam Loveswept, thank you

  Contents

  CHAPTER ONE

  STEP ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  STEP TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  STEP THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  STEP FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  STEP FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  STEP SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  STEP SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  STEP EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  STEP NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  STEP TEN

  A Biography of Mary Kay McComas

  CHAPTER ONE

  STEP ONE

  In the long run, we hit only what we aim at.

  —Henry David Thoreau

  Henry had a point. A good one. Determine exactly what it is you want. You can’t have your way unless you know which way you want to go. Be practical. Be realistic. Reach for the stars ... but stay in your own galaxy.

  WAITING FOR A BLUE, two-tone station wagon to back out of a parking space in the crowded lot at the supermarket, Ellen Webster looked up in time to see a woman in a green Volkswagen swing around the corner just as the elderly couple pulled away, and drive straight into the open space. ...

  A short time later, while waiting at the deli counter, she watched a small child topple a display of boxed crackers. She stepped forward to help the harried mother set the disarray right. When she set the last box in place, she turned to see she’d not only lost her place in line, but the mother and child were walking away with enough thin-sliced bologna to plug a pothole in a country road. ...

  A portly, out-of-breath man with thick glasses and a cane bumped into her shopping cart with his at the checkout counter.

  “Oh. Excuse me,” he said, squinting to see her.

  “No problem,” she said, backing up a bit to let him go first.

  “I think you were here before me.” He was wheezing heavily, as he swung an arm wide to usher her through.

  “That’s okay,” she said, noting his pallor and the thin layer of perspiration on his brow and upper lip. “You don’t have much there. Go ahead of me.”

  “Thank you.” He pushed his cart into the narrow aisle as the person in front of them paid her bill and gathered up her groceries.

  The man fished around in his cart and picked up the first thing he touched, a head of rusty iceberg lettuce, and set it on the moving belt. She frowned. Poor guy. Can’t see well enough to get a good head of lettuce, she thought, watching it travel toward the cashier.

  That was when the sirens began to blare and the store lights started to flash off and on. Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony came blasting over the loudspeakers.

  “What? What?” the man cried out in confusion, raising his cane in the air, swinging it back and forth.

  “Congratulations, sir,” she heard the teller tell him as she ducked the cane. “It’s Lowry’s tenth anniversary and you’re our one hundredth customer today. You’ve just won five hundred dollars, sir!”

  “Well, fancy that,” he said.

  Fancy that indeed. She released a sigh of abdication that she’d been holding in her lungs for half her lifetime. She closed her eyes and bent her head, wagging it slowly.

  It wasn’t that she hated her life. She didn’t. For the most part, it was self-designed and tailored to fit her perfectly. Still, there was this unshakable suspicion that something was terribly wrong with it.

  If the meek were to inherit the earth, she wasn’t getting her share. Doing unto others as you would have them do unto you was simply another dogmatic dud, if you asked her.

  Good guys always finish last was an adage that better depicted her life.

  Only the good die young was an expression that was beginning to make absolute sense to her.

  What was she doing wrong? she wondered, not for the first time, as she opened her eyes to see the fat, blear-eyed man waving five crisp one-hundred-dollar bills in her face.

  She smiled weakly at him, knowing he wouldn’t be able to decipher her insincerity. Let a smile be your umbrella, people said. All she ever got was a mouthful of rain.

  She backed away from the checkout stand, where the manager was shaking the winner’s hand and posing for pictures, and moved three aisles down to a line that was still moving.

  Politely encouraging other people to take the winner’s position in front of her was becoming a terrifying and familiar experience. Just that morning she’d accidentally discovered that the young girl she’d trained as a teller at the bank was not only making fifty cents more an hour than she was, but was also being considered for the temporary loan officer’s job that would be opening up when Mary Westford went on maternity leave.

  Last month her sister, Jane, had complained that she was tired of the same old summer resort she and her family had been vacationing at for the past few years. Ellen merely mentioned how much she’d enjoyed the quiet little seaside town of Rainbow Beach the summer before. There wasn’t a room to be had when she’d called around the village four days earlier, and yet somehow her sister had managed to find a condo for three whole weeks.

  She stepped to the front of her shopping cart to unload her groceries onto the rolling black belt. Apples. Onions. Gourmet cat food. Breakfast cereal. Shampoo. Gourmet cat food. Paper towels ...

  And then there was the mystery man. She sighed. So attractive. And he had that big flashy smile that he aimed at everyone but her. He’d reopened the camera shop across the street from the bank about a month ago. His shoulders were very broad. He’d been out washing his front display window that morning when the bank opened. She could see him from her cubicle in Bonds and Trusts. The muscles in his arms had strained and corded under his T-shirt when he’d reached to get the high spots; his short wavy brown hair had been streaked with gold in the morning sun.

  Why hadn’t she kept her mouth shut about him?

  “Where are you this morning?” she’d heard her friend Violet ask as she sat with her chin on her fist watching him. “I’ve answered your line twice already.”

