Raul laughed and hefted the mail bag over his shoulder and let himself into Sam’s house with a Ricky Ricardo-accented, “Honey, I’m home!”
But when Raul wandered into the living room, finding two more half-empty mail bags with the contents splayed across the floor, the counters, and the tables, he realized whatever Sam had done had gotten a lot of attention. Perhaps too much attention.
“It looks like someone is popular,” he commented, dropping the bag next to the others.
“It’s all fan mail responding to my latest column.”
Sam smiled up at him from where she knelt on the floor separating the letters by topic: anxiety, depression, motherhood, abusive husband, job woes, loneliness, aging… and that had only skimmed the surface. Women carried the weight of the world on very slim shoulders that were never supposed to hold that burden alone. As a result, it was crushing them one by one. But Sam hoped to help each and every one.
“No death threats, I hope?” Raul was well aware of the many fanatical readers out there, biding their time for the perfect moment to unleash their crazy on an unsuspecting celebrity. And with 1,215 pieces of fan mail, Sam was darn near close to celebrity status.
“None that I know of… yet.” Sam’s brain was fatigued and eyes blurry from reading.
“What was the column about? The issue was sold out at every corner before I could grab a copy!”
“A woman got pregnant from her married boss after he gave her the ultimatum to either have sex with him or lose her job.”
“What did you advise her to do?”
“There’s not much a woman can do in a he-said-she-said situation like this.” Sam sighed wearily. “I want this column to change that, though.”
“How?” Raul asked.
“By changing the laws.” Sam glanced at the letters, admiring the courage of all the women brave enough to reach out for help. “But if it was me in that situation? I’d sue the boss who coerced me. Then go after the company who hired him and refused to stand behind the victim. And then demand the doctors make birth control not just available to married women, but any women who also want access to it.”
“That’s a lot of wants.”
“No, it’s a lot of needs. Generations of women are unable to thrive in a world we helped build. How is that fair? It’s time to change that.”
“How are you supposed to do that, Sam?” Raul admired the goal, but he was also a realist. “You’re one woman against a whole system.”
“No, it’s 1,215 women against a system. And I’m sure there are more out there. If this is how many women I can bring together with one brand-new no-name column, imagine if this made headlines on a bigger scale. Women could change the world!”
“If anyone could do it, it’s you.”
Fido whinnied at the front door, and Sam stood to her feet.
“Want to take Fido for a walk with me?” she asked, desperate for fresh air and sunshine.
Instead she would get steel mill smog and gray clouds, but beggars couldn’t be choosers.
Raul clipped on Fido’s halter and lead rope as Sam threw on her floral gymsuit and loafers, opting not to wear the collared Danksin leotard her mother insisted was more on-trend because Sam didn’t want the entire neighborhood—or Raul—to see every nook and cranny of her body.
Miss Posey tut-tutted from her front yard as they headed onto the street. “I hope you plan to marry that fellow,” she warned.
“Why is that?” Sam dared to ask.
“So that you can move out of here, of course. Rumor has it your new next-door neighbors are a fright. Truly terrible people, I tell you.”
“You’ve mentioned this before, but you never told me what makes them so awful.”
“I heard one of them was,” her voice dropped to a conspiratorial whisper, “incarcerated for violence. Or drugs. Or maybe it was both!”
Raul turned to Sam as they kept walking. “Did you hear that? Your very own neighborhood violent, drug-dealing villain!” As a journalist, Raul knew how a rumor could twist the truth until it was unrecognizable.
“Maybe I’ll finally get bumped down the villain list,” Sam said with a shrug.
As they passed the next-door neighbor’s yard, the front door was painted in angry words slashed across the white door:
Criminal!
Go away!
Die!
“Wow, what did your neighbor do? Work for Hitler?” Raul asked.
“I wish I knew.”
“Be careful, Sam.” Raul vividly remembered covering the story of the Boston Strangler, and only last year investigating the Ypsilanti Ripper. Both “nice guys” who could “never have done such violent crimes.” After years of lingering so close to the underbelly of society, Raul knew the horrors mankind was capable of. “Obviously people know something about them that you don’t.”
“That’s exactly the problem—I don’t know anything about them. What if everyone else is wrong? Just because someone believes something is good doesn’t make it good, and just because someone believes something is bad doesn’t make it bad.”
“You’ve just switched topics to Cook Pharmaceuticals now, haven’t you?”
“You know me so well,” Sam said, clucking Fido to pick up his pace as he stopped every couple feet to graze. “Just because a large group thinks something is safe doesn’t make it safe. The group mentality can be dangerous, Raul. You of all people should know this, considering you’ve been writing against sheep mentality for years, trying to get people to see the facts over their feelings.”
They continued walking, Fido nibbling on patches of summer-drought-beige grass as they went, until they reached the end of the street, where another For Sale sign stuck up out of a fresh patch of dirt. Before long the neighborhood would become a ghost town. Whoever Sam’s new next-door neighbor was, it was certainly scaring everyone away.
