Ghosts Don't Get Bylines
AYLA
By twenty-seven, Ayla Brooks had climbed Denali, survived a hostile takeover, and swum the English Channel twice, and she had done every bit of it in somebody else’s name.
Eleven books. Three bestsellers. A paragraph from one of them had been read aloud at a senator’s memorial service, and Ayla had watched the clip at two in the morning eating cereal out of the box, mouthing along to sentences she’d rewritten nine times on a train to Philadelphia. Nobody at the service knew she existed. That was the job. If she was being honest with herself, which she tried to be on weekdays, that was the entire appeal of the job.
Now she was sitting in the lobby of the most private billionaire in America with a broken toaster in her tote bag.
In her defense, the toaster was a scheduling decision. Walt’s shop closed at five. The meeting was at three. And five years of interviewing important people had taught her that first meetings ran either eleven minutes or four hours, so she had planned for eleven and packed a granola bar for the other outcome.
The lobby of Strand’s headquarters had been a foundry once, and nobody had tried very hard to make it forget. Iron trusses. Windows two stories tall, full of brown river. In the middle of the floor, under a glass case lit for a museum, sat a dented white washing machine with one hinge held on by a bent coat hanger. The brass plaque read UNIT ZERO. BUILT BY HAND, 2018. STILL RUNS.
Ayla liked it immediately, which she knew was a professional hazard. She always liked the subject on day one. It made the next eleven weeks easier and the twelfth one worse.
“Two ghosts before you,” Harriet had said that morning, peering over the reading glasses she wore on a chain like a librarian in a heist movie. “One lasted six days. She wanted to call it From Basement to Billions.”
“Oh, no.”
“The other lasted four hours. Nobody will tell me what happened in the four hours.” Harriet had slid the contract across her desk, the NDA clipped to the front of it, thicker than two of Ayla’s books. “Twelve weeks. Manuscript due the fifth of December. And, darling?”
“Rule One.”
“The book is never about you.”
Ayla knew. It was the rule she was best at. The fee on this one was enough to buy her six months of not ghosting anybody, and six months, if she was disciplined, might be enough to open the file she hadn’t opened in three years and find out whether anything in it was worth finishing. That was the plan. Disappear well for twelve weeks, and then maybe, briefly, try not to.
“Ms. Brooks?”
The woman crossing the lobby had a phone in one hand, a tablet in the other, and a handshake like she was closing on a house. “Vivian Osei. I run communications, which with Owen mostly means apologizing in advance.” She guided Ayla toward an iron staircase with a palm between her shoulder blades. “He’s going to be rude. It isn’t personal. He’s rude to the board, he’s rude to me, he was rude to the governor. He’s never rude to the line workers, which tells you everything, but you won’t see that today.”
“Good to know.”
“We need him to come across warm,” Vivian said. “That’s the brief. Warm, human, relatable. A man people would let into their kitchen.”
“His washing machines are already in their kitchens.”
Vivian gave her a sideways look. “Don’t say that to him. He’ll agree with you, and then we’re done.”
***
Owen Strand’s office did not have a desk. It had a workbench, eighteen feet of scarred maple running the length of the river windows, and on it, laid out on a towel in a precise line from largest to smallest, the disassembled pieces of something Ayla eventually identified as a dishwasher pump.
The man taking it apart didn’t look up when they came in.
He was younger than the press photos made him look, early thirties, in a gray T-shirt with STRAND faded almost to nothing across the chest, sleeves pushed up, dark blond hair that needed a cut he was clearly never going to schedule. The photos had all been taken from a distance, at events he’d obviously wanted to leave. This close, he mostly looked like a man who’d been interrupted.
“Owen,” Vivian said. “This is Ayla Brooks, from Blank Page Partners.”
“Ms. Brooks.”
“Mr. Strand.”
He set down a screwdriver with more care than he’d given the introduction. “I don’t want a ghostwriter.”
“That’s all right,” Ayla said. “Most people don’t. They want a book, and they’re upset to learn somebody has to write it.”
That got his eyes off the pump. Gray, steady, not hostile, just pointed at her with the same attention he’d been giving the impeller housing. Vivian had already retreated to the doorway. She had seen this part before.
“I signed that contract fourteen months ago,” Owen said, “because somebody else is writing a book about me, and I wanted there to be a second one on the shelf. I didn’t sign it so a stranger could make me sound like a greeting card.”
“I’ve never made anyone sound like a greeting card. A motivational poster, once. He asked for it in writing.”
“The last one wanted to call it From Basement to Billions.”
“I heard. I’m so sorry.”
“She lasted six days.”
“I’d have given her four.”
His hand stopped halfway to the screwdriver. Then he picked it up anyway. “One question,” he said. “Ask me one question. If it’s a stupid question, you can leave, and I’ll tell your agent it was my fault, which it will be, because I agreed to this meeting.”
