The Ditto Effect
by Matson Sewell
part 1
Harvey never imagined that when he asked to see his only grandson’s second-grade photo, his daughter, the aspiring influencer, would text him to become her social media follower. Then he’d see all the pictures he wanted.
He set his phone down next to the sink and stared through the window as the late afternoon sun streamed shadows of gnarled branches across him and the cheerful yellow walls of the kitchen. His modest, two-bedroom ranch house was dwarfed by the massive maple tree in his front yard, its extravagant growth dividing the trunk low to the ground and exploding into a natural jungle-gym.
Almost all of the neighborhood kids loved to climb the tree, with its limb-knuckles in lucky positions providing the perfect holds for small hands, and its deep bark fissures inviting toes to dig in for the climb. The one child not drawn to the tree was his daughter, who, even as a youngster, was impervious to the enthusiasms of others. Wasn’t it a parent’s job to guide a child? His daughter, the influencer, was a one-way street. He couldn’t even convince her to send his grandson’s photo.
His phone buzzed on the white tile counter, lighting up with his daughter’s name. “Mom’s been gone for three years. It’s time for you to get out and meet people,” Sissy announced. “I’m emailing you an application for a conference called ‘Writing from Life.’ Isn’t that great? All the speakers are people who turned their life stories into fiction. One of the conference speakers is retired from the LA Police Department.”
“Chico isn’t Los Angeles, kiddo. I wrote a lot of accident reports, dealt with drunk Cal State college students and campus fights. On a wild full moon night, we’d have a scary domestic squabble. Not the stuff of bestsellers.”
He’d never brought home the cop drama, the few horrifying stories of car-mangled bodies and dead criminals as well as victims. Sissy didn’t know about the night when his partner was shot, an event that hastened his recent retirement. He couldn’t imagine trying to write that story.
“I’m sending you the application as we speak.”
“If I do this, Sissy—"
“Cecilia, Dad,” she interrupted. “I haven’t gone by Sissy since high school.”
“If I do this, Cecilia, I’m going to ask a favor from you.”
She ignored his dare. “It’s the damn passivity, letting life happen to you. You’ve got to get out there and grab life by the balls.”
He should have let it go but couldn’t resist: “I don’t see how committing sexual battery against Life is going to turn out swell for me.”
Sissy’s breath came in huffs, which meant she was pacing in frustration. He could picture her stalking around her ritzy taupe condo, out and back from her small balcony, in perfect Los Angeles weather.
“The deadline for the application is tomorrow. Do I need to fill it out for you?”
Sissy’s mother used to cajole with a hint of teasing. It made giving in a pleasure instead of a defeat. She’d insisted on the exact yellow for the kitchen walls and the bright white glossy trim. He gazed at the door jamb with three horizontal permanent marker lines about hip height where they’d measured Sissy on her birthdays before their child declared the ritual “stupid.” Each time they’d repainted, Helen recreated the marks.
“Dad?”
“I’ll send it in,” Harvey said, defeated.
* * *
For most of the morning, his laptop open on the marbled Formica kitchen table, Harvey struggled with the first challenge: write a page of information detailing your background, experience, and interest in writing and whether your area of focus was memoir, fiction or poetry. Finally, he filled a page, careful to avoid actually lying.
When his acceptance arrived two days later with a registration form, the real trouble started. First, filling in the tiny rectangles on his computer proved infuriatingly frustrating. The data spaces weren’t large enough to show everything typed in but, when he tried to scroll back and make sure the spelling was correct, the system would delete his entry. Giving up, he stopped trying to confirm each entry and hoped for the best.
Next, there was that special form of hell called autocorrect, which he couldn’t figure out how to turn off. His address on Duckwalk Terrace was autocorrected to something so pornographic that Harvey shut down his computer and paced around his sunny kitchen for several minutes before he logged on again and fixed the error.
The next aggravating prompt was “Name You Like to be Called.” He skipped that data square, which was located directly under his registration name, but the form would not submit. A little flag popped up indicating the form was incomplete, with that section in red. Harvey tried filling in “Harvey,” but it added his last name, “Winchester,” automatically. He didn’t want anyone to assume he wanted to be addressed by his full name. He considered typing in “Harve,” but it sounded like a guy trying too hard at a barbecue, and he’d never gone by a nickname.
He positioned the cursor in the space under his first name and hit the double quote marks indicating ditto. The form would not accept. Only letters were acceptable. He typed in “Ditto” and, with a loud whoosh and no time to reconsider, the registration went through.
“Perfect!” Sissy declared when Harvey told her about the acceptance and registration, minus the pornographic address struggle. “I’ll email you a list, so you bring the right clothes.”
“I’m not helpless or senile, you know.” Harvey disconnected the call.
* * *
The people on the Chico force would be horrified to witness how Sissy treated him. Or maybe they wouldn’t be horrified. They might think he deserved her disrespect as well as theirs, ever since the standoff that got his partner shot.
He began to pack. Make the best of things as they came along, just the way he always had. Because, upon reflection, whenever he went along for the ride, life turned out better than he’d dreamed of, anyway.
Helen, for instance. Two weeks before his high school graduation dance, he still hadn’t asked any girl for the date. A friend of his family called to say her daughter’s boyfriend had broken his leg. Would Harvey do them all a big favor and take Helen to the dance?
The dance was the first fun he’d ever had on a date. Helen put him at ease, sweetly shifting her weight side to side and holding onto him in a slow dance, carefully concealing the fact that Harvey didn’t know how to dance.
