“You want me to what?” Anna said. Her eyelids felt heavy and pained her when she opened and closed them.
“Call her, will ya,” her editor said as he flipped through the unorganized piles of newspaper and timecards on his desk.
“We need an updated story for Monday's issue. It's going A1.”
Anna imagined if this were 1950, her editor would have extinguished the cigarette pinched between his fingers at this point in the conversation. Instead he took a quick gulp from an energy drink can.
Anna wasn't prepared to argue with the editor she'd only had for a few months.
Her options were simple: feel like a human being or… well… not one.
Anna knuckles were turning white as she clinched the back of one of her editor's office chairs. When she relinquished the whicker material, she was surprised by the amount of sweat her palms left behind.
There hadn't been a fatal case of plague in this county for over three decades. Anna was under the impression the plague only affected rats aboard ships and Middle Ages-era Europeans.
There were fewer than 50 nationwide cases in the entire decade. And here Anna was, contemplating calling a mother whose daughter played concert cello hours before dying from the plague three days ago.
It was Mother's Day.
The photo sent along in the press release promised the story a lot of page views. A blond haired beauty with dark green eyes and an endearing set of freckles, Tessa Haven looked like the ideal babysitter Anna dreamed of as a kid. Anna wondered if she was a lifeguard. To a young Anna, there was nothing better than being a lifeguard.
Anna's editor wanted a quote from the dead girl's mother. Or at least he wanted to say they'd tried to get a quote from the dead girl's mother.
Anna cringed at the thought. She imagined the once well-known Olympic swimmer answer the phone with a quivering, “Yes?”
Anna would bet her entry-level journalist's salary Betty Haven let one postman after another hand her an arrangement of flowers today.
She was the mother who lost her only daughter on Mother's Day.
Anna's fingers hovered over her desk phone's keys.
Had someone asked her yesterday if she'd ever call a grieving mother on Mother's Day to ask for a quote, she would have answered surely.
No way.
It can wait.
Was the public curious about how Mrs. Haven felt? Yes. But was it worth disturbing a distressed woman in the first few days of being daughterless on a day that celebrated her motherhood?
No way, no how.
Yet, her fingers still hovered above the illuminated phone keys. The dial tone became white noise.
Journalism was supposed to be easier than this, Anna thought.
As long as she cared about the community, cared about justice, cared about telling the truth, everything would work out just fine she was told by her tenured professors.
Did those tenured professors never have to call a dead girl's mother on Mother's Day?