by Deana Birch
Jake kept his distance as I got ready for work. I chose my beige, button-down, floral dress with the pleated skirt and left my hair down, the natural waves showing. He peeked up from his phone when I came into the living room.
“Ready?” I asked.
He slipped the device into his back pocket and blinked a few times. “How do you manage to always look so good?”
Urging myself not to let it sting, not to think in one hour all of this would be gone, I said a quiet thank-you and turned away. I grabbed my phone and saw I had three missed calls, all from my ex, Dimitri. One occasional missed call was normal. Three back-to-back set off an alarm. It could be something about my grandmother. She and his father were best friends.
“You okay?” Jake asked.
“I need to make a call before we go.” I shot him an apologetic smile.
“No worries; the bus won’t leave without me.” He winked, maybe sensing my worry.
From my kitchen, I dialed Dimitri’s mobile in France, and he picked up on the second ring.
“Minette…”
Ever since I can remember, Dimitri called me “kitten.” A breakup wasn’t enough of a reason for him to use anything else.
“Salut. Ça va?”
He replied yes and no. Yes, our families were both fine. But no, he wasn’t. A player from a rival soccer team had hard fouled him during his last match, and he would be out for three months with a knee injury. It was a huge blow. He had recently transferred from his home team of Marseille to a bigger one in Paris, and now he wouldn’t be able to play. Still speaking French, I tried to comfort him and find anything positive about the situation.
I spied Jake waiting on my couch and thought I was probably tipping the scales into the rude category. I told Dimitri I had to go to work, and that I would get in touch over the weekend to check on him.
“Sorry about that.” I winced. “Ready to go?”
“Honestly, I gotta say, you speaking French makes me want to drag you back into the bedroom.” He twitched, maybe to see if there was a chance.
“Even if it was to my ex-boyfriend?”
His face fell.
Hello, mouth. Meet foot. I guess I assumed he wouldn’t care. But no one likes hearing about former lovers, especially hours after how we’d started the day.
“I’m sorry. I don’t know why I said that.” I hoped the back-and-forth motion of my head would erase any awkwardness.
“It’s fine. You still keep in touch with your ex?”
“Yeah, we’re…friends.”
Oh, look—the other foot wanted to meet my mouth. Jake and I had started this whole fling based on friendship. I closed my eyes and rolled them at myself.
“Shall we?” I asked.
After a stop at Steven Brass’s house—where Jake had been crashing—to grab his bag and laptop, we headed to The Spade’s rehearsal space off the 101, close to Ventura.
Once there, I decided not to get out of the car. As he grabbed the door handle, I stopped him with my hand on his wrist.
“Jake?”
He turned to me.
“Thanks for your friendship.” I smiled, highlighting the implications. “I know you said it was until you left to go back on the road, and I want you to know I agreed to that too. I have no expectations or illusions this is going to continue. It was great. No, actually, it was amazing. But I’m okay it’s over. Thank you for the last few days; I definitely enjoyed myself. I hope you have a great tour.” I released him from my hold and offered a tight smile.
His face twisted. He must have been expecting me to say the opposite, to tell him I wanted more, and then he would have to remind me of our deal. But he didn’t say anything. He leaned in, kissed my cheek, and got out of the car with his things. I had let him off the hook. The final kiss was most likely an act of gratitude; he didn’t have to break yet another heart.
Staying and watching him leave would go against what I’d said and expose me for the crushing hard fool I was adamantly denying myself to be. So before he could catch me, I put the car in drive and pulled away.
In the parking garage at work, I found my spot and turned off the ignition. I sat for a moment before saying out loud, “You will not allow yourself to be sad about this, Louana. You had a fling with a sexy rock star. You had incredible sex. You will enjoy it and appreciate it for what it was. And most of all, you will get over it.”
I did a pretty good job of it at work, where distractions were plentiful. But when I got home, there were too many reminders. The way he had washed, dried, and put back the breakfast dishes. The condom wrapper in the trash. Even Archie was confused when there was no Jake to tackle and play rough with him. It took everything I had not to research him online again. I even put my phone on airplane mode as further security from the Internet. I pulled Jake’s pillow into me, his transfixing scent still on it. I was holding on; I knew it. Just a little longer, I convinced myself.
