Waiting for Tom Hanks

by Kerry Winfrey

  For a moment, I allow myself to imagine what that would be like. To come home at the end of the day to her, to curl up on the couch and talk about everything that had happened. A bloom of sadness unfurls so quickly in my chest that I almost gasp.

  Because she’s not here, and she’ll never know. And I have to do this, because she’d want me to. And also because, in the five years since I graduated from college, I’ve done exactly nothing to get closer to my dream of working in movies. To do that, I’d have to move somewhere, which means I couldn’t stay here and be with Uncle Don, and there’s no way I’d ever leave him all alone. A movie that’s filming right in my own neighborhood? It’s fate, like a gift Mom sent me from the afterlife.

  * * *

  • • •

  I was worried about finding Tommy Crisante on set, but it turns out it’s pretty easy. For one thing, he’s standing in the middle of the blocked-off street. And for another thing, he’s incredibly loud.

  “Hi, Tommy? I’m Annie,” I say, approaching him as he talks to a young guy in a headset and a black jacket.

  He cups a hand over his ear. “You’ll have to speak up, sweetheart. I can’t hear for shit. My ears got blown out when I did all those action movies with explosions in the ’90s.”

  “Um.” I push back my shoulders, brush my hair out of my face, and force myself to be louder. “I’m Annie. Don’s niece?”

  Tommy’s eyes light up and before I even know what’s happening, he’s hugging me. “Donny’s niece? Am I ever glad to see you!”

  His hug squeezes the air out of me, and I barely manage to choke out, “I’m, uh, happy to be here!”

  “How’s Don? Aw, you look just like him!” Tommy says, holding me at a distance.

  I hope I don’t look like Uncle Don, since he has a gray ponytail and a slight potbelly, but I don’t contradict Tommy. “He’s great. We live a few blocks away.”

  “When he called me, I thought, ‘This! This is a sign!’ My assistant quit last week to work for an underwear model. What’s he got that I don’t?”

  I’m not sure if he really wants an answer to this, so I open and close my mouth a few times, but he keeps talking.

  “Come on,” he says, guiding me toward a crowd of people. “Let me introduce you to the cast.”

  Oh, no. Oh, no. I knew I’d have to see Drew eventually, but I was hoping it wouldn’t be today. Now I’m wishing I thought to wear a disguise, like some glasses or a wig or maybe the giant Predator costume Uncle Don has from the last time he and his friends went to a convention. Anything to stop Drew Danforth from recognizing me from my classic role as Woman Who Spilled Coffee All Over His Coat and Refused to Speak.

  But Tommy’s already walking across the street, and people are moving out of our way, and it’s impossible to stop this momentum. Suddenly, there are just three people in front of us; three people who stop talking and look at us expectantly when they see Tommy.

  “Annie,” Tommy says, gesturing to several people, “I’d like you to meet our stars. This is Tarah Thomas, our lead actress.”

  She smiles, and I’m immediately struck by the thought that she’s the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen. Obviously, I’ve seen her before—I haven’t been living under a rock that doesn’t have cable access—but in person it’s a whole different level. Her dark brown skin glows so much it practically radiates, her curls are artfully styled, her teeth are straight and white. I smile back weakly.

  “This is Brody Johnson,” Tommy continues, pointing to a pale guy in a slouchy knit hat and puffy coat.

  He lifts a hand in greeting. “I’m the comic relief,” he says with a straight face.

  I smile, instantly comfortable around him. He doesn’t even look like a movie star—he looks like a guy you would see in line at the grocery store, which I guess is sort of his appeal. Maybe this won’t be so bad . . .

  “And, of course, this is Drew Danforth.”

  My smile instantly fades. Here he is, right in front of me, this man with the gold-flecked brown eyes and that voluminous hair. Unlike Brody, Drew does not look like someone you’d see in line at the grocery store. If he was in a grocery store, people would be staring at him and thinking, “Who is that guy?” even if they’d never seen one of his movies.

  But I guess he does look like a guy you’d run into on the street, because I literally did.

  “Bonjour,” he says with a small smile, before taking a sip of coffee.

  I narrow my eyes. “Bonjour,” I mutter back.

