It Will Come to Me by Emily Fox Gordon

isn't he among us now?” said Ruth, registering in some remote cerebral listening post that with this blunt-ness she'd gone too far.
    Mitten-Kurz sighed. It was a sigh she'd sighed before, Ruth could tell, the sigh a dean sighs when she is forced to deal with an unreasonable petitioner. “That … decision … came out of a long and complex and sometimes … difficult … conversation among the stakeholders.”
    “The stakeholders? Who are the stakeholders?”
    “Well,” said the dean evenly, “the stakeholders are exactly who you'd expect them to be.”
    “The tenured English faculty,” said Ruth.
    “Yes, and elements of the administration. And the board has a certain amount of input. There was a feeling among the English faculty that Professor Muldoon didn't entirely represent thecurrent thinking in the field. As I think you know, I myself am a sociologist. When I don't know much about a subject I tend to defer to those who do.”
    Ruth felt the intended dig. She also registered a suspicion that in fact the dean knew quite a bit about the current thinking. So did Ruth, but something told her not to let on about that. If Mitten-Kurz could play the innocent, so could she. Best to stand her ground as an indignant amateur. “Am I,” she asked, her voice once again quavering involuntarily, “am I not a stakeholder?”
    “Well of course—”
    “Do I not read? Do I not
think
about what I read?”
    The dean had thrown up her hands now, and was smiling a tender, ironic smile in the direction of some imagined auditor. The
characters
we have here in our academic community, that smile said. The irritating characters who are nonetheless a vital
part
of that lively community.
    “Stakeholders,” said Ruth, who knew she was speaking too loudly and no longer cared. “Are not all we readers stakeholders?” (Should that have been “us,” not “we”? She was stumbling over her own inverted syntax.) She tried again. “Why can't we all be stakeholders? In literature?” That didn't sound right either, but she'd be damned if she didn't get some use out of this appropriated trope, even though Ben, trapped in conversation across the room, had just shot her a look of horror. “Let me put it another way, Dean Mitten-Kurz. If academics are the only stake—”
    But gentle fingers had closed around her upper arm. It was Marjorie Brautigan, her quiet across-the-street neighbor. “Ruth,” she whispered—Marjorie was an anxious, tentative, helpful soul. “People are starting to get hungry? I've been trying to get the table organized? I don't know where you keep things?”
    The potluck. Ruth had completely forgotten. It seemed a new dispensation had begun because in the twinkling of an eye Mitten-Kurz had melted away and now Ruth was sitting on a stool in her disorderly kitchen drinking another glass of wine while Marjorie and—to her slightly numb surprise—Charles Johns were taking charge of the chaos of casseroles and baking dishes and salad bowls on the central island. They had transferred what was salvageable of her chicken chili into a microwavable glass bowl and left the blackened pot to soak in the sink. “Thank you,” she said to them a number of times as they methodically ferried the potluck offerings into the dining room, around which she could see that guests were beginning to cluster like deer at a salt lick. “Thank you so much. I can't tell you how grateful I am.”
    Then she was sitting outside on the back steps among a group of four smokers, holding in her hand yet another glass of wine. She could be sure it was new because it was white, not red as the previous ones had been. One of her companions was Brad Sonenshein, a veteran graduate student famous for being unable to complete his dissertation. Another was his chronically exasperated girlfriend, Danielle, whose last name Ruth had forgotten. The third was a chunky young man with a head of glossy dark curls. She'd seen him before but had never caught