⸎
Since Fridays were low-key, I had gotten in the habit of taking a yoga class at lunch. It never mattered if I returned to work with my hair pulled back and a little sweaty. Friday afternoons were used for closing out the week behind us and planning the one which lay ahead. Plus, Mario had a strict rule of only writing on Fridays.
I stopped at the juice bar after class and pulled out my phone while I waited in line. No new messages.
“Excuse me.” Someone tapped me on the shoulder. I cringed. I despised the gesture. “You’re up.”
“Right.” I turned and recognized the tapper from somewhere, but I couldn’t place him. “I know you,” I said and waggled a finger.
“Yoga,” the tall, handsome back tapper said.
“Yeah. No. Somewhere else.…” I studied him again.
The clerk behind the counter cleared his throat.
“Medium number five, please.” I paid, then the guy from yoga did the same, and we waited next to each other for our drinks. It hit me like a bat over the head.
“The Drifting. You’re in The Drifting.” I dropped my head back and groaned.
His eyebrows squished together. “I am, but it’s not out yet, and it’s my first film. How do you know that?”
“I work for Mario Mendina. We’re doing the music.” I offered him my hand. “Louana Higgins.”
“Brandon Cole,” he said, shaking my hand.
Our juices were done, and we sipped them as we walked out together.
“Nice meeting you,” I said, turning to go to my car.
“Yeah, same. See you in yoga?” His thick eyebrows rose.
“Maybe!” I waved goodbye.
Ew. I shuddered in the Fiat. A back-tapping actor—two big strikes in my book. I had sworn off actors after meeting too many of them who thought that because I worked with Mario, I had some kind of “in” with directors. They were all thrown, no doubt unfairly, into the same bucket labeled “Do not date or be friends with.” In a city where everybody wanted to be somebody, it cut my dating and friend pool in half, but it was a good rule. And back-tapping was like nails on a blackboard. Even though I was starved for friends, I had to have some standards.
I left work around five, determined to rid my apartment of all things Jake. I cranked up the music—some French pop, quite un-Jake— and stripped the sheets. I collected all the trash and scrubbed the kitchen and the bathroom raw. I was pretty sure I got it all. Well, almost, anyway.
I made a chicken Caesar salad for Fern and me, and we ate it out by the pool as Archie swam for his ball.
“I thought you’d have a hot date tonight.” Fern frowned at her lettuce.
“Who told you you’re not hot?” I winked over to my elderly bestie.
“Good point. I’ll rephrase. I thought you would be out with Jake.”
I speared a piece of chicken. “It was a fling. It’s over. He’s on tour.”
“They don’t tour forever. Are you sure it was a fling? That hunk of a man liked you, Louana.” She took a bite and her painted eyebrows were rais
ed as she chewed.
“One, don’t say hunk ever again. And two, it was temporary, and he’s gone now.”
“Too bad. He looked like he could…”
I held up my hand in objection. “Please don’t finish the sentence.”
“Don’t be a prude.” She wiped the corners of her dark-pink, lipsticked mouth and drank her sangria.
If she only knew.
⸎
The listless air in my apartment hung like someone had pressed pause on my life. The place was spotless due to my Friday night purge, and there was nothing more for me to physically do. The stillness and silence was making me stir-crazy, and I needed to get out. By 8 a.m. Saturday morning I had already run with Archie and showered. It was shaping up to be a beautiful summer day; the California weather holding true. I needed to escape the barren walls around me. I also needed some company. With a bowl of cereal in front of me, I remembered what my boss, Bob, had said on Monday about how he was tired of eating alone.
One of my mom’s favorite sayings came to mind: “Let the food be the medicine and the medicine be the food.” A quote from Hippocrates. I grabbed my phone and called Bob.
“Hey, everything okay?” he answered, after the first ring.
“Yeah, yeah,” I fibbed. “Do you think Sage and Sadie would like a playdate?”
⸎
I drove Fern’s Subaru Forrester north on the PCH, and I was pretty proud of my little plan. Bob had been asking to meet Fern in person for months. Her stories were too good to be true, and he needed proof this cantankerous old lady existed. Fern, Archie, and I needed a field trip, and Bob’s wife, Karen, needed a distraction. All of this added up to my patchwork family away from home, and that day, I needed all of them around me. And the dogs that came with them.
