by Julie Wright
Her question led to the discussion of all my other life grievances. My emotions were so frayed and raw, getting all the words out proved to be an effort.
Emma quietly listened to the entire sad tale with the compassion of a woman who knew what it was to become a casualty on love’s battlefield.
I ended with, “I hope Ben chokes on the pen he signed that contract with.” My voice was thick with anger and ache.
Emma’s mouth twitched at the corner. “Wow,” she said, trying not to smile. “I think that’s the least reasonable thing I’ve ever heard come out of your mouth.”
I laughed quietly and picked at the frayed knees of my jeans. “I’ll be reasonable tomorrow. Or maybe next week . . . or maybe next month.”
“You don’t have to make a hasty return to reasonableness on my account. It’s actually good and healthy to give in to the irrational every now and again.”
I felt more calm and less broken having said everything out loud.
“What happens now?” Emma asked. “I mean, what do the lawyers say happens now regarding the intellectual property? Are you being sued personally?”
“I don’t think so. The lawsuits are between the companies. Portal Pictures already owns every creative effort I made while I worked there, so they have no reason to sue me, and I don’t have anything Mid-Scene would want, so they have no reason either. I’m just jobless, now, which is awesome.”
“And by awesome, we mean . . .”
“Catastrophic. I’d move in with Grandma except, with her new boyfriend, I might cramp her bachelorette style. Plus, this is assisted-living housing, meaning I’m not old enough to qualify for residence. Plus, she’s sick . . . so there’s that.”
Emma ignored my sarcastic rant and went straight to the meat of the problem. “Do you have savings you can live on for a while?”
“Enough to last me a few months,” I admitted.
“Good, because otherwise Grandma would—”
“Kill me. I know.” My grandma had encouraged both Emma and me to save ten percent of our incomes anytime we were paid for anything. She said the savings would act as a gift that we give to our future selves. Even when times were lean, I tried to keep a savings account active. I said a mental thank you to my past self. Past-Silvia really did me a solid by not getting frivolous when the pay rate went up when I moved to Portal Pictures.
Emma sucked in a deep breath, which meant she was about to say something I didn’t want to hear. When she started her sentence by saying, “I know this isn’t what you want to hear, but . . .” I allowed myself a private chuckle. “We can always use good film editors at Kinetics. If things get tight, you always have a job with me. I’d hire you knowing full well you would be looking for employment elsewhere, and there wouldn’t be any hard feelings regarding you quitting when you got the job you wanted.”
“Thanks, Emma. I hope it won’t come to that, but it’s nice knowing I’m not lost.” We both knew it was an option I would take only in the most desperate circumstances. I wanted to make films for entertainment, not films to peddle a product. Not that Emma’s profession morally assaulted my ideals. It just wasn’t what I wanted for myself.
“What is your legal recourse?” Emma brought me back from wandering into thoughts of Ben. “Does your intellectual property still get credited to you, or does the studio take ownership of it because of anything fraudulent that might have happened with it?”
These were good questions. Questions I probably should have asked when Owen the lawyer was reading me the riot act over my poor behavior and bad decisions. Or maybe it was good that I hadn’t asked, since asking would be treating them like they were there for me. The problem with corporate lawyers was that they were there for the corporation. The Portal Pictures lawyer could have only one interest—the studio.
“Do you think I should get my own lawyer?” I asked Emma. It might not be my name announced at the Academy Awards, but I wanted, and expected, my name to be in the credits. They couldn’t pull that from me, could they?
“Maybe. A consultation might not hurt. An intellectual property rights lawyer could help you see where you stand legally, and you know how much I like knowing where I stand on things.”
I nodded, and then groaned and threw myself back against the couch. “I feel stupid about this whole thing, like a kid getting caught stealing candy at the grocery store, but really, Emma, what choice did Dean give me?”