  “Oh, do you speak French?” Tarah asks.

  “N-no,” I stammer, stealing a glance at Drew. He tries to hide his smile behind his cup, but it reaches his eyes. “I mean, I took French in high school but I don’t remember anything. Ouvre la porte. Open the door. I remember that.”

  I clamp my mouth shut to stop myself from rambling. I avoid looking at Drew, but from the way his shoulders are shaking, I can tell he’s laughing at me. My embarrassment turns to rage—this guy is famous and rich, and he’s getting his kicks making fun of me, a pathetic assistant/freelance writer?

  Tommy claps me on the back. “Well, that might come in handy if you ever get stuck in a bathroom in France. Let me introduce you to our prop department . . .”

  With that, he whisks me away from the cast, and I take a deep breath of relief. I refuse to look over my shoulder, but I can feel Drew’s eyes on my back, and I know that if I turned around, I’d find him still watching me.

  * * *

  • • •

  Tommy isn’t big on please and thank you, but he’s always clear about his demands, and he never gets upset when people don’t get things right the first time. He just asks for what he wants again and again and again.

  And as for me, he mostly wants me to bring him coffee. Like, a lot of coffee. He decides pretty quickly that he doesn’t like whatever the craft services department is serving and asks me to get him some from Nick’s, and on my fifth trip in there, Nick says, impressed, “This guy really puts it away.”

  “Tell me about it,” I say, out of breath from running up and down the street. “I think he’s ninety-five percent caffeine at this point.”

  “So how’s it going?” Chloe asks, leaning over the counter. “Have you talked to Drew yet?”

  “Have you showed Tommy your screenplay?” Nick asks at the same time.

  I ignore Chloe’s question and give Nick an exasperated glance. “No, it didn’t exactly come up in between my coffee runs. ‘Here’s your fifth cup, and by the way, here’s a screenplay I wrote that you didn’t ask for or want.’”

  Nick hands me another black coffee. “Couldn’t hurt.”

  I shake my head as Nick smirks at me and I find myself wondering, for the hundredth time, why Chloe can’t see that he’s perfect for her. They have the perfect romantic comedy flirty-bickering chemistry, and I see the way he looks at her when she isn’t paying attention. The thing is, Nick is cute—he’s tall and skinny, with light brown skin and that perpetual five-o’clock shadow. Chloe could do a lot worse, and as I know all too well, she has done a lot worse.

  “Escape (The Piña Colada Song)” starts to play, and Chloe sways back and forth. “This is my jam,” she says, pouring syrup into a cup.

  “This song?” Nick asks. “Seriously? It’s all about a guy and his wife who are trying to cheat on each other.”

  Chloe hands the cup to a customer with a smile, then turns to Nick and immediately becomes indignant. “Um, did you miss the end of the song? They end up together! It’s romantic!”

  Nick throws his hands in the air. “They hated each other! She wrote a personal ad, looking for some other dude, and he responded because he was trying to leave her. How is that romantic?”

  “Oh, my God,” Chloe says, looking at me as if I can help her. “Do you have to ruin every little thing, Nick?”

  I bite my lip to keep from cracking up at the rom-com playing out in front of my eyes.

  I raise my cup. “Gotta get this to Tommy befor
e it gets cold.”

  Nick raises a hand. “See you in half an hour.”

  As I scoot out the door, I can hear Chloe groan as Nick says, “And don’t even get me started on that personal ad. ‘Getting caught in the rain’? Seriously? These people are walking clichés and they deserve each other.”

  When I find Tommy, he’s deep in conversation with some crewmembers, so I stand off to the side, holding his coffee. As I wait, I look around and take it all in. I’m here. On a movie set. And, sure, it’s not quite as glamorous as I thought it might be—after all, it’s practically in my backyard, not on the New York City streets or an LA backlot—but it’s a real, big-budget movie. One with fancy lighting and sound machines and a costume department and . . .

  Actors.

  “Be careful around this one,” Drew says to Brody as they appear in front of me. “She once spilled an entire cup of coffee on me.”

