Waiting for Tom Hanks

by Kerry Winfrey

“Thanks for the help,” I say, grabbing another one. “And, uh. Sorry for the shit tirade.”

  He laughs, a deep, throaty thing, and meets my eyes. His are blue and clear and, all of a sudden, I’m watching this interaction take place on a screen, while sitting in a plush movie theater seat and digging my hands into a large popcorn with extra butter and salt.

  And then I do what I always do when I’m flustered. I keep talking.

  “I’m not usually this clumsy. Really. But I was taking these papers to Tommy’s trailer and I tripped over this wire and . . . seriously. What is this wire doing here? It’s a hazard. There are, dare I say it, too many wires in the world generally, but specifically right here, in front of me. Who put this here, right in the path of everyone walking?”

  The handsome blue-eyed stranger raises his hand. “That would be me.”

  “That would be you?” I say, my voice trailing off so that the last word is barely audible.

  “Yep.” He nods, then gestures around us. “I’m a gaffer. Responsible for many things, wires among them.”

  “Cool,” I say. “Okay, well, I’m gonna go shut myself in Tommy’s trailer and never return. Bye.”

  Before I can turn and flee, the handsome blue-eyed stranger with slightly curly hair reaches out to grab my arm. “Hey,” he says, that throaty laugh appearing again. “It’s okay. Really. I’m Carter Reid, by the way.”

  I push my hair behind my ear, then hold out my hand. “Annie Cassidy. Tommy’s assistant.”

  He nods. “Yeah, I’ve . . . seen you around.”

  There’s something about the way he says those few words, like he’s been not only seeing me but liking what he’s seeing, that makes my whole body flash hot and cold. It’s nice to be seen by someone who likes what they’re seeing, unlike some people who make it all too clear that they see you but want to simply make fun of what they’re seeing and call you derogatory nicknames based on your job duties.

  But there’s a very attractive man in front of me, so I don’t need to think about Drew Danforth right now.

  Carter looks older than me—not by a lot, but maybe he’s in his mid-thirties. There’s just something about him that looks like he’s been around the metaphorical block, like he’s seen some stuff and lived to tell the tale. That makes him sound grizzled, which he emphatically is not, but I guess what I’m saying is that you know how some celebrities age really well? Like, how George Clooney looked so much better by the time he married Amal than he did when he was doing sitcom work in the ’80s? It’s kind of like that. This guy looks like he’ll age well, like a wine or a cheese or a Clooney.

  “Okay. Well,” I say once I realize that I’ve been staring at his face for far too long. “Gotta get to Tommy’s trailer.”

  “See you around, Annie,” Carter says with a wave. I watch him walk away for just a second, long enough to really notice that he’s wearing a thick and durable work jacket that looks, just a little, like something that Bill Pullman would wear in While You Were Sleeping.

  * * *

  • • •

  I once read that Nora Ephron was obsessed with details. She knew her characters inside and out—how they dressed and spoke and decorated their homes.

  And while I’m not saying Tommy is anything like Nora Ephron—for starters, I’m fairly certain she didn’t sloppily eat Italian subs almost every day for lunch—he does share her attention to detail. In some regards, anyway.

  Tommy’s obsessed with some book, which he swears he needs in a scene, and his demand that I find it wipes my embarrassing wire-related incident with Carter Reid out of my mind. “It has a blue cover,” he says.

  “And what’s the title?” I ask, getting out my phone so I can take notes.

  “I don’t know,” Tommy says, rubbing his hands together as his breath puffs into the cold air. “I think I saw it on the Today show. Or maybe Good Morning America. But it had a blue cover.”

  “Do you know who wrote it?” I ask.

  He shakes his head. “A man, I think. Or maybe it was a woman.”

  Well. That certainly narrows it down.

  “Oh!” he says, eyes wide. “There was a wolf on the cover.”

  He smiles, like this should give me enough to go on.

  “So,” I say slowly. “You want me to go find a book with a blue cover that has a wolf on it, that’s by a man or a woman and was featured on Today or Good Morning America.”

