Are You Happy Now? Read Online Free Page B

cars are already full. Lincoln lets that train pass. The next arrives five minutes later, crowded also, but not hopelessly packed. Lincoln enters the rear door of the third car from the front. He shoulders his way through the cluster of passengers thoughtlessly gathered at the door and finds a spot of standing room in the aisle. Most of his fellow passengers are young and white, but because the train traverses a variety of neighborhoods, it occasionally provides a somewhat intimate mixing of race and class, one of the few places where that happens in Chicago despite the city’s proud role as the hometown of President Obama. Lincoln is standing behind an older, rather heavyset black woman wearing a wide-brimmed, old-fashioned white hat and a ruffled, patterned dress with a stiff, white, crocheted collar. Standing a few feet away, Lincoln sniffs the dull fragrance of starch. He wonders for a moment why she’s there—this hardly seems like the means or route for her to get to church—and then he privately notes with disapproval that none of the men sitting in the car has given her his seat.
    Quickly, Lincoln turns to the Times crossword, which he typically completes in the fifteen minutes or so before the train arrives at his home station, Southport. He makes a good start, filling in the doglegged top left quadrangle, before his mind drifts back to his conversation that afternoon with Duddleston. Was his boss really preparing to fire him? There was something about Duddleston’s tone—the soft suggestion of a simmering frustration, the hint that his patience has been pushed so farand would go no further. In glancing over a local book blog this morning, Lincoln had noticed a worrisome blind item: “Are changes coming to the editorial lineup of one of Chicago’s top publishers?” The blog, Big Shoulders Books , is written by Marissa Morgan, a spacey, middle-aged North Shore housewife whose wide-eyed fascination with literature gets underwritten by her rich lawyer husband. She mostly carries cheerleading appraisals of local authors, but she’s oddly well-connected and every now and then lands a surprising scoop. Did she know about something impending at Pistakee?
    Lincoln realizes that he’s in a precarious spot. He can’t afford to lose this job—not if he has any hope of rallying his fortunes. Yet the harsh little secret of the business is that Pistakee could probably make the same modest profit publishing dreck that spilled straight from the computers of writers directly onto the pages of a Pistakee book without a touch from a seasoned editor. The public doesn’t seem to care. Consumers will buy a book, or not, depending on the subject, the cover, the title, the fame of the author—and, increasingly, depending on the buzz stirred up by social media. Lincoln’s injection of editorial professionalism probably doesn’t make a whit of difference.
    After several quick stops, the train pulls into the Wellington station and unloads some passengers, but then it sits there, doors open. Annoyed at the delay, Lincoln returns to the crossword puzzle. He scratches the answers out in pen, writing almost as quickly as he reads the clues. The car doors finally close and the train moves out, and after a bit Lincoln becomes vaguely aware of a commotion behind him. At about the same time, someone suddenly clamps a hand hard on his shoulder. The grip—like that of a stern father grabbing a child—is so out of place that Lincoln reacts almost nonchalantly. He stares at the hand—male, fully grown, with the trace of an inked stamp from a nightclub discoloring the pale skin—as if it were a familiar and harmless bug that had crawled onto his shoulder. Then he follows thearm back to its owner. Lincoln sees a young, short-haired man in a yellow polo shirt, his body awkwardly stiff, his gaze turned away from Lincoln and focused intently on the back of the car. Now Lincoln recognizes the source of the percolating commotion: a mob of