  Brody raises his eyebrows, and I can feel my cheeks redden. I mean, yes, technically this is a statement of fact, but I know he’s making fun of me. “Sorry about that,” I mumble.

  “Looking for someone to throw that one at?” Drew asks, pointing to the cup in my hand. “Because I’ll move out of the way. I don’t really want to take another coat to the dry cleaners.”

  Brody takes a bite of the candy bar he’s holding and keeps silent. Even though his character is Drew’s fast-talking, goofy best friend, in real life he’s apparently more taciturn.

  “I can pay for your dry cleaning,” I say, because really, it’s the least I can do, but Drew just chuckles.

  “I’m not going to make you pay for my dry cleaning.” And then he leans in—surprisingly close—and says, “See you around, Coffee Girl.”

  Brody lifts his candy bar to me like a toast. “Coffee Girl.”

  And then they walk away, and I’m left thinking about what I should have said back. Coffee Girl? Okay, so Tommy’s troubling caffeine dependence does mean that I spend a large part of my job getting him coffee, but seriously? That’s not my job title, and it’s a little—or a lot—condescending to reduce me to Coffee Girl. I’m an assistant. I’m a writer. I have a name.

  “Thanks, Annie,” Tommy says from behind me, and I turn to hand him his coffee.

  “Yes,” I say forcefully. “Annie. That’s my name.”

  “Sure is!” Tommy says cheerfully, looking at the clipboard he’s holding.

  I let out a frustrated sigh and look across the street. Drew’s standing there, talking to Tarah and Brody, his annoying profile directly in my line of vision. Try as I might to look away, my eyes snag on him. I mean, I get it—I get why he’s famous. He’s cute, yes, but there’s more to it than that—there’s something about him, some sort of charm that he radiates, some ineffable quality that the rest of us mere mortals don’t have. Although if Chloe were here, I’m sure she’d remind me that he’s very effable.

  But even Chloe’s imagined double entendre isn’t enough to make me not mad at him right now. White-hot indignation floods my system as I think about what he just said. Coffee Girl. Ugh. There’s no way this guy can give the romantic comedy genre the respect it deserves.

  Chapter Seven

  I manage to more or less avoid Drew on set the next day, since he’s actually focused on his job instead of putting me in my place. Whenever I’m not on set, though, I have to write articles, because internet content doesn’t make itself. Tommy has some phone call with an executive scheduled for Thursday evening, so we wrap up in the afternoon, and I’m free to spend the rest of the day in bed, writing.

  Well, writing and researching Drew.

  It’s not that I feel good about typing his name into the search bar on my laptop. In fact, I feel pretty creepy about it, like Meg Ryan does at the beginning of You’ve Got Mail when she’s trying to secretly e-mail Tom Hanks without arousing Greg Kinnear’s suspicions.

  But I don’t have a bland, clearly-not-right-for-me boyfriend to observe my actions. I only have my own secret shame as I ignore the article I’m supposed to be writing on at-home hemorrhoid relief.

  It’s just that the last time Chloe was trying to convince me that I should be actively pursuing Drew because he’s my Tom Hanks, she was trying to describe his specific brand of hotness. She claimed that he was sexy in a John Krasinski way, then I said that John Krasinski is more cute than sexy, and then she was like, “Oh, so you admit you find Drew sexy, which, FYI, means you totally want to have sex with him,” and then stared at me like she was a detective on Law & Order and she’d cornered me into a confession, which was very annoying.

  So here I am googling Drew, trying to convince myself . . . what, exactly? This is like when I look up the Facebook profile of some girl I hated in college—like I’m hoping to find something that confirms my feelings and makes me say, “Yep, still hate her, I was right all along.” I already know plenty of annoying things about Drew, and from the safety of my blanket cocoon, I intend to find out about any scandals or embarrassments.

  At first, I don’t come across anything juicy; just his IMDb page and a Wikipedia article that tells me where he went to high school and that he was the football team’s mascot.

  On the second page of results, I see a post on a blog called Hollywood Gossip. In glaring capital letters, the headline screams, “HOLLYWOOD HUNK DREW DANFORTH VISITS DYING GRANDFATHER,” right above a picture of Drew next to an ailing elderly man. A fake smile is pasted on Drew’s face, but it can’t hide the exhaustion and anguish he’s obviously feeling. It’s so raw that I’m uncomfortable looking at it, and I wonder how the hell this picture even ended up on this terrible website.