  He nods and claps me on the back. “Thanks, Annie.”

  And then he turns around, barking at some crewmember about something. I sigh and head toward the bookstore.

  One of the most charming parts of living in Columbus in general, and German Village specifically, is our bookstore, the Book Loft. It has thirty-two book-filled rooms—some tiny, some large—that snake up and down like a maze. To get to the children’s section, you have to go up one set of stairs and then down another. I’ve often thought it would be a great setting for a murder mystery—you could hide a body in the Civil War room and be fairly certain no one would find it for hours.

  The Book Loft is almost as comforting to me as Nick’s. The courtyard that leads to the door is charming and beautiful, even covered in slushy snow. And the light that glows from the front windows looks especially inviting on this dim, gloomy January day.

  I walk into the main room and tell an employee what I’m looking for, not that I expect her to be much help. Even a seasoned bookseller would have a difficult time with the description Tommy gave me (seriously, “it has a wolf on it” isn’t giving her a lot to work with). Still, she promises to do her best while I set off to look for it myself. I climb the stairs into the new-release room and almost bump into a broad-shouldered man in a pea coat.

  “’Scuse me,” I mumble, but he’s too engrossed in the hardcover he’s flipping through to notice me. I scoot around him—doesn’t he know these rooms are tiny and difficult to maneuver in?—and scan my eyes over the shelf of new releases.

  Then I hear him say, “Coffee Girl?”

  I turn and find myself face-to-face with Drew.

  “Oh, for God’s sake,” I say. “Are you following me?”

  I’ll admit, at least part of my prickliness is because I’m a little embarrassed about how I may have been a little bit rude to him when he was just talking to my uncle. And I guess I’m the tiniest amount ashamed that I kind of went on a romantic comedy tirade in his general direction on the night of the Great Barry Debacle. Drew snaps his book shut and gives me his crooked smile, the one that spawned a billion Tumblr gifsets when he flashed it in Mike’s Restaurant. In person, it looks a lot more annoying . . . but okay, still cute. If it didn’t belong to the man who insisted on following me around, giving me a rude nickname and stomping all over my most cherished form of entertainment, maybe I would find it endearing.

  “Actually, I was here first,” he says, placing the book back on the shelf. “Which means you’re the one who’s following me. I didn’t get a chance to ask earlier, but how’s Barry?”

  We’re so close to each other in this crowded room that I can see the gold flecks in his eyes. “It, uh, didn’t work out,” I say, turning around to get back to my job. “We were too different. I like hot liquids; he likes half-eaten garbage bagels.”

  Drew laughs out loud, the sound shockingly large in the small room. “I’ll fill in the blanks myself, I guess.”

  I focus on the book covers in front of me. Purple, red, black . . . blue, but definitely no wolf. This is going to be impossible.

  “Looking for something to read?” Drew asks, moving to stand beside me.

  I turn my head to look up at him. He’s a few inches taller than me, so my eyes are basically at the level of his mouth. “A book for Tommy,” I say. “It has a blue cover and maybe there’s a wolf on it and it was on TV.”

  A sharp laugh shoots out of Drew’s mouth. “Wait, that’s all he told you?”

  I nod. “Yep.” I crouch down to look at the shelf below.

  “So are you
going to look at every book in the Book Loft?” Drew asks from above me.

  “Yep,” I repeat.

  “All right,” he grunts, then he crouches down beside me, the shoulder of his pea coat bumping against the shoulder of my puffy jacket.

  “Don’t you have to be back on set?” I ask.

  Drew shakes his head. “Nah. The next scene is just Tarah and Brody, and it’s not like Tommy’s going to be able to focus on anything anyway until he finds this book.”

  Still in my crouching position, I turn my head to look at him. “You don’t have to help me. I can do this myself, and anyway this position is kind of uncomfortable.”

  “Ah, you forget,” Drew says. “I trained for months for The Last Apocalypse. I have amazing thigh strength.”

  I look back at the shelf quickly, hoping Drew didn’t see the way my face flushed when he mentioned the strength of his thighs. It’s not like I want to think about his thighs. It’s not like heat slowly flooded my body as a mental image of his thighs filled my brain.

