Oh God.

“We keep in touch, Blair and I, so when something comes across his desk that troubles him, he gives me a call. And I just now got off the phone with him. It was a very interesting call, the most amazing thing. Do you have any idea, Mr. Walker, what it might have been about?”

Sarah turned to look at me.

“Yes,” I said as evenly as I could. “I have a pretty good idea.”

“What is it, Zack?” Sarah asked.

“Why don’t you tell her, Mr. Walker.”

I cleared my throat. “I was out to Oakwood for lunch-well, actually, I never had any lunch, come to think of it, only a coffee. Which probably explains why I’m feeling a little light-headed all of a sudden. Edgy. I could use a bite to eat.”

“Zack.”

“I had lunch with Martin Benson, who writes a column for the Suburban. I think he may have been left with the impression that I was trying to get him to scrap doing a story on Trixie, which is not at all the case.”

Sarah was speechless. Magnuson was good enough to fill the silence.

“Blair says this Benson fellow told him that you wanted him to surrender his camera phone so he wouldn’t take a picture of this, this woman known as Trixie, who, I understand, has a rather unorthodox line of work.”

“She was, yes, that’s sort of true, but she was very frightened that he was going to take her picture and run it in the paper.”

“That’s what journalists do,” Magnuson said. “We take pictures of people we want to do stories on, and we put them in the paper, whether they like it much or not. I’ll bet you Sarah could explain the whole concept to you if you’re not all that familiar with it.”

“That’s who called you, isn’t it?” Sarah said. “There was no call about a Star Trek convention.”

Magnuson’s bushy eyebrows went up a notch.

“Yes,” I said. “I mean, no, there was no call about a Star Trek convention.” I was starting to feel that I’d be lucky to cover anything as newsworthy as a Star Trek convention in the future.

“It’s one thing to try to outsmart the competition when we’re trying to get a story that we want just as much as they do,” Magnuson said. “One time, when I was based in Washington, there was this little runt-nosed jackass from the paper out on the coast, doesn’t matter which one, kept shadowing me, figuring he had a better chance snooping on me and my sources than trying to cultivate any of his own. So I’m on a pay phone, and I know he’s just around the corner, but he doesn’t know that I know, and I ask for Rewrite, tell them I got a hell of a story about a particular congressman who was found dressed in women’s clothes in a whorehouse, and off he dashed. Then I told Rewrite we had to start again. Our paper didn’t have a story about a congressman found dressed in women’s clothes in a whorehouse, but his did.” He sniffed. “Never followed me around again after that.”

I laughed.

“Shut up,” Magnuson said. “You’ve got nothing to laugh about. What you did isn’t the same as what I did. You tried to steer Benson off a story to protect a friend.”

“I didn’t-”

“I can’t fire you outright,” Magnuson said. “That would involve the newspaper guild, and hearings, and back and forth and who needs that shit anyway. So instead, you can remain a reporter.”

I knew it was too soon to think I’d dodged a bullet.

“But not for city. Tomorrow, you start in the homes section.”

I was dumbstruck. Surely, firing would have been more humane.

Sarah, as well, could find no words. She looked back and forth between me and the managing editor.

“I’ll see what I can do about getting someone else for you,” Magnuson told her. “I don’t want you to have to run that department shorthanded, because, I can tell you right now, you’re going to be running that department for the foreseeable future.”

He turned back to look at something on his computer, and it was clear that we were being dismissed.

I’d been busted down to the homes section.

Sarah wasn’t going to become the foreign editor.

It didn’t matter anymore what Myanmar used to be.

“ACTUALLY, we’re not the ‘homes’ section,” the “not-the-homes” section editor told me. “We’re ‘Home!’ That’s the way we did the masthead when the paper had its redesign a few years ago.”

The Home! editor was a short woman named Frieda, and as she stood next to me while I sat at my new desk, we were almost at eye level. She wore a bright orange dress that seemed to be humming, like a transformer. She was pointing to the masthead on a copy of the Home! section spread out on my desk. The letters H-O-M-E, in brilliant blue, followed by an equally bold exclamation mark.

“I came up with that,” she said proudly. “You know how, when someone comes into your house, a member of your family, they shout ‘I’m home!’ Well, my thinking was, we take the last part of that sentence and turn it into the name of the section. It’s the punctuation at the end, that dramatic exclamation mark, that makes it, I think. It’s what separates our home section from home sections in other papers. It’s what gives this section its punch, its vitality. I think we have the best home section anywhere, and it sure is nice you’re going to be able to work for it.”

She smiled.

I thought, If I could find a home tall enough to get the job done, I’d throw myself off the roof and kill myself.

“Of course,” said Frieda, “I understand that coming here wasn’t totally your idea-Mr. Magnuson explained that to me-but I think you’re going to find working here very fulfilling. We do a lot of important stories here, and you should know that Home! is one of the biggest revenue producers for the paper. We have advertisers lined up to get into our pages, and many weeks we have to turn them away. There simply isn’t any more space for them. The presses can’t handle a section that big. Did you know that?”

“Wow,” I said. “I did not know that.”

“I’ve had this story idea percolating for a while, and haven’t had anyone free to do it, but now that you’re here, I’d like to give it to you, because you have the kind of skills, I think, to run with it.”

I steeled myself.

“Linoleum,” Frieda said. “There are so many angles, I’m thinking along the lines of a series, not just one article. What advances are being made, scuff resistance, design choices, whether the linoleum is being made here or whether we’re going overseas to get it. Is this country hanging on to its linoleum jobs, or giving them away to Mexico?”

“So it would have a political angle,” I said.

Frieda nodded enthusiastically. “I can see you’re thinking already. That’s great. Listen, why don’t I leave you to it, if you have any questions you can ask, and don’t forget that at three, we traditionally have a little biscuit break.”

I glanced up at the clock. “Gee, six hours,” I said. “I may not be able to wait.”

Frieda smiled and touched my arm before departing. I sighed and slumped in my chair. I was more than depressed. I was tired. I’d barely slept the night before. And not just because Sarah wasn’t speaking to me. There’d been a wild electrical storm around midnight. Flashes of lightning filled our bedroom with light, just long enough to see Sarah’s back turned to me. The wind came out, and I lay awake wondering whether any of the stately old oaks that surrounded the house would come crashing through the roof. Briefly, the power went out-the wired-in smoke detector chirped once, and when I glanced at the digital clock radio, it was flashing 12:00.

According to the morning news, some parts of the city had lost power, some for several hours. A great many limbs and a few entire trees had come down, taking power lines with them. But when I looked out in the morning, all I saw were a few twigs and short branches scattered across the yard and the street.