The Next Best Thing Read Free Page A

pulled a dollar out of his pocket. And handed it to me.
    I started to punch the button that would connect me to Gary. Then I stopped. Should I tell Dave first? I certainly could, now that I’d gotten the Call. He’d want to know. Maybe he’d even want to celebrate. Or maybe I should sneak out of the house, head to the airport, and buy myself a ticket to Hawaii, where he was vacationing, to tell him in person. I knew where he liked to stay, which flights he would have taken, his favorite restaurants on every island. Whether I’d be a good showrunner remained to be seen, but I had been an excellent assistant. The hard part would be getting past Grandma. “Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me,” she’d say, and point out that I had already had my heart broken once by a Hollywood writer and that I should endeavor to make new and interesting mistakes rather than repeating the ones I’d made before.
    She was right, I thought, and picked up the phone and called Gary. “Good news?” he asked, and I bounced on the bed, smiling as I said, “The best.”

TWO
     
    M y love affair with television began when I was eight years old. It started—as so many things do—with The Golden Girls.
    When I was three, my parents were driving on the Massachusetts Pike, on their way from their house in Framingham to dinner with friends in Worcester, when their station wagon hit a patch of black ice. The car skidded over the guardrail, flipped over twice, and then burst into flames. My mom and dad died, and my car seat broke free of its straps and went flying through the windshield. I broke an arm and a leg and most of my ribs on the right side of my body—the side I’d landed on—but most of the damage had been caused by going face-first through all that glass.
    My mother’s mother, Rae, had spent her life in Boston but was living in Coral Gables when the accident happened. She came north for the funeral and never left, arranging the sale of her condominium over the phone, having her furniture and clothes and dishes shipped up, moving into my parents’ house, and taking over the business of raising me.
    I’d spent chunks of my childhood in hospitals, undergoing and then recovering from various surgeries intended to repair the damage the accident had done. The longest stint was the summerbetween second and third grades, when I stayed at Shriners Hospital of Boston. The doctors there had big plans, a series of operations that would stretch from June to August. First, I was to have a titanium rod implanted in my jaw, to replace the shattered bone that had been reinforced with pins when I was five but was failing to grow properly. “You’ll be like the bionic girl!” my orthopedic surgeon, a jolly man named Dr. Caine, had announced. Of all my doctors, I liked him best. He had a shiny bald head that glowed under the hospital lights. He carried peppermints and plastic-wrapped caramel squares in the pocket of his white coat, and when he looked at me, he looked at all of me, not just the parts he’d be cutting and sewing.
    Three weeks after Dr. Caine finished up, I would have surgery on my face, a free-flap skin graft during which doctors would remove a rectangular piece of skin from my hip and sew it onto my cheek and chin. The danger there was reabsorption, the body taking the relocated skin and basically sucking it back into itself. I’d gone to the library after school, had snuck into the adult section and found medical textbooks there. In some cases, patients who’d had this kind of surgery looked almost normal—the new skin raised or stretched or discolored or lumpy, but the shape of their faces essentially correct. Others looked bizarre, grotesque, like they’d had bites taken out of their faces, the surgery grinding and swallowing bones and flesh. This, though, my grandmother told me in a phrase that never varied by a word, was “a state-of-the-art procedure.” I would have it, and we’d hope for the