  Focus, Annie.

  “And anyway,” he says, “I can’t find that Orb of Time book.”

  “Wheel of Time,” I say, barely holding in my laughter. “Although Orb of Time sounds fascinating. Wait. Are you telling me you’re actually going to read it?”

  “I don’t know,” he says, looking at the shelves. “Don really hyped it up. I mean, a hero’s journey, and the belief that time itself is a wheel? Who wouldn’t want to read that?”

  “How long were you talking to Uncle Don before I showed up?” I ask in a low voice.

  He turns his head slightly to face me. “A very, very long time.”

  I swallow, then compose myself. “Cool. Well, you’re not going to find it here in the new releases, on account of it’s not even remotely new.”

  “That’s fine. I’ll grab it later. Is this what you’re looking for?” he asks, holding up a green book with a bear on the cover.

  “Blue. Wolf,” I remind him.

  “Right.” He slides it back on the shelf and stands up. “I think we’re gonna have to move on to the next room.”

  “Agreed,” I say.

  “We can safely assume it’s not a travel guide,” Drew says as we walk past the tiny room that houses them.

  “I don’t know if we can,” I say, quickly scanning the shelves for anything blue. “Tommy doesn’t even know what this book is about. Why he wants it so much is beyond me.”

  Drew chuckles, pushing in behind me. I instinctively take a step forward and run into the shelf. This room is more like a nook, and it’s definitely not large enough for two people.

  “Not here!” I say, ducking under his arm to get out.

  We look through sports, business, and military history. Nothing. Drew keeps getting distracted and paging through books on personal finance and the Civil War, and I have to keep reminding him why we’re here. It’s a little bit funny, how he turns into an overgrown child in the presence of books.

  “I wouldn’t have pegged you for a big reader,” I say as we walk into a small room that seems to be mostly psychology books. “Especially of epic fantasy series.”

  He shrugs, scanning the shelves. “I like to read all kinds of things—it’s sort of like acting, you know? A way to escape into someone else’s life for a moment. I always like to find a bookstore in whatever city I’m in because they’re a good place to hide. Usually everyone’s so interested in whatever they’re buying that they don’t really look at you.”

  I snort-laugh, and he turns to look at me. “What?”

  “The attention thing again. Come on. Don’t act like you don’t like it.”

  He raises his eyebrows. “I don’t.”

  I gesture vaguely toward him. “Look at you.”

  “Again,” he says, mimicking my gesture in a mocking way, “these rock-solid, impressive, very attractive abs are temporary.”

  It would be obnoxious if he wasn’t smiling as he said it.

  “And anyway,” he says, “I’m not an actor because I want attention.”

  “Then why?” I ask, sliding a blue book with no wolf on the cover back onto the shelf.

  “Because I like making people happy,” he says, tilting his head to look at the spines of books.

  “Wow,” I say. “Conceited much?”

  He looks up quickly and gives me a wry smile. “I don’t mean that I think my mere presence on screen causes joy.”

  I look away, focus on the books, and wait for him to elaborate.

  “When I first started acting, I was getting some roles, but mostly small ones. Like, a background character in a sitcom, or a jock in a teen movie. Stuff like that. But then my grandpa got sick, and I went home to Shreveport.”

  I look at him, but Drew is still looking at the books.

  “I wasn’t making serious money yet, and my parents both still had to work, so I quit acting for a little bit to do all the day-to-day stuff for my grandpa. It’s not like anyone in Hollywood missed Asshole Jock #2. My grandpa had bone cancer, which is pretty shitty, and it was my job to make sure he was taking his meds and eating what he could. But mostly I just hung out with him. I was used to seeing him so strong—I mean, he was a veteran, and he’d worked at a steel mill—but now he was so weak. He couldn’t really do anything but sit, so we watched TV. A lot of TV. Specifically, we watched all eleven seasons of Frasier.”

  I can’t help it—I laugh, then cover my mouth.

