Charley's Web Read Free

“How’s it growing? Going. I meant going, not growing,” he corrected, as if his slip had been unintentional.
    He thinks he knows me, Charley thought now, leaning back in her brown leather chair and staring past the dividing wall that separated her tiny space from the dozens of other such cubicles occupying the editorial department’s large center core. The big room was divided into three main areas, although the divisions were more imaginary than concrete. The largest section was comprised of journalists who covered current events and filed daily reports; a second section was reserved for weekly and special-interest columnists such as herself; a third area was for fact-checkers and secretarial staff. People worked at their computers for hours on end, barking into headphones, or balancing old-fashioned black receivers between their shoulders and ears. There were stories to uncover and follow, deadlines to be met, angles to be determined, statements to be corroborated. Someone was always rushing in or out, asking for advice, opinions, or help.
    No one ever asked Charley for anything.
    They think they know me, Charley thought. They think because I write about Passion parties and Brazilian waxes, that I’m a shallow twit, and they know everything about me.
    They know nothing.
    WHY CAN’T YOU JUST SHUT UP AND GO AWAY?!!!!
FROM: Charley Webb
    TO: Irate Reader
    SUBJECT: A reasoned response
    DATE: Mon. 22 Jan. 2007 10:37:06–0800
    Dear Irate: You’re mean. Sincerely, Charley Webb.
    This time Charley did press the SEND button, then waited while her computer confirmed the note had indeed been forwarded. “Probably shouldn’t have done that,” she muttered seconds later. It was never a good idea to deliberately antagonize a reader. There were lots of powder kegs out there just waiting for an excuse to explode. Should have just ignored her, Charley thought, as her phone began ringing. She reached over, picked it up. “Charley Webb,” she announced instead of hello.
    “You’re a worthless slut,” the male voice snarled. “Someone should gut you like a fish.”
    “Mother, is that you?” Charley asked, then bit down on her tongue. Why hadn’t she checked her caller ID? And what had she just decided about not deliberately trying to antagonize anyone? She should have just hung up, she admonished herself as the phone went dead in her hand. Immediately the phone rang again. Again she picked it up without checking. “Mother?” she asked, unable to resist.
    “How’d you know?” her mother replied.
    Charley chuckled as she pictured the puzzled expression on her mother’s long, angular face. Elizabeth Webb was fifty-five years old, with shoulder-length blue-black hair that underlined the almost otherworldly whiteness of her skin. She stood six feet one in her bare feet, and dressed in long, flowing skirts that minimized the length of her legs and low-cut blouses that maximized the size of her bosom. She was beautiful by anyone’s definition, as beautiful now as she’d been when she was Charley’s age and already the mother of four young children. But Charley had few memories of this time, and fewer photographs, her mother having disappeared from her life when she was barely eight years old.
    Elizabeth Webb had reappeared suddenly two years ago, eager to renew contact with the offspring she’d abandoned some twenty years earlier. Charley’s sisters had chosen to remain loyal to their father and refused to forgive the woman who’d run off to Australia with, not another man, which might have been forgivable, but another woman, which most assuredly was not. Only Charley had been sufficiently curious—spiteful, her father would undoubtedly insist—to agree to see her again. Her brother, of course, continued to shun contact with either of his parents.
    “I just wanted you to know that I thoroughly enjoyed your column yesterday,” her mother was saying in the quasi-Australian lilt that clung to the periphery of each