Rise and Shine by Anna Quindlen Page A

with a big, barking laugh. “I sure know that.” Out back, to one side of our parking lot, two kids were blowing bubbles sitting on the stump of an ailanthus tree, the weed tree of the city so resilient that I once saw one growing out of a slag pit of chopped concrete at an abandoned urban renewal project. It was a sweet, old-fashioned scene, the puckered lips, the lifted chins as the kids followed the flight skyward. By the trajectory of their gaze, I could tell that the bubbles were flying into the fire escape on the back of our building, there to burst into little smears of soap. But it was a raw March day, with a steel gray cloud overhang, and the kids had no coats. “You two come inside and put on warmer clothes,” I called out the window, a disembodied adult voice that froze them both.
    Tequila let out a loud whoop. “Oh, girl, I know what you’re talking about. Times I say to myself, Tequila, you’re gonna get yourself in trouble. But the Lord sets a bar on my tongue.” Tequila belonged to an evangelical church, but she was reasonably fluid in her piety. My feeling was that she liked the singing. She had a beautiful alto voice; to hear her sing “Natural Woman” full-throttle was an almost otherworldly experience.
    There was a long whistle from outside my office. “Oooh, baby, you got the president on your tail, you better be careful. Cause if there’s one thing we know around here, it’s that the government, they don’t care. They don’t care about truth. They just do what they do. What. They. Do. That’s all. They gonna twist up everything. That happened to me once with the police, they were trying to mess me up every which way—”
    “Who are you talking to?” I asked, standing by her desk and digging in her candy jar for a Tootsie Pop.
    “Hold on, honey.” She put her big hand over the receiver. Tequila wore more rings than Liz Taylor, although it was hard to tell exactly what sort of metal they were made of, especially the older ones. “It’s your sister. The president of the United States is after her. She better watch out.”
    “Meghan? You’ve been on the phone all this time with Meghan?”
    “We been visiting.”
    “Put her through. Now.”
    A volcanic “huh,” a muttered explanation, and then my interoffice line bleated feebly. We’d had our phones hot-wired by a former client who’d been recruited by the telephone company for a minority hiring program. “Good morning,” Meghan said.
    “Good morning? Good morning? I am not the television audience at home. This is your sister. Where in the hell have you been?”
    “Put Tequila back on. She was much nicer.”
    “Meghan, I haven’t talked to you since Sunday. I left messages everywhere. I’ve been beside myself. I almost had the police looking for you.”
    “I bet the police you know didn’t want to find me.”
    “Oh, shut up. Why haven’t you called?”
    “Honey, in case you haven’t noticed, I’ve been busy. Kissing the brass’s ass. Making nice to the lawyers. Although I draw the line at Ben Greenstreet. If that little jerk thinks he’s going to get a private apology out of me, much less a public one, he’s stupider than I thought he was.”
    “I’ve been so worried about you. Are you all right?”
    “Me? Of course.”
    “Don’t ‘of course’ me.”
    “God, Bridge, you’re starting to sound like Aunt Maureen.”
    “And don’t try to change the subject. Why weren’t you on the air this morning?”
    “I was not on the air this morning because apparently there is some feeling at the highest level of the network that a cooling-off period is called for. For whom I am not sure. I certainly don’t need a cooling-off period. I’m perfectly cool. But since I was leaving on vacation Saturday anyhow, it has been decided that I should begin my vacation a few days early. It would have been nice if anyone had informed me of this fact so that I wouldn’t have gotten up at four in the morning and called the car