  Drew looks up, a smile on his face and a glint in his eyes. “No, it’s okay. Please laugh. I get that a sitcom about a Seattle psychologist was a weird choice for a blue-collar Southern guy, but for some reason it’s what we ended up watching.”

  Drew leans back on the shelf and crosses his arms. “The thing was, it helped. I mean, it didn’t make anything better—he was still dying, and we both knew it—but it made us laugh. Every time Niles did something pretentious and hilarious, we could forget for a second what was happening. It was like, for twenty-one minutes at a time, things were kind of okay because we were in Frasier Crane’s apartment. And that’s when I knew—that’s what I want to do. Take people out of their crappy realities—out of the world where their loved ones are dying or they’re getting divorced or they’re losing their job—even if it’s only for a little while.”

  He lets out a small laugh. “Anyway, that was probably way more than you wanted to know about my life,” he says, shaking his head.

  “My parents died,” I blurt out, and he meets my eyes. I nod. I’ve long since forgotten about looking for Tommy’s book. I don’t know what it is about this moment—the tiny room, the book-lined walls, the feeling that we’re the only two people in this building—but I feel not only like I can share anything with Drew but also that I should.

  “My dad died when I was a baby, before I even knew him. Sometimes I think I have memories of him, you know? But I’m only thinking of pictures I’ve seen, of me on his lap. My mom died when I was in high school.”

  I swallow and meet Drew’s eyes. He’s staring at me, but with an understanding that I wouldn’t have expected from him before today. He nods, just slightly, encouraging me to continue.

  “And even though I never knew her and my dad together, she told me all about their relationship. They had this fairy-tale romance. They were supposed to be together forever. She told me all about how he adored her, and you could see it in the pictures, the way he’s looking at her like everything she’s saying is the most interesting thing he’s ever heard. And he died, which was terrible, but she never, ever lost her faith in love.”

  “That’s why you love romantic comedies so much,” Drew says softly, taking a small step toward me.

  I nod. “They’re like my version of Frasier. We used to watch them all the time, and now they’re comfort viewing, my reminder that everything isn’t awful. There’s a part of me that needs to see a world where everything works out for the best, where people are together forever, or where Tom Hanks can destroy someone’s business but
they fall in love anyway.”

  Drew smiles a little bit. “You’ve gotta admit, that’s a pretty big obstacle.”

  “That’s what I like about it,” I say, noticing that at some point in this conversation, Drew and I have become so close to each other that I have to look up to see his face. “It’s not like being in love fixes everything for them, because it doesn’t fix everything in real life. It just . . . makes everything bearable. Better.”

  “I get it,” Drew says.

  “You know,” I continue, unable to stop myself from talking after years of never bringing up this subject, “I always thought it would’ve been better if she’d died slowly instead of suddenly, because then at least I’d have closure. But honestly, it kind of sounds like it sucks either way.”

  Drew nods. “It’s all shitty—dying slowly, dying suddenly. Life’s a big ball of shit sometimes.”

  I smile, just a little. “But there’s Frasier.”

  He smiles back. “And romantic comedies.”

  By this point, he’s so close that his breath is hot on my face. If I wanted to—not that I do—I could reach out and touch him. Not that this is even a thought in my mind, but there are mere inches between our faces. Not that this is a movie, but if it were a movie, it would be very easy to close this distance between us . . .

  The sound of heavy breathing interrupts us as someone else shuffles into the room . . . and since this is a tiny Book Loft room, it means that someone else is basically on top of us. Drew and I stop talking and try to move out of the way as the person in a large puffy coat reaches directly in between us to pull a book off the shelf. I bite my lip, trying not to laugh, and when I meet Drew’s eyes I see that he’s doing the same thing.

  Then my eyes catch on the book this person has just pulled off the shelf, and I yelp.

  “Wait,” I say. “What book is that?”

  The woman eyes me suspiciously. “I saw it on CBS This Morning.”

  “Blue cover!” Drew shouts, which seems unbearably loud in this little room.

  She turns to look at him in alarm.

  “It’s just,” I say, holding out my hands, “I’ve been looking for that book all day, and it’s really important to me, and—”