Ayla ran the drafts in her head, fast, crossing out as she went. Draft one: Tell me about your childhood. Cut; he’d be gone before she finished the sentence. Draft two: What does Strand mean to you? Cut, and she would also have to leave the profession. Draft three: Why washing machines? Not stupid, but he’d given the same nine-word answer in every interview on record, and she could see it loaded and waiting behind his face.
She looked at the pump instead. At the parts lined up by size, like somebody had diagrammed a sentence.
“What’s the last thing you fixed that nobody asked you to?”
The screwdriver stopped.
It wasn’t a long pause. Maybe two seconds. But Ayla had spent five years learning to hear the difference between a man deciding what to say and a man remembering, and this one was remembering.
“The coffee machine on three,” he said. “Tuesday.”
“What was wrong with it?”
“Grinding noise. A month, at least. Scale buildup on the burr carrier.” He said it the way other people reported the weather. “Nobody filed a ticket, because everybody assumed somebody else had. It took eleven minutes.”
“That’s your book,” Ayla said.
“That’s a coffee machine.”
“It’s a man who notices the thing nobody filed a ticket on, and fixes it without telling anyone, and then tells a stranger it took eleven minutes like eleven minutes is the impressive part.”
He looked at her for a long moment. “That’s a press release,” he said. “Not a sentence.”
“Then give me better sentences. That’s the whole arrangement. You give me sentences, and I make them sound like you on a good day.”
“I don’t have good days. I have days.”
“Okay, counterpoint: you fixed a coffee machine for a floor full of people who will never know it was you. That was a good day. You just don’t count them.”
From the doorway, Vivian made a small noise that she turned into a cough.
Owen’s gaze dropped, not to the pump, but to Ayla’s tote bag, where three inches of frayed power cord had worked their way out over the edge. “Your toaster’s heating element is gone.”
“How could you possibly—”
“Scorching at the strain relief. And it’s a Kessler two-slot. They all go at four years.” He tilted his head. “It’s four years old.”
It was four years old. Ayla, who couldn’t have told you within a decade how old her winter coat was, felt caught out. “I’m taking it in to be fixed.”
“Good. Don’t replace it. They’re built to die so you’ll buy another one.” He said it with real contempt, the first strong feeling she’d seen out of him, and it was about a toaster. Ayla made a mental note in capital letters. “Take it to someone who repairs things.”
“I have a guy.”
“Good,” he said again, and looked, for one second, more satisfied with her than he had been with any of her answers.
“Vivian says you need to come across warm,” Ayla said.
“Define warm.”
“Human. Somebody a reader would let into their kitchen.”
“My appliances are in two million kitchens.”
“Your appliances are better at small talk than you are.”
That time it got as far as his eyes before he shut it down. He set the screwdriver on the towel, at the end of the line where it belonged, and wiped his hands on a rag older than some of his employees.
“One week,” he said. “Follow me around. Ask what you want. If I hate it, you’re gone.”
“If I hate you, I’m gone first.”
He considered that with the same attention he’d given the burr carrier.
“Fair,” said Owen Strand.
***
Liberty Avenue at twenty to five smelled like bus exhaust and somebody’s garlic, and the bell over Walt’s door gave the same cracked two-note greeting it had given her for four years. Nobody in Bloomfield called the place anything but Walt’s. Its sign had been hidden behind a sagging green awning for as long as Ayla had lived six blocks away, and she had never once thought to look underneath it.
“My favorite customer,” Walt said, from behind a counter crowded with vacuum parts and a radio playing a ballgame to itself.
“You say that to everybody.”
“I say it to you and Mrs. Kaminski, and Mrs. Kaminski’s on probation. She bought a new microwave instead of bringing me the old one.” He held out his hands for the toaster like it was a casserole she’d brought over, turned it once, and squinted at the cord. “Element’s gone.”
“Everybody keeps telling me that today.”
“My kid would tell you a toaster that dies in four years was built by somebody who wanted you back in the store in four years.” He was already writing up a ticket on the old carbon-copy pad, pressing hard with a pencil. “He’s got opinions about toasters.”
“He sounds like a lot.”
“He’s a lot of things,” Walt said fondly. “Opinionated’s the one he’s proudest of. Parts for these take a week, maybe more. I’ll call you.”
Ayla took the ticket, folded it without reading it, and dropped it into her tote bag next to the notebook where she had written eleven minutes and underlined it twice, and she spent the walk home and all three flights of stairs above the bakery drafting and redrafting the first line of a man who didn’t want one.
At the bottom of the bag, the ticket’s header said, in faded blue capitals: STRAND & SON REPAIR. EST. 1962.
