![]() ![]() Instead, she asked gently, “Do you love your daughter?” There was no point in being maudlin and mentioning it. Obviously, Marge knew that she and Suki weren’t young anymore, and that time had a way of pulverizing your best intentions. My Tommy and I were married for seventy years.” “I know she wanted me to be happy for her, but how could I? Suki’s a flibbertigibbet. ![]() At her age.” She snorted again, then paused. “Last week she went on one of those singles cruises-you know the ones, where they all wear Hawaiian shirts and drink purple cocktails? Anyway, today, she told me she’s getting married again to a man she met on the boat. “So, Marge, what’s the problem with Suki?” At forty-nine, she no longer found gray hair a laughing matter. ![]() Suki gave me my first gray hair when I was thirty years old. “I guess some things never change, eh, Marge?” “I’m having a little trouble with my daughter, Suki.” The caller’s flattened vowels identified her as a midwesterner. Her fans, she’d learned, were often anxious. Nora smiled, although only her producer could see it. Nora?” The caller sounded hesitant, a little startled at actually hearing her voice on the air after waiting on hold for nearly an hour. “Hello and welcome, Marge, you’re on the air with Nora Bridge. She pushed line two, which read: Marge/mother-daughter probs. A computer screen showed her the list of callers on hold. She scooted her wheeled chair closer to the microphone and adjusted her headphones. The hows and whys of her family’s destruction remained-thankfully-private. Her fans knew she’d been divorced and that she had grown daughters. Even the previous week when People magazine had featured her on the cover, there had been no investigative story on her life. She had managed her career with laserlike focus, carefully feeding the press a palatable past. Each night she brought her own regrets to the microphone, and from that wellspring of sorrow, she found compassion. There was never a time in her life, barely even a moment, when she didn’t remember what she’d lost. She under-stood every nuance of need and loss. She was an ordinary woman who’d made extraordinary mistakes. It was the impurity in her heart that made her successful. Reviewers claimed that she could see a way through any emotional conflict more often than not, they mentioned the purity of her heart.īut they were wrong. The women of Seattle had been the first to discover her unique blend of passion and morality the rest of the country had soon followed. Nora had started her career as a household hints adviser for a small-town newspaper, but hard work and a strong vision had moved her up the food chain. It appeared in more than 2,600 papers nationwide. Advertisers and affiliates couldn’t write checks fast enough, and her weekly newspaper advice column, “Nora Knows Best,” had never been more popular. Part of the reason for their current wave of success was Nora Bridge, the newest sensation in talk radio.Īlthough her show, Spiritual Healing with Nora, had been in syndication for less than a year, it was already a bona fide hit. They had grown from a scrappy local station to Washington’s largest. For fifty years they had broadcast from this lot. The owners of radio station KJZZ didn’t care that they no longer fit in this trendy area. It had been built almost one hundred years earlier, when few people had wanted to live so far from the heart of the city. On a corner lot in the newly fashionable neighborhood of Belltown, there was a squat, wooden-sided structure that used to sit alone. Purple-haired kids with nose rings and ragged clothes zipped through downtown in brand-new, bright-red Ferraris. Buildings sprouted overnight, it seemed, reaching higher and higher into the soggy sky. ![]() The dot-com revolution had changed this once quiet city, and even after the sun had set, the clattering, hammering sounds of construction beat a constant rhythm. In the encroaching darkness, the streets of Seattle lay like mirrored strips between the glittering gray high-rises. ![]()
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