The 12 Days of Liz: Day Twelve: Phoning It In

I like it when my POV characters have to do two things at once. More is even better, but I’ll take two. Anything that makes life harder for them is good. In this first Liz book, I have a character who can’t be in town with Liz but has to be strong on the page, the client Liz is ghostwriting for, Anemone Patterson. Solution: the phone.



Anemone calls Liz at least once a day, either nagging her to get to Chicago (Liz is trying) or asking for updates on what’s going on. She calls at pretty much the same time every day, which means that Liz is in the same place the first three days she calls, so I have a nice three-beat that can go haywire with everything else in the third act, plus it’s a subtle way to say “Twenty-four hours have passed,” giving readers something to hold onto as the plot rushes by. Mostly, though, Anemone always calls when Liz has something else she’s dealing with, and that makes life a lot more complicated which is bad for Liz and good for the book.

This is a chunk from the middle of one of those scenes:

The car door opened and Skye Blue slid into the front passenger seat. “I need to talk to you,” she said, looking over the seat at me, her face grimly pretty.

Obviously slouching hadn’t helped, so I sat up. “I’m on the phone with a client.”

“Who’s that?” Anemone said.

“Skye Blue, sister of the bride,” I told her.

“Skye Blue?”

“I’ll wait until you’re done,” Skye said.

“No,” Anemone said, “really? Skye Blue?”

“Sister Lavender and brother Navy,” I said, and Skye rolled her eyes.

“I assume her mother is a crack whore?”

“Drunk,” I said, and Skye jerked her head up. “Probably pills, too.”

“Is the daughter still there?”

“Yes, she’s waiting for me to get off the phone, but she doesn’t realize that this is a very important business call, so I can’t hang up, and she’ll have to go. Now, what do you want to tell me about this Linda person?”

“Lindsey. Nothing.” Anemone clipped off the word again. “You go ahead and talk to poor Skye Blue. That tells you everything you ever wanted to know about her mother. And when you’re done, get your butt up here.”

“Tomorrow,” I said. “I have to get rid of six hundred bears tonight, but tomorrow–”

“Bears?” Anemone said.

“Hello?” Skye said. “I need to talk to you.”

I sighed. “Make it fast,” I told her. “I’m on the phone.”

Skye smiled at me, as cute as could be. “I talked to Molly and she said you were the best person she knew.”

“So you brought the very best butter. What do you want?”

“You held Veronica the whole time you were at the house last night.”

I thought of that poor, trembling, overbred animal and thought, Not my problem. “So?”

“So Lavender’s going to have her put down.”

I straightened. “What? Why?”

“What?” Anemone said. “What’s wrong?”

“Cash doesn’t like the dog,” Skye said.

“Cash told her to kill her dog?”

“Who’s Cash?” Anemone said. “Oh, wait, that’s the bastard ex who dumped you three times. And now he’s a dog-killer? You really know how to pick them, Liz.”

“No, no,” Skye said to me. “He thinks Lavender’s giving her to a nice farm upstate or something.” She leaned against the back of the front seat, closer to me. “I need you to take the little beast. I’ll leave a door open and tell them she ran away.”

I could see Veronica, frozen in terror, as Lavender stalked toward her, death in her eyes. It didn’t seem plausible. Besides, I had not come back to town to fix everybody’s problems again. “Just take the damn dog yourself.”

“I can’t, I don’t have any place to take her that Lavender doesn’t know about.” Skye pressed against the seat, those violet eyes burning into mine. “Veronica’s a neurotic little mess, but she doesn’t deserve the needle.”

“Oh, hell.” I let my head fall back against the window. First the bears, then the rock, and now a dog.

“The needle?” Anemone said. “This woman is playing you, Liz.”

“I know,” I said into the phone.

Maybe my mother would like a dog.

“And then you can just take her with you when you leave town,” Skye finished up. “And no one will ever know.”

Yeah, I could see Veronica and me on the road; that was entirely doable. Jesus. “I’m not stealing a dog.”

“I’ll bring her to you,” Skye said. “My god, Molly said you were a kind person. The dog is going to be murdered.”

“Molly lied. Look I can’t save the whole freaking town. I have my hands full with Anemone’s book and my mother’s bears. Somebody else is going to have to be the Dog Rescuer.”

“Thanks for putting the book first,” Anemone said.

