Initially, the previous night, Genie had questioned whether she was supposed to be playing such a big role. But now she was irreplaceable. The pace and the pressure were unendurable. “I wasn’t equipped for it,” she would remember, “emotionally, physically, or anything else.” Her responsibilities, and the idiosyncratic systems she’d worked up to manage them, couldn’t be easily explained or handed off to Theda. And every time Genie started to explain them, the phone rang or the counter got mobbed. “Just start working with me,” Genie finally told her, “and you’ll find out.”
