Suzanne Beecher

Dear Reader,

There's a little miracle I perform every time I'm getting ready to go out of town on business and I wish I could figure out how to do it every day. I'm not a huge fan of business trips, but one of the things I've learned from them is how to focus. I start out with a long list of things that "absolutely" must get done before I leave. But then at some point in the process my focus shifts, and I let go of anything that doesn't concern my trip.

It's a wonderful feeling to be able to concentrate on one thing at a time, to give it my all and then move on and repeat the process. When I'm out of town and those "other" things creep into my mind, I simply remind myself that I can't get distracted. I can only concentrate on my next appointment, I need to give it my all and so that's what I do.

It's good advice and I listen to it when I'm out of town, but it's been frustrating because I can't seem to perform the magic when I get back home into my daily routine--I get easily distracted. Yesterday when I was working and Abby, my cat, jumped up on my lap I stopped to pet her and her purring was so comforting. And later in the afternoon, when my daughter called to tell me that my granddaughter was most improved in her class, I felt very proud.

Okay, so maybe I do get a little distracted when I'm working at home, but you know what? I've decided that's okay. Because yesterday's distractions felt like little miracles to me.

Thanks for reading with me. It's so good to read with friends.

Suzanne Beecher
Suzanne@firstlookbookclub.com

P. S. This week we're giving away 10 copies of the book American Fantasy: A Novel by Emma Straub. Click here to enter for your chance to win. 

1

THURSDAY, 8:25 A.M.

Deck 9

The pool deck of the 'American Fantasy' never smelled worse than it did first thing in the morning on turnaround days. Elsewhere on the ship, there was occasionally a faint sewage smell in bathrooms and staircases, but on debarkation mornings, the pool deck stank of spilled beer and regret, with those light whiffs of sewage and black ship exhaust floating on top like whipped cream on a sundae. Sarah watched as the ship's cleaning crew attacked the red, white, and blue confetti stuck to the ground, wheeling their buckets of soapy water inch by inch. Abandoned glassware and beer cans sat in sad clusters around the perimeter, overlooking the scene.

Sarah didn't usually do back-to-backs, but her recently ex- girlfriend had gotten custody of their cat, so there was nothing to hurry home for anyway. An empty one-bedroom apartment in Queens was less appealing than one with a pretty girl in it. Lexie would keep the plants alive no matter how long Sarah was away, she wasn't a monster; she'd just fallen in love with a twenty-three-year-old dog walker named Plum and they were going to be very, very happy together. Sarah was staying at sea for as long as possible. She felt like one of the men who sang sea shanties on TikTok, a millennial lost in the wrong century.

Turnaround day was impressive: The crew corralled two thousand people and their luggage off the ship, cleaned every room, restocked the vast stores of food and alcohol, refueled the whale-size fuel tanks, mended anything broken, and then opened the doors to let two thou-sand different people and their oversize suitcases aboard, all within the span of half a day. Sarah and her production team had to worry about their changeover too, but their charges were the entertainers, the talent. Getting a few hungover sixty-year-olds and their guitar techs back onto dry land and welcoming a new group aboard was easy. She didn't have to wheel anything heavy down a ramp; Sarah just had to make sure no one she was responsible for jumped. It was hard to fall off a cruise ship by accident.

During her tenure at JackRabbit Productions, Sarah had started with the easy cruises: Broadway, some wellness and vaguely cultish spiritual leaders (though not environmentally conscious spiritual leaders, a narrow field). By the time Sarah worked her first heavy- lift cruises (reggae, EDM, heavy metal, comedy, all the ones with the high-est contraband rates), she was on track to be in charge. No one could do it forever. It was kind of like when Westley becomes the Dread Pirate Roberts in 'The Princess Bride'—Sarah was aware that someday she would pass the metaphorical keys to the ship to someone else, as they had been passed to her. Maybe that was true for all jobs in one way or another.

It was just past eight in the morning, and her team was striking the things they no longer needed. There was still music blasting on the speakers, as if the ship could not stand a moment of silence—she could hear Lynyrd Skynyrd's "Sweet Home Alabama" playing for probably the seven hundredth time in the last four days. Sarah would be glad when the changeover was complete, and the soundtrack shifted to the top hits of the '80s and '90s. Sarah's walkie-talkie buzzed.

"Yeah?" she said, squinting into the light. "Okay, send him up."

Sarah's good assistant was going to a wedding in Cleveland and had already disembarked. For the next five days, she would have Tyler in-stead. He'd only been at JackRabbit for a few months and looked straight out of juvenile detention, with a giant koi fish tattoo on his neck, though Sarah knew that he wasn't out of juvenile detention at all and was, in fact, her boss's nephew and had recently dropped out of the part of NYU where you could major in basket-weaving if you wanted to. Sarah kept her eye on the door that led to the elevator banks, and a few minutes later, Tyler emerged, his wide jeans skim-ming the floor, where they would no doubt collect errant pieces of con-fetti. He nodded at her, and Sarah nodded back.