The driver’s door opened . . .

And then Peri and Margot get in. It’s like a clown car, ending with the arrival of Lavender and her conversation with Skye and Liz:

“But you’re going to save the dog, right?” Skye said, and the driver’s seat door opened and Lavender slid in.

“Well, this is cozy,” she said, and the temperature in the car fell about thirty degrees.

Since it had been chilly to begin with, I said, “Okay, my client is on the phone. I’m working here.”

“So what are we talking about?” Lavender said, ignoring me to stare at Skye.

“Who’s the new talent?” Anemone said.

“You offing your dog,” I said to Lavender.

“What?”

That at least got her eyes off her sister and onto me. Progress in communication.

“This is the dog-killing bride?” Anemone said. “Oh, goody.”

I ignored her to get rid of Lavender. “As I understand it, you’re planning on having Veronica put down because Cash doesn’t want her. Skye asked me to find a home for her. The two of you should go someplace else and argue about that now.”

Lavender swung back to Skye. “You told her that?”

Skye leaned forward, practically spitting. “You’re going to have her put to sleep!”

“No, I’m not.” Lavender pulled back. “Good lord, Skye, get a grip.”

I looked at Lavender. “So you’re not going to have her put down.”

“Who the hell do you think you are?” Lavender snapped.

“I think I own this car, and I’m trying to talk to my client, and your entire fucking family has wasted a good chunk of my afternoon, but since we’re all here and chatting, I also think you’re going to kill your dog, and it’s a bad, bad idea because people will find out and somebody will tell the press and they’ll use it in the election against Cash. America loves dogs and you’re going to be a dog-killer. Huge liability. Don’t do it. Are we done now?” I looked from Lavender to Skye. “Good. Don’t let the car door hit you on the way out.”

I kept my phone clutched to my ear as I opened my laptop and clicked on the first of Anemone’s e-mails. Fucking Blues who were still sitting in my car. Fucking Burney that still hated me and threw rocks at me. And fucking Anemone who’d sent the e-mails that were downloading into my inbox now, courtesy of the Porter’s WiFi, which I was stealing without a second thought. The first one was more stuff about martinis. I should introduce her to Margot. They’d have so much to talk about—

“Now what’s happening?” Anemone said.

“I’m reading your e-mails, all ten thousand of them,” I said.

“You know,” Skye said to me thoughtfully. “I was mad at you for a minute. But now I think I love you.”

I looked up and she was surveying me again, that summing-up look that was really annoying. “Fabulous. Go away.”

She nodded and got out of the car and closed the door, and I was alone with Anemone on the phone and Lavender in the driver’s seat, frowning at me.

“Is there anything else?” I said to Lavender.

“Cash said you never lie.”

“I’m no good at it. I need to work now.”

“Why did you come back to town?”

I thought about being rude, but it hadn’t worked before, so I said, “Because my aunt MariLou wrote me and told me my mother was going crazy because I hadn’t been home in fifteen years, and I felt guilty, so I bought a two-hundred-dollar five-foot purple bear and planned to drop it off and run on my way to Chicago. And then this car broke down. Willie is trying to find the part for it now. When he fixes it, I am leaving.”

She sat there for a minute, her eyes a little unfocussed from thinking hard. I say that not to imply that she was dumb, I didn’t think Lavender Blue was dumb. But this was something she had to wrap her mind around, and I knew how she felt. The Collective-Burney-Think was that I had come home to break up her wedding. It is very hard to think outside the Collective-Think when you’re living in Burney. Which is one of the many reasons why I’m never going to live in Burney again.

“I believe you,” she said.

“Yay.”

“I want you to come to my bachelorette party tonight.”

“What? No.”

“I love this town,” Anemone said.

The big problem is that scenes like this are addictive. They’re the jelly beans of fiction, you just want to keep writing them. Well, I want to keep writing them. The key is to make Liz’s life harder with them while escalating them; the problems she’s dealing with are greater, Anemone is more demanding, Liz is more stressed. Part of that is that Anemone gets invested in what’s going on in Burney and starts to meddle, and part of it is that Liz just really wants to get to work, and everybody is making it harder for her, not just by interrupting her but by ensnaring Anemone. So I have to remember all that, to make the conversations move the plot and change character instead of just having fun with dialogue.

And oh yeah, they need to be cut back. (headdesk).