  “My line?” she’d asked, looking at her phone to see three lights blinking on hold. “Oh. Sorry.” She’d looked at Vi and laughed at herself. “Well, it’s clear I’m not really here yet, isn’t it?”

  Vi had leaned against the wall of the small cubicle while Ellen answered and quickly dispatched her calls.

  “He’s a nice distraction, isn’t he?” Vi had asked, thoughtfully twisting a long curl of her blond hair around her finger. “Have you noticed how often he washes that front window?”

  “Who?”

  “That beautiful hunk-o-man across the street,” Vi had said with a knowing smile and a sly glance toward the front window. “Your view is better than mine, by the way.”

  “Does that mean you’re going to be standing there all day?”

  “Nah. I got work to do. I’ll leave as soon as he bends over to pick up all those paper towels on the sidewalk.”

  Ellen couldn’t help herself. She had looked. Just in time to watch him bend over and pick up the dirty paper towels, displaying for the entire world behind him a rather nice picture of the seat of his pants.

  “Okay. My day is made,” Vi had said, pushing away from the wall with a satisfied grin on her face. Then she’d grown thoughtful. “I wonder how much a good camera would cost? And how long it would take me to figure out how it works? And which film to use? And then there’s always all those lenses to get into. ...”

  “Go for it,” she’d said, understanding her perfectly. Blindly shuffling papers across her desk, she knew full well that Vi had a better cha
nce of attracting the man’s attention than she did ... and wished it weren’t true. “Your handle has room for one more notch on it.”

  Vi had laughed. “That’s why I carry the big guns, baby. Plenty of space for my notches.”

  She’d nodded, agreeing, trying to look busy and uninterested in Vi’s social life—which consisted primarily of discovering what a man would fall for, rather than what he stood for. Her idea of a truly romantic setting was something with a diamond or a sapphire in it.

  “They say,” Vi had said enticingly, “he used to work for the CIA.”

  “I heard it was the FBI.”

  Vi had laughed. “I heard he was a spy. But before I heard that, I heard he was some kind of war hero turned mercenary. I heard he’s some sort of relative to old man Blake who’s come here to help him out till he’s back on his feet.”

  “I heard long-lost son,” Ellen had said experimentally.

  “I heard nephew.”

  They’d stared at each other for a second, then laughed. How could she not like Vi? She simply was the sort of person Ellen wished she could be. Bold and sassy.

  “Maybe we should mosey on over and check out his inventory during lunch,” Vi had suggested. “Start up a conversation. Find out what’s what.”

  “Can’t. Not today. Promised Mrs. Phipps I’d pick up a few things for her at the grocery store. You go on without me. Take notes.”

  “You know what your problem is, Ellen?” she’d asked after several short moments of contemplation.

  “You mean, other than the huge flaw in my self-confidence and the total lack of sexual aggression?”

  “In addition to those.”

  “Well, no, I guess don’t know what my problem is, but I’m sure you’ll tell me,” she’d said as the phone rang again.

  “You’re too nice. That’s your biggest problem. You take better care of everyone else than you do yourself. You’re just too nice.”

  ... Bananas. Vitamin C. Gourmet cat food. Canned peaches. Gourmet cat food. Tomato paste ...

  She was too nice. Vi was right, she thought, setting a box of denture paste on the belt and looking over the rack of impulse items to the man with the thick glasses. She should have left that old man panting and wheezing over his rusty lettuce and gone ahead of him in the line. She was there first. He’d offered to let her go first. But no. To be nice, she’d practically insisted that he go before her. Now she was out five hundred dollars and she was going to be late getting back to work.

  She really was too nice. Wasting her lunch hour fetching groceries for old Mrs. Phipps when she could be across the street from the bank checking out the man in the camera shop.

  She was way too darned nice! She was losing fifty cents an hour and a promotion to a girl with a tenth her experience. She had no place to spend her vacation this year. And she was going to have to hike all the way across the parking lot to her car on top of everything else.

  She was almost angry about it, she decided with half a huff, squeezing a bag of cookies a little more forcefully than she might have otherwise, just for spite. Almost angry? What was that? she chastised herself. She had red hair. She was supposed to have a fiery temper. So where was it? Gathering a good head of angry steam was time-consuming; sustaining it was impossible for her. She was, quite likely, the only living redhead with a temper to match that of a dead blonde. It didn’t seem fair.

  That’s when she saw it. Its little green cover seemed to flash at her like a neon sign. There it was between Name Your Baby and Lose Ten Pounds Overnight, below Toilet Training Your Cat and Know Your Lucky Number and above Eat Yourself Healthy. There it was. Have It Your Way, with a subtitle of Getting What You Want.

  Granted, it was one of those five-inch mini-books that everyone sees and no one with any sense ever buys, but there it was, bright green cover, bold white lettering. Have It Your Way.

  As if a book that size could tell her how to change her life, she thought with great disdain, looking first at the cashier, then at the woman behind her.

  Ridiculous, she thought, reaching out to take a copy of Word Find, looking around once again. Her nice problem was a major disorder. She fanned the pages with a fake interest and put the booklet back. There was also that lack of sexual aggression and the flaw in her self-confidence. What she needed was an intense psychological overhaul. Not a pamphlet. Casually she ran her fingers through her hair. It would be absolutely insane to believe the solutions to her problems could be found in ...

