Caregiver

Prologue

From Dan Shoemaker’s Gmail

Adele O’Dair to me

show details 2:49 PM (1 hour ago)

Hi Dan,

Sorry for the delay in getting back to you on the CAREGIVER manuscript. Dan, I think this is a wonderful, innovative, and heartfelt piece of writing.

But.

Memoirs, which were all the rage just a couple of years ago, are becoming a bit passé these days and, to be blunt, I really don’t think I can find a suitable market for it. As your agent, I feel it’s my responsibility to tell you when something works and when it doesn’t.

CAREGIVER was really touching (even a crusty old Brooklyn broad like me teared up at a few of the scenes), but you’re about art and I’m about business and I just don’t think, from a business standpoint, the time for this is now.

Of course, by walking away from this, I am giving you my tacit permission to shop it around yourself (just don’t go to another agent behind my back, okay? Otherwise, I’ll have to come out there and kill you).

Now, send me some more of that romance you were starting to write. That, I can sell!

Best,

A

“What the f**k?” Dan whispered to himself, staring at the passionless prose facing him on his monitor screen. He had spent the last year and a half pouring his heart, his mind, his soul, and sometimes even his sweat into the manuscript.

The story was solid. It made you laugh. It made you cry. It made you think. There was timeliness and social relevance to it. It resonated. It had “sand,” as his old college creative writing teacher would have said.

What did that b***h Adele know anyway? He contemplated just hitting reply and summarily firing her ass. He could probably do better on his own. After all, what had she done for him, other than sell a popular line of romance mystery novels that had landed him here, in a house on a bluff above Seattle’s Lake Union, with views of not only the water but the Cascade Mountains as well, when the sun deigned to show itself? Yeah, what had she done for him other than ensuring he was set for life, even if he never wrote another word? What had that b***h done for him other than help to spawn a legion of fans that eagerly awaited his next book… as long as it wasn’t Caregiver?

Not much. Dan rolled his eyes.

He got up from his glass-topped desk and peered from his second-floor office out at the perfect June day spread out before him. The sun shone brightly. A few cumulus clouds floated high up, just enough to break up the monotonous, crystal-clear blue expanse of sky. The Cascades, in the distance, looked slate-colored, still topped with white snow. On Lake Union, a seaplane landed and sailboats lazily cruised the calm waters. Just another day in paradise, here in the Pacific Northwest.

A day that had no deference for Dan’s mood, which was lousy.

Adele had been the first person he had allowed to read Caregiver. The book had been too personal, too close to his heart to let anyone else see it, including the able-bodied gentleman who shared hearth and home with him and who was, right now, downstairs, sunning himself on their deck. Now he certainly would have had an interest in the story, but the time wasn’t right for sharing it with him.

And she had called it a memoir! When had he said it was a memoir? He plopped back down at his desk, brought up his correspondence folder, and looked at the submission package he had sent her the week before. And there it was, right in the first line of his note: a novel. Not a memoir.

So what if the story was set in Tampa, where he had lived? And big deal if the main character shared the same name, the humble yet forthright Dan, with him! And who would care that Dan had actually been thirty years old at the start of 1991, a new transplant to Florida from Chicago, and had joined the Tampa AIDS Alliance Buddy Program as a way to meet people and make some friends? All those attributes were the same as his protagonist’s, but that didn’t mean that main character was Dan Shoemaker.

The book was a novel, a story, a romance, just as Adele wanted. Literary agents! They were business people. What did they know—really—about literature?

He clicked through his documents folder and found Caregiver. He brought it up on the screen and began to read.

It was just fiction. So why, with the very first line, was his vision blurred by tears and his swallowing blocked by a lump the size of an orange in his throat?