Chapter Five
As December approached, Ava and I were both doing well professionally. The final pages of her book had been turned in, approved and it was put on the publishing schedule for early spring. I was getting all the work I could handle from several different editors and enjoying working in a number of genres. I could see my skills progressing at a rapid pace.
In the months leading up to Christmas, I had been making the rounds of New York’s used book stores, slowly filling in the holes in Ava’s magazine collection. She was crazy for the illustrators who appeared in “Colliers”, “Woman’s Home Companion” and “Ladies’ Home Journal” during the teens, twenties and thirties. I had been stashing them at my parents’ house so that she wouldn’t find them before Christmas.
“I suppose you’ll b