  She flipped a copy of Have It Your Way in with Mrs. Phipps’s groceries.

  “Whoa! Hang on there. Let me give you a hand with that,” said a male voice as Ellen wrestled with a splitting grocery bag full of dairy products and fresh produce beside her car in the parking lot behind the bank. She grabbed a carton of eggs with one hand and tucked an orange under her chin with the other. “Here we go. We’ve got it now.”

  Wedged between the backseat of the car and the open door, she couldn’t see the man’s face, but she was grateful to feel the extra set of hands laboring with hers to save her perishables.

  “Oh, thank you,” she said, flustered. “Why don’t they double-bag the fruit?” she wanted to know, thrusting a stalk of celery under her arm as she guided the precarious pile of edibles back toward the seat she’d taken it from. “They double-bag canned goods. Why don’t they double-bag the fruit? Which is going to make a bigger mess if you drop it?”

  There was a soft laugh but no answer as the groceries toppled onto the seat in a heap. She pushed a thick tress of crimson curls to the back of her head in one frustrated gesture, then turned to thank her champion.

  Her heart jumped and all but fell to the asphalt with a loud splat. It was him. The mystery man from across the street. The mercenary/war hero/spy/FBI guy/loving son or nephew that no one seemed to know anything about—aside from the fact that he was darkly handsome and built like a well-paid, high-class bouncer. She felt as awkward as a teenager with a new set of braces. Smile or run? She wished the earth would open wide and swallow her whole. Why him? Why now?

  He gave her a tentative smile and a sympathetic look as he totally misinterpreted her reaction to him.

  “One of those days, huh? I’ve had ’em,” he said with friendly understanding. “You get out of bed in the morning, and from then on things run steadily from bad to worse.” He grinned, and her heart flopped around pathetically in her chest. “Doesn’t seem to be anything you can do to stop it either.”

  The sound of his voice echoed in her ears as the silence between them grew uncomfortably long. Her mind scrambled for a pithy response.

  “No,” she said.

  “Well, a day only lasts so long,” he said, preparing to go on his way again—out of her life. “And every new day is a fresh start. Tomorrow will be better.”

  “Yes,” she said, once again dazzling him with her wit. He nodded and turned, walking with a slow, easy stride around the side of the building, toward the busy street.

  “Tomorrow has got to be better,” she added, tossing a loose block of cheese atop the bags of vegetables scattered across her backseat.

  She took a deep breath, closed her eyes, and screamed silently in her soul. It was sweltering in the car, but rather than leaving her enervated as usual, the heat now seemed to fuel the irrational excitement she felt as she probed the bottom of the bag for the answer to all her problems.

  It was so little. She fanned the pages skeptically, flipped to the last page. ...

  This step-by-step procedure can be applied to any area of your life that you find dissatisfying. Try it. On your boss. On your coworkers. On your neighbors. On that special someone who has recently caught your eye. Just remember, being happy is your right, but it’s up to you to exercise it.

  Her brows lifted and her head bobbed up and down with the reasonableness of these statements. Slowly she turned to the first page and started to read.

  You have the right to be happy. This is your new mantra. Say it. “I have the r
ight to be happy.” The Declaration of Independence guarantees you the right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” So, if you’re alive, liberate yourself and start pursuing whatever it is that will make you happy.

  You can have your own way. It’s easy. All you have to do is want it badly enough. Ignoring your right to be happy is an inclination that is learned in early childhood. A time when so many of our attempts to explore our world, to seek out and satisfy our own happiness, are thwarted, and the altered behavior is rewarded with the approval and satisfaction of others. Ignoring our right to be happy is simply a bad habit we’ve learned.

  It’s time to unlearn a bad habit. Break it. Replace it with the practice of having it your way and getting what you want. ...

  No one seemed to notice she was thirty minutes late getting back from lunch. She hurried across the lobby to her desk, put her purse in the bottom drawer, and picked up her pen to look busy.

  She had a clear view of most of the bank from her seat—the tellers in their booths, the drive-by window behind them, the glassed-in offices of the bank officers. She, Vi, and Delores Shoot were lined up a few feet from the front windows in small, low-walled cubicles to show the community that customer service was a high priority at Quincey First Federal Bank.

  Quincey, Indiana, was a just-right place to live. Ellen had always thought so anyway. Not too small or intrusive. Not too big or impersonal. There were plenty of strangers in town, people she’d never seen before, to keep life interesting. People she recognized but didn’t know, to keep it comfortable. There were acquaintances she could stop and talk to in the street, to keep it friendly. And since she’d grown up there, she had friends and family there too.

  It was an unpretentious, middle-class American town, homespun and humble, and if she sometimes found it a bit boring and repetitive, she almost always assumed responsibility for her discontent. She had her faults, but shirking responsibility wasn’t one of them. There were days when she felt responsible for everything—the weather, the national deficit, the lives of her customers. ...