"Okay," she said. "Welcome, welcome. Did you read the packet?"

Tyler made a face that was clearly supposed to suggest that he had read the packet on Boy Talk but in fact made perfectly clear that he had not.

"Here are the basics," Sarah said, already annoyed. "These guys have sold millions of records. Millions. More records than artists today even 'imagine' selling. Their fans love them, and we are here to support that love."

"Do they even sing?" Tyler asked, scoffing, as if the most impressive thing he'd ever done wasn't taking his father's sports car for slow, su-pervised joyrides around a gated community.

Sarah took a deep breath and ticked off the members of the band on her fingers. "It's Shawn and Keith Fiore; they're brothers. Shawn's the de facto leader, I'd say, you'll see what I mean. Intense. Keith is the nicest one. Corey West, who you'll probably recognize from TV, et cetera. Scotty Sanchez and Terrence Campbell. Scotty is the life of the party, a sweetheart; Terrence is kind of a weirdo. There are pictures of them in your packet and on your clipboard. You should know what they look like." She paused. "With me so far?"

Tyler nodded, his eyes glassy. There was no hope that this boy was going to retain any useful information. Sarah saw the next few days stretching ahead of her, carrying the entire ship on her back like Atlas. Boy bands had never been her thing either, and she had just turned thirty, which made her ancient compared to Tyler but a decade younger than the low end of Boy Talk's fan base, not counting the twenty-somethings who were there with their mothers. Suddenly, someone in their 'twenties' sounded so young. Tyler looked like an actual baby, even with the neck tattoo. Lexie's new girlfriend was only seven years younger than she was, but still, it felt vaguely scandalous for anyone Sarah knew to have a girlfriend who had been born in the year 2000. It sounded both impossible and illegal. Thank god the cruise would be filled with middle-aged women—Sarah didn't think she could take a ship full of Plums right now, women with no memory of taking a quiz that wasn't on BuzzFeed, for whom 9/11 was a historical fact rather than something they actually remembered.

"It's very straightforward. Bobby—he's their manager—and Shawn and their team communicate well, and everyone else shows up and is super professional. This is our fifth time working together. They're all cruise pros now." As was she. Sarah knew what they liked, what they needed. The Serenity Suites were already stocked with enough Diet Coke, Dr Pepper, and Red Bull for a herd of elephants. Sarah wasn't sure some of the guys consumed anything else the entire four days. She was good at her job, and the job did not include judgment. Sarah became Cruise Sarah (efficient, problem-solving, cheerful) for at least fifteen hours a day. It would be even easier now that Lexie wouldn't be sending photos of Mr. Whiskers every night before bed, his giant gray body stretched across Sarah's pillow. Mr. Whiskers was Plum's problem now. Sarah hoped he bit Plum's toes every morning with his tiny little razor blade teeth.

"Okay," Tyler said. He scratched his fish tattoo. "Cool." His mouth stayed slightly open, like he too was a giant koi, trying to breathe on land.

"The guests will mostly be Talkers—that's what they call themselves. Not all the guests will self-identify that way, but most of them will. They're not all moms, but they have mom vibes—drunk, horny moms on vacation." At the word 'horny', Tyler's eyebrows flickered with surprise, like he'd just heard his elementary school teacher say a naughty word. Great. Now she was babysitting on top of all her other jobs.

Middle-aged women were the ideal cruisers because even when they got drunk, they didn't start fights, and they rarely complained. There would be some heterosexual husbands and some gay men, maybe a hundred total out of the two thousand cruisers. The women were diverse in many ways—race, political views, ability, income bracket—but they were almost all women. More lesbians than Sarah had initially anticipated, which was nice and made sense once she'd thought about it. These were the guys who had launched a million sexual awaken-ings, and even if they had awakened something other than heterosexuality, they had still been present, like distant guardian angels of puberty. Beautiful teenage boys often looked like middle-aged lesbians anyway.

"Didn't Corey, like . . ." Tyler said. "Get into trouble?" He gestured with his hand, sort of like he was pretending to jerk off. He had a stack of jangly bracelets, big chunky silver things that were going to make noise and annoy her all weekend, she could just tell.

"It doesn't matter," Sarah said. "Not to us. Anyone could get wasted and crash their car and make out with a nineteen-year-old." She gave Tyler a look. "You hear me? It doesn't matter to us." Her phone buzzed.

(continued on Tuesday)

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