The Neighbor Favor(25)
Unfortunately, however, Lily wasn’t wrapped in her hot nameless neighbor’s heady embrace. She was at the office. She hurried to stop her alarm, which signaled that it was six thirty p.m., aka time for her to go home. She was making a conscious effort to be out of the building before seven p.m. every day in an attempt to achieve the elusive work-life balance people were always talking about.
Her stomach grumbled, and she leaned back and stretched her shoulders and neck, looking around at her empty floor. Almost everyone else had already gone home except for Lily and Edith. They were the only members of Editorial on the sixteenth floor because Edith had refused to give up her corner office when the rest of the editorial groups in their division had moved to the fourth and fifth floors. Lily’s cubicle was smack-dab in the middle of Ad Promo and Copyediting. Her colleagues were nice enough and always greeted her in the morning, but they pretty much kept to themselves out of a sense of self-preservation. Everyone knew to avoid Edith’s corner of the floor, lest they incur her wrath for simply breathing outside of her door. When she was first hired, Lily used to go to lunches once a month, organized by a couple of the other editorial assistants but then those assistants were promoted, and the lunches stopped happening. It wasn’t like Lily was able to attend that many anyway. Edith always needed Lily, so she mostly ate lunch at her desk.
She could hear Edith mumbling to herself in her office now, mere feet away from Lily’s cubicle. For the last three hours, Lily had been hunched over, doing line edits on a manuscript about the various infections discovered during the Renaissance. She needed to hand the line edits in to Edith at the end of the week, though, so that meant she was taking this manuscript home with her.
She gathered her things and tried to ignore the state of her messy desk. Stacks of manuscripts in various stages. Advanced reader copies piled high, and boxes of foreign editions that needed to be opened. In a beloved corner sat a small stack of children’s books that she managed to snag from the free bookshelf in the hallway near the copy machine. She’d clean her desk soon. That was what she always told herself. Once they got through the summer launch presentation. Once she mailed out author copies. Once she tracked down some Lysol wipes. Once, once, once.
She grabbed her bag and switched out of her flats for her Keds, planning what she’d eat for dinner. Then: “Lily, I need you!”
Lily jerked and cringed at the sound of Edith’s high-pitched voice. She quickly walked over to Edith’s office and found Edith peering at her computer screen, palms pressed against her temples. Her dark blonde hair was cut into a short bob, and she wore a black button-up and a long black skirt. She always wore black, with the occasional gray sweater or slacks thrown in, which made her look even paler. She was like a distant and unpleasant cousin of the Addams Family.
“What’s wrong?” Lily asked, coming around to stand by Edith.
Edith pointed at the screen. “I can’t remember how to attach a document to an email.”
“Oh,” Lily said, fighting the urge to sigh. “I’ll help you.”
For what felt like the millionth time, Lily showed Edith how to properly attach a Word doc. Edith frowned and shook her head. Sometimes she pretended she was much older than someone in her early sixties, like the concept of technology simply escaped her and there was nothing to be done about it.
“This godforsaken policy to save the environment is really a pain in my butt,” Edith said. “I miss the old days when you could mail a manuscript to an author and let that be it. Now I have to save paper and do everything electronically. It’s your generation’s fault. You’re always trying to crusade for something.”
Lily smiled tightly and shrugged. It had actually been senior members of the finance team at Mitchell & Milton Inc. who’d realized the company could cut costs by spending less money on paper, and an added bonus was that it was good for the environment. But in Edith’s eyes, millennials were to blame for everything wrong in the world.
“Have you set up a lunch with that agent from Walton Literary?” Edith asked.
Lily quickly glanced at the time on Edith’s computer: 6:41 p.m. She was growing hungrier by the second. “Um, no, not yet,” she said. “I haven’t had a chance to, but I will.”
“Lily.” Edith shook her head. “You’ve been here for over two years and haven’t even talked about acquiring anything yet. That’s not how you get ahead in life, you know. You have to meet with agents and look through your submissions. Get some gumption, girl. I can’t hold your hand forever. You’ll never achieve what I have if you don’t make the effort.”
It took all of Lily’s strength not to jerk her head in surprise at Edith’s words. Hold her hand forever? There was no hand-holding taking place whatsoever. Lily had been left to fend for herself and find her own way from day one. Working with Edith was like being an abandoned toddler in a crosswalk during rush hour.
Edith always did this, though, chastised Lily about her so-called lack of effort. She never acknowledged that Lily didn’t have time to set up her own agent meetings or sort through her own submissions because she was always accompanying Edith on her agent meetings and reading through Edith’s submissions and editing Edith’s books. Just this afternoon Lily had to catch a cab all the way downtown to SoHo to meet Edith where she was having lunch with one of her authors because she’d forgotten her favorite notepad at the office and needed Lily to bring it to her. If Lily spent her days doing things like transporting Edith’s notepads across town, when was she supposed to find the time to build her own list? She was basically the only reason that the Edith Pearson Books imprint was still functioning.