Emma proved her worth as a friend by not answering. Her business-savvy mind had probably already come up with ten different solutions that would not have played out like this one had, but she didn’t give me answers that were too late to be of any use. She wasn’t stupid enough to live in the would-have, could-have, should-have world. Emma was too practical for that. At least, she was when it wasn’t her own love life on the line. Emma had a harder time seeing the forest through the trees when she was tromping through her own forest.
But I guessed we were all like that.
“Thanks for giving me advice on what to do now instead of lecturing me on what I should have done,” I said, wanting to make sure she knew how good she was for my soul.
“It’s what you do for me,” she said. “Besides, now is the only thing that matters. The past is old news. The end.” She gave me the names of several intellectual property lawyers, people she’d worked with specifically on several product lines in her gyms. She trusted them completely.
“What else?” she asked me.
We’d danced around the elephant in the room for long enough. Emma was apparently ready to talk about it whether I was or not. “What else?” I asked. “You mean besides the lawyer at Mid-Scene making Ben sign a contract that prevents him from seeing me anymore? Is that the ‘what else?’ you mean?”
“Are we talking about the lawyer you think dabbles in the dark arts and possibly sacrifices kittens for her own evil purposes?”
“Yes. That one. But it’s not just about her. This is about Ben. He signed the Hollywood equivalent of a restraining order. Why would he do that?”
“I don’t have a good answer for that. Ben doesn’t strike me as a fall-in-line-behind-the-company kind of guy. Perhaps the dark-arts dabbler spiked the company water cooler?” she suggested, only half joking.
“No.” I rolled my head to stretch out my neck muscles. “He wasn’t compelled to do this. No one can make Ben do anything he doesn’t want to do. He just doesn’t . . .”
“Don’t finish that thought,” Emma said. Her eyes dropped to where my fingers had started pulling the fringe threads out of the knees of my jeans, but she didn’t say anything, and she didn’t try to stop the microcompulsive behavior.
“You don’t know what I was going to say,” I insisted.
She gave me a look—the one we both knew how to do because we’d spent years being on the business end of that look from Grandma. “You were going to say he doesn’t love you after all.”
The bad thing about a friend who knew you well enough to finish your sentences was that she knew you well enough to finish your sentences.
Emma got up from the chair at the kitchen table and headed for the counter. “You’re the woman who is logical and levelheaded about everything.” She pulled an apple from the fruit bowl and set it to the side of the sink, then she pulled out a tub of rolled oats from the pantry. From the fridge, she found a package of blueberries as well as some apple juice. She added them to her stuff on the counter. She used the juice in place of half the water and began cooking the oats.
“What is that supposed to mean?” I said.
“It means, don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. He might have had a good reason. Maybe you should text him and find out what that good reason is.” She chopped up the apple and added it to the oatmeal.
“No. Absolutely not. He already told me I’m not allowed to contact him. It’s like being grounded from y
our boyfriend by your boyfriend. The whole thing is ridiculous. And if he thinks I’m going to crawl to him and beg and plead, he’s wrong. He chose this. He gets to live with it.” I sniffed and winced at the throb in my head, right behind my eyes. “Why do I always get headaches when I cry? Isn’t it enough for me to feel emotional pain? I have to be in physical pain as well?”
A chuckle of commiseration came from the pantry. “Call it nature’s way of kicking you while you’re down.”
“Yeah, well, nature’s got a mean streak, doesn’t she?”
Emma reappeared from the pantry with Grandma’s hot-air popcorn popper. She was probably the one who bought the appliance for Grandma. Emma didn’t use microwave popcorn after she’d read an article that said chemicals inside the popcorn bag were endocrine disrupters. I didn’t even know what an endocrine was, let alone that they could be disrupted. I tried telling her that since I wasn’t planning on licking the bag, the chemicals wouldn’t hurt me. In response, she bought me a hot-air popper, too. Though I never admitted it, I liked the flavor and texture better in the hot-air popper. It was also nice to be able to season the popcorn my own way rather than the way that was meant for the masses.