On the way home, when the rear tire on the driver’s side of his dad’s Buick blew out, Harvey had a chance to show off his under twenty-minute tire-changing skill. After stowing the flat and tools in the trunk, he turned to find Helen, wearing his rented formal jacket over her aqua taffeta dress, looking up at him like he was a hero. He didn’t agree with Sissy that you couldn’t just let life happen to you. Helen was the best thing that ever happened to him.
* * *
The conference hotel in the High Sierra, a building of rough-hewn redwood and glass, blended into its surroundings so gracefully the world felt right. Harvey, as he expected, felt out of place. He was too early. The registration tables weren’t set up yet, and it was another hour before room check-in. The clerk, dressed like an adolescent deputy sheriff, held his bag at the front desk while Harvey walked into the dense woods.
Careful to pick his way along the rough path cushioned with pine needles, he worried about dirt embedding in the seams of his shoes, and there was no place to sit in his khaki pants. He should’ve let Sissy send him a packing list. She would have selected jeans, T-shirts, flannel overshirts, and boots.
The tips of the magnificent mountains, still snow-capped, towered over the evergreens surrounding him. The scent, a sharp pine tang with a deep undertone of composting earth, brought back a vivid sense of his boyhood. He had gone to Mohawk Boys Camp every summer as a kid. He’d never forgotten those primordial days in nature learning how to canoe and build a fire and thread a wriggling worm onto a fishing hook. He hoped to take Josh, Sissy’s little boy, camping. But Josh lived in another state with his father, and Harvey didn’t get to see him.
He arrived back at the hotel in time to check into his room, wash his face, and wipe off his shoes. By then he was late for registration. He grabbed his room keycard and hurried to the conference area in the hallway to the right of the lobby.
Nametags were scattered in alphabetical order over two long buffet tables, guarded by a petite, gray-haired woman wearing a tan jumpsuit with lots of pockets. Harvey smiled with relief. Add a pith helmet and she could be a tour guide for a group of bird watchers on urban safari. She didn’t look like a writer any more than he did.
He headed for the end of the alphabet and scanned the first names, which were in huge letters. The last names were in tiny print. No Harvey. He scanned again.
“The ’welcome address’ is about to begin. May I help you with something?” The bird safari guide had joined him at the W’s.
“My nametag isn’t here. Harvey. Harvey Winchester.”
“Here it is!” she offered with a beaming smile. “We try to honor people’s wishes for the names they like to be called.”
Harvey stared at the nametag.
“You’d better hurry in now. They’re starting.”
* * *
Harvey pinned the tag on his shirt, stifling a laugh, having figured out the name mix-up. Ditto. Ditto Winchester. He’d get the nametag fixed at the first break.
As he slid into an empty seat, the organizer of the conference congratulated them on being selected. Not all who applied got in. Harvey had assumed they accepted any paying applicant, because he had been admitted at the last minute, so this was great news. Ditto Winchester wasn’t hanging out with any slouches.
The ballroom, with its high ceiling, too-bright lights, frigid temperature, rows and rows of hard chairs unfolded on a patterned maroon carpet felt unfriendly and out of step with the rustic hotel. A lovely woman from across the room startled him with a splendid smile. She had dark hair, cut short in a glossy cap, and her eyes narrowed to black ribbons when she smiled. Definitely too young for him, forty or forty-five.
His face burned. He could tell: she thought he was flirting with her. He wasn’t one of those swaggering hot-cops like his last partner, hadn’t flirted with a woman since Helen. He glanced away as the welcome drew to a close.
“What a great name for a writer. I’m so jealous!” Harvey didn’t realize the woman to his right was talking to him until she tugged at his sleeve. He glanced at the nametag buoyed on her generous chest before taking in her wide, sweet face. She was all pastel. Pink cheeks and lips, soft gray hair. Soft.
“Anna Walsh,” he said. “Nothing wrong with your name.”
“Oh, it’s not like ‘Ditto Winchester.’ You write westerns?”
“No, I was a cop. Retired now. I haven’t—”
“Crime stories!” Anna cried. “Ditto sounds like gunfire. Is it your given name?”
Laughter bubbled into his throat before he could answer.
Anna waited, a patient woman.
“Somebody gave it to me,” he managed to say before bursting into laughter.
Anna joined him. She reminded him of Helen, who would do the exact same thing, laughing without asking — and without knowing— what was funny.
* * *
The crowd filed down the aisles toward the double doors. A good-sized group, close to two hundred.
Harvey didn’t want Anna to feel rejected, so he turned very slowly, feigning reluctance, to join the exit line. He really should’ve stayed home. People had warned him about newly widowed men and the women who pursue them. What would a woman find appealing about him? He was only five feet ten, five eight and a half without shoes. Most of his thinning hair was graying, not brown enough to be youthful, not gray enough to be distinguished. But he was trimmer these days. He would never regain the weight he had lost since Helen died, not on his own meager cooking, anyway.
Harvey stopped at the registration table with every intention of fixing the nametag. Instead, he found himself staring into those black ribbon eyes he’d seen from across the lecture hall. She was definitely too young for him, despite the sunbursts of lines around the eyes. Even her name was too young: Tiffany.
He tried to step out of her way. She stepped in the same direction, blocking him. He moved back to his starting position at the same time she did. After a third simultaneous block they laughed.
“There must be a name for this dance,” Tiffany said, “some kind of country two-step? No, I’ve got it: This should be called a faux pas de deux.”
Harvey offered a quiet laugh and nodded slowly. He didn’t know any French words but recognized the sound of the language.
“Are you going to dinner now?”
Again, he nodded.
* * *
Copyright © 2026 by Matson Sewell
