Cai Emmons is a dramatist, screenwriter, independent filmmaker, and novelist. Her first novel, His Mother’s Son (Harcourt, 2003), was a Booksense, Literary Guild, and Doubleday Book Club selection. Two of her plays, Mergatroid and When Petulia Comes, have been produced off-Broadway. The story here is excerpted from her second novel The Stylist (HarperCollins, 2007). Emmons teaches in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Oregon and is at work on a new novel.