  I click away and onto an article about Drew’s most famous relationship: the years-long one between him and Gillian Roberts, his costar on Mike’s Restaurant. They slowly fell in love on the show, but apparently in real life they got together a lot more quickly. Gillian played this supposedly mousy waitress on the show, someone who didn’t wear a lot of makeup and had messy hair and never really dressed up (so . . . someone a lot of us, myself included, related to). But in real life? I scroll through pictures of her on the red carpet, her hair sculpted into waves and some designer dress hugging her perfectly toned body. She’s beautiful. I remind myself that she has trainers and nutritionists and professional hair and makeup artists, but I can’t help comparing myself and my hair (abysmal) and wardrobe (leggings-based) to the glamour on my screen.

  I click away from that article, too, and keep reading results. Aside from the time he was photographed making out with a Victoria’s Secret model at a party, most of the articles have headlines that refer to Drew as a “Hollywood prankster” or “funnyman” and are about all the weird things I already know he did.

  Does this guy take anything seriously? Or does he think his entire life is a joke, when most people would literally chop off a body part to have the career and lifestyle he has? Coffee Girl, I think.

  Annoyed, I slam my laptop shut. I need to be reading about hemorrhoids, not movie stars, so I decide to go to Nick’s, where at least I’ll be too embarrassed to openly research Drew Danforth.

  I step into the coffee shop and wave to Chloe and Nick behind the counter, then grab the one open table by the window—Thursday is board game–night, and Monopoly aficionados have every other table pushed together. Nick loves it because they have to order seriously massive amounts of coffee to stay awake for such a boring game. I settle down and open up my Word doc, ready to write the guide to at-home hemorrhoid relief that will take the internet by storm. I type a few words and take in the comforting sounds of the coffee shop: Chloe berating Nick for putting on his Elliott Smith playlist (“It’s like a real bummer of a Wes Anderson movie scene in here, and that doesn’t make anyone buy lattes!”), the comforting hiss of the espresso machine, the chuckles of the Monopoly players. As much as I sometimes wish my life would change, or that something would happen, I have to admit that I do love these comforting sounds. I inhale the warm, rich coffee scent and think that if I could
wrap up in this evening like a blanket, I would.

  Since Chloe and Nick are distracted by yet another one of their sexual-tension-filled arguments, I take a moment to open up my screenplay. But when the bell above the door jingles, I quickly close the document and decide to return to a little guilty Drew Danforth research. Sure, reading about a celebrity is kinda pathetic, but at least it’s not vulnerable in the same way my writing is. Not that I think some random coffee drinker is going to care about my screenplay, but it still makes me feel naked and exposed to work on it here. Maybe if I was writing a blockbuster action film or a slick mystery, I wouldn’t feel like this, but this is a romance. This is a document full of my deepest desires and dreams, my beating heart contained behind the glare of a computer screen.

  Drew Danforth’s face smiles at me from an article I just opened, and I grimace, then look up to see . . . Drew Danforth.

  I do a double take as I watch him walk past my table and toward the counter.

  “Hey, man,” Nick says, clearly not recognizing him. “What can I get you?”

  “A small black coffee, please,” Drew says, then glances into the bakery case beside the counter. “And, uh . . . one of those, I guess?”

  “Oh! Those are my cherry-almond bars, and—” Chloe’s friendly, customer-pleasing smile melts off her face, replaced by sheer amazement. “Wait . . . you’re . . .”

  Drew pulls off his beanie, sending droplets of water flying. “Nope. Not me. I just look a lot like him.”

  Chloe ignores his words and grabs Nick’s arm. “Drew Danforth!” she squeals. Even the Monopoly players look up.

  Nick looks at me and says, exasperated, “What’s going on?”

  At this, Drew turns and sees me. His eyes light up with recognition, and his mouth quirks into that infuriating little smirk. I self-consciously pat at my hair, which the misty snow-rain outside has turned into even more of a frizz ball than usual.