She poured in the kernels and positioned a bowl to catch the popped corn. “Nature’s a monster. Speaking of . . . did you lose Audrey again?”
I grunted, remembering how my eye had bothered me when I first woke up. “No, it’s in my pocket.” I tugged Audrey-the-eye from my pocket and used the kitchen sink to clean it off. Once it was dry, I put it back in my socket.
Emma sprinkled sea salt over the popcorn, along with a spritz of lime oil she’d found in the fridge, and placed the bowl on the table. She went back to check on the oatmeal, then took a deep breath. “Remember when Blake had been an idiot and was groveling for my forgiveness, and you said I would cave and he didn’t deserve to get me back, so you took away my phone?”
I nodded. I pulled my phone from my back pocket and held it out for her to take—to return the favor.
But Emma didn’t take the phone. She folded my fingers over it and said, “This isn’t the same thing. Sometimes radio silence is the best option. With Blake, it absolutely was—”
“Because he was on a date with Trish the Fish.”
Emma smirked. “We have to stop calling her that. She’s going to be my sister-in-law.”
“I don’t have to stop calling her that. I’m no relation.”
“The point is,” Emma said, trying to bring the conversation back on track, “I think communication here would help, not hurt. You’re the one who tries to always see the other point of view. Give Ben a chance to explain.”
“What is there to explain? He chose a job over me. Romeo wouldn’t have ever made such a choice.”
“Romeo isn’t real.”
“Colin Firth wouldn’t have done it. And don’t try to tell me he’s not real.”
“He is real, but the character he played isn’t. We have no idea what the real Colin Firth would do in a dating situation since it’s unlikely either of us will ever date him.”
I pouted. “Hitch wouldn’t have done it.”
Emma stared at me while I lifted my eyebrows and took a handful of popcorn to celebrate my victory. She blew out a breath of exasperation. “Fine. Though Hitch isn’t real either, he probably wouldn’t have done it, at least not unless he had a really good reason. Remember, Hitch was a master at other people’s love lives, but he was a disaster with his own.”
“The movie Hitch was inspired,” I said around a mouthful of lime-flavored popcorn. “The dating scene really does require the help of a specialist because the love Hollywood has given us is a lie. Everything I know about love I’ve learned from Hollywood. I’ve learned if you’ve never been kissed, go undercover as a reporter in a high school. If your best friend is a guy who is marrying someone else, sabotage the wedding. If you’re an overworked doctor who doesn’t make time for love, you’ll probably need to go into a coma to find the one meant for you. The hotel maid only needs to steal clothes from one of the rooms to get the politician’s attention. The famous actress just needs to find the guy with a blue door in Notting Hill. I know all these stories backwards and forwards. Movies teach us how to fall in love, how to have a first kiss, how to have a good fight and then make up afterwards. And because of Hollywood, I know how to break up.”
“Break up? Seriously? With the guy you were planning on declaring your love to less than twenty-four hours ago?” Emma actually looked worried.
Those words hit their mark, and I felt myself deflating. “I really was. I was going to use the L word.” My barely audible whisper must have been heard because Emma squeezed my hand.
“That is some definite bad timing,” she said.
“Yeah.” I barked a short laugh. “I thought we’d be snuggling in front of the fake fireplace in my apartment, but it seems the only spooning I’ll be doing is with Ben and Jerry’s.”
“Your grandma has some Chunky Monkey in the freezer,” she said.
“Sounds perfect. We should definitely eat it so she isn’t temped by it. Ice cream can’t be good for h—”
“You eat my ice cream without sharing,” Grandma called out, “and I’ll be kicking you both out of here before you can say, ‘Sorry, Grandma.’”
“What are you doing up? Do you want help getting back to your room?” I asked, rushing to her side.
“I would think me getting up in the morning is preferable to the alternative. I’m fine, Silvia. I’ll likely take a long nap this afternoon because the treatment makes me tired, but I usually function okay the day after.”
