Excerpt from Heart on the Line       “Hi,” she said, extending her right hand. He shook it, grateful for the business-like greeting.       “Hi,” he said, resuming his seat only after she’d dropped into the chair across the table from him. She swept a thick, frizzy lock of hair back from her face and let out a breath. “Would you like a drink?” he asked.       “I’d shoot my Nona for something cold and wet.” She closed her eyes for a minute, then let out another breath. “It’s brutal out there.”       He caught the eye of a waitress near the bar and she came over. Loretta requested a gin and tonic with lime, and he settled for a Pete’s Wicked Ale when the waitress told him the bar didn’t carry Sam Adams. She disappeared, leaving him to face Loretta. Her cheeks were naturally flushed, and she had no lipstick on, no make-up at all. It made her seem naked in a way.       Her feet were naked, too, he noticed as she crossed one long leg over the other. She wore sandals but no stockings. Sensible on such a hot day—but when he gazed at her bare pink toes, her sensibility was the last thing on his mind.       “So,” she said when he failed to get a conversation going. “As far as the show—”       “I’ve seen your show,” he said, allowing privately that that was an exaggeration. He’d seen ten minutes of one show. “The Becky Blake Show. It was—”       “Which broadcast did you see?”             “This morning’s. The woman with two husbands.”       “Oh, gawd.” Loretta shook her head. “Not only did she have two husbands, but they were both assholes.”       “She deserves points for consistency,” he said.       Loretta laughed. “We taped that show three weeks ago. It seemed like a good idea then. But I don’t know if we’d do a show like that today.”       “Why not?”       Loretta leaned back in her chair, shook her foot to adjust her sandal over her instep and smiled wearily. “Ratings.”       Before she could explain, the waitress returned with their drinks. While she arranged the cocktail napkins, beverages and a bowl of what resembled trail mix on their table, Josh kept his gaze on Loretta. For some reason, his tension was draining away. This get-together was fine. Everything was cool. He was a man meeting a woman for a drink at the end of a workday. No problem.             She took another sip of her drink. “We’re not doing shows like that anymore. Our boss wants us to tone it down.”       “Tone it down?”       “No more polyandrists for a while. No more wife swappers, no more teenage tartlets, no more men who like their lovers to touch their noses in front of other women but not in front of other men.”       “So…the show is completely changing?”       “I don’t know about completely.” She lowered her drink and shrugged. “The thing about daytime TV—everything is cyclical. After the tower attack, we were told to do only uplifting shows about heroes and survivors. And we did. We did some absolutely gorgeous shows about firefighters, about ETM’s, about this couple who lived in Battery Park City and couldn’t go back to their apartment for a week, and when they got there their pet schnauser was waiting for them in the foyer with his leash in his mouth—and he’d made all his poops on the kitchen floor because he’d remembered that he wasn’t supposed to mess on the rug. One smart dog, I’m telling you. But eventually people wanted to go back to watching shows about incest and breast implants. Now I guess the pendulum is swinging again. Word from above is they want kinder, gentler shows.”       “I see.” He drank some beer and tried to figure out what the Becky Blake Show’s version of kinder and gentler would be.       “There’s this idea for the show that everyone is freaking out about,” she said. “They love this concept, for some reason.” She uncrossed her legs and leaned forward to scoop a handful of the pretzel-peanut-Goldfish mix into her palm. “Blind dates.”       He waited for her to elaborate.       “The idea would be to have people meet a blind date on the show, go out with the date, and then report back. It sounds kind of corny—but there’s as much potential that the blind date would end in disaster as that it would lead to romance. The premise has an element of suspense, which of course is very important for the Becky Blake Show.” She shrugged again. Her exposed shoulders were broad and slightly bony. She was just this side of skinny. He’d never been a big fan of women who counted calories and went into a panic if they gained an ounce. But she was eating the cocktail snack mix, popping nibble after nibble into her mouth, so he assumed she wasn’t hung up on food. “To tell you the truth, the whole blind date thing is not my idea, but Becky loves it.”       “I see.” Actually, he didn’t.       She traced the rim of her glass with an unpolished nail, then smiled again. It was a different smile from her earlier ones, more hesitant, more questioning. “So anyway, the production team thought it would be fun for some of the blind dates to involve people who work on the show.”       “Is Becky Blake going to go on a blind date?” He recalled the pert little blonde he’d seen refereeing the rival husbands on that morning’s show. He wouldn’t want to be her blind date. Everything about her had been too…pink.       Loretta shrugged again, her smile growing even more enigmatic. “As a matter of fact, the staff member they have in mind is me.”       “You?”       “They think it would be great TV to set me up with a blind date on the air. Can you believe it?”       He drank some beer, buying time to sort his thoughts. Why was she telling him this? He prided himself on being an intelligent man—he could see through scumbag landlords and venal housing authority drones without having to squint—but he couldn’t seem to get a clear picture of this conversation.       “So anyway, the thing is, I was thinking, assuming I’m stuck with this situation for the sake of my job and so on, you could come on the show as my blind date. And before you say no—” she held up her hand in anticipation “—you should hear me out.”       Her blind date. Loretta’s blind date on a nationally syndicated television show.       No.

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