“I made us breakfast,” Emma said, dishing up three bowls of apple oatmeal topped with blueberries and setting them on the table.
“This is probably a good way to get blueberries in my diet. I hate eating them plain, but the doctor said raw antioxidants were important, so I’ve been forcing them down. They hide better in oatmeal, don’t they?”
Emma seemed glad to have had her offering accepted and even liked.
“Silvia called in the reinforcements over my little problem?” Grandma asked. “You really don’t need to worry, either one of you. I’m going to be just fine. Plus the breast cancer ribbon is pink, and you both know I look great in pink.”
Before I could answer, Emma said, “Oh, we know you don’t need Silvia and me to help you. We know you’ve got this. It’s Silvia we’re worried about.”
I widened my eyes and gave her a shake of my head while also giving her a kick to the leg. She ignored me and spilled my troubles out in their entirety to my grandmother.
This opened up a lengthy and heated breakfast argument as to whether or not I was wrong to not let Ben explain himself. When Walt showed up, he took their side. Three against one.
I decided I didn’t like any of them.
When Walt saw Grandma was having a girls’ day, he graciously bowed out, declaring that movie marathons weren’t really his thing unless someone was in a spaceship or getting shot at. No wonder he got along so well with Ben.
Since I’d already watched Breakfast at Tiffany’s, I asked to stay with the theme.
“Are you sure those are the movies you want right now?” Emma shot a meaningful look at my grandmother and lowered her voice. “Didn’t you once tell me you avoided Audrey’s movies because you didn’t want to die like she died?”
I sent an apologetic look at Grandma, who shrugged and nodded in agreement. “That’s not unreasonable. I don’t want to die the way she died either.”
“But,” I added, “I think I might want to try to live like she lived.”
Though I could tell Emma had been hoping for something with Colin Firth in it, she gave in to the Audrey Hepburn marathon.
At some point, I would have to find out if my mom and dad knew about Grandma’s cancer, though I suspected they didn’t have any
idea. My parents loved Grandma Bradshaw. They deserved to know. But I decided to wait to call her out on her need for secrecy. She was still tired from her treatment. That argument could wait for another day.
Thinking of my parents made me cringe. The only conversations we’d had recently were updates on the various grandparents we were in charge of. Mom did most of the talking since she lived in constant exhaustion due to dealing with two elderly people in varying stages of Alzheimer’s. I had become good at not telling her my troubles because I didn’t want to burden her with more things to worry about. All of yesterday’s events definitely fell into the category of “more things to worry about.” For that reason, the information had to be cautiously shared. They didn’t need to know I’d quit my job since, of course, I would find another one. They didn’t need to know that Ben had trampled my heart and reignited my daydream of running away to Peru. Did they need to know about the cancer?
I peeked at Grandma, who was laughing at the scene in Charade where various people were trying to determine whether the guy in the coffin was dead or not, and thought maybe I would wait until she was ready to tell them. She didn’t look like the Grim Reaper was hovering over her any longer. Her color had mostly returned, and her spirits seemed pretty good even if her appetite was hit-and-miss. I would let her choose when to tell them as long as her choice was to tell them. If she didn’t want to, well, then I would.
Grandma had all the Audrey Hepburn movies, and beginning with Charade was a good choice since Grandma spent the whole time sighing happily over Cary Grant. We watched Sabrina, which made Emma cringe, making me wonder if a story about two brothers as love interests for the same girl hit a little too close to home for her.
We ordered a pizza from Geppetto’s—vegetarian, since Emma liked it that way, and because Grandma’s health was on the line. Emma scowled at me when I used a knife and fork to eat my pizza. Like she could make fun of how I chose to eat my pizza when she would eat hers like a savage. She folded her pizza in half like it was a sandwich and didn’t mind smearing sauce all over her mouth. Seriously. Savage.