When we arrived, Archie hopped out of the back hatch and through Bob’s gate, where the three dogs moved from sniffing to play barking and showing their bellies to each other. Fern had Karen smiling within seconds, and Bob helped me with the bags of food. I’d overbought on purpose, determined to leave leftovers. Bob was well aware of my love for cooking—one of the many gifts my mother had given me. Sometimes I would bring in extra portions for lunch and give them to Bob or Mario. Fern teased I was trying to save the world one meal at a time. Maybe she was right. But maybe I was like Bob, tired of eating alone, so I bribed people for their company with my food.
“This was a great idea,” Bob said. He pulled the groceries from the bags and set the items on his granite counter. “Karen and I both need to get our minds off cancer, but she doesn’t feel like leaving the house.”
“It will be good for all of us,” I said, watching the waves of the ocean through the window above the sink.
“Why?” Bob studied me. “What’s going on with you? Boy problems?”
“Man.” There was no sign of boy in Jake Riley.
“Oh, they’re the worst,” he joked. “You wanna talk about it?”
“I wanna forget about it.” Lie. What I wanted to do was relive it. Over and over.
“Well, I’m always here for you.”
“I know.” Truth. And why I was standing in his kitchen.
Most of my afternoon was spent in front of the stove. Fern and Karen sat on the patio enjoying the ocean air and laughing. Down on the beach, Bob corralled the wet, sandy, saltwater-vomiting beasts. I cooked a huge pot of chicken soup for the week, baked Fern’s favorite marble cake for dessert, and steamed some broccoli for a kale salad. Bob came in around six, leaving the exhausted, soppy dogs with the ladies outside. He set the table and prepared his “world-famous” crab cakes. Watching from my seat at the counter, I made mental notes and planned to steal the recipe.
The four of us sat around the table after dinner, which I was about to get up and clear when Fern said, “You know, Bob, our girl Louana has a dirty little secret.”
My eyes expanded, and I calculated Fern’s alcohol intake. One mojito before dinner; one, two, three glasses of Riesling. Yup, Fern was tipsy.
“Oh, dear Lord,” I muttered and rolled my eyes.
But there was no stopping Fern. My guess was she would say something about Jake, but anything could come out of her old, unpredictable mouth.
“Louana has a terrible habit of smoking cigarettes.”
Pursing my lips to attempt not to laugh, I hid my smile. She wasn’t giving Bob any information he didn’t already have.
Fern turned back to me. “I saw you! The day when those hoodlums tried to buy Archie from me and turn him into a fighter. I saw you through the window; you sat next to the pool and smoked like a little chimney.” She turned back to Karen and Bob, joyful and proud of her betrayal.
“Bob is a stress smoker.” Karen glared over to him and his eyes popped. “He smokes when he’s worried. He thinks he can hide it by eating mints, but it’s pointless. I can smell it on his clothes.”
My eyes darted around the room, trying to focus them anywhere but on Bob, and I flared my nostrils to hold in my laughter. Bob cracked, which made me close my eyes and burst out as well. Fern and Karen looked back and forth at us in disbelief.
However tipsy Fern had been, she was still clever. “You knew. You both knew.”
Bob wiped a tear of laughter from his cheek. “It’s how we met.”
I graduated college in four and a half years with a double major. Before moving to Los Angeles mid-January, I had sent my résumé in response to several job postings. After a week of interviews, I was still unemployed. So I set up a meeting with a headhunter who happened to be on the third floor in the same building as Mario’s studio. There was also a little coffee shop on the third floor, which opened out to a terrace. It was on that terrace, after my meeting with the headhunter, when Bob found me sitting at a table, smoking. The meeting went like this:
“Can I bum one?” he’d asked.
“You can take the pack,” I’d said to him. “I don’t really smoke.”
“Me neither.”
He asked to join me, and I remember studying him, trying to get a read on this middle-aged man. His clothes were casual, but he was well put together. I could see on his face he was dealing with something. He wasn’t going to flirt with me; he looked like he had been hit by a bus.
“Sure,” I said.
He sat, let out a long breath through his mouth, removed a cigarette from the pack, and lit it.
“I’ll give you two options,” I said. “We can sit here and smoke in silence, or you’re welcome to talk about whatever it is that’s bothering you. I’m a great listener and I’m unemployed, so I’ve got literally nowhere to be.”
I had been sure he would choose silence, but I didn’t want to be unkind and not ask. Also, I was being sincere—he came across as a good guy who needed a friend.
He surprised me when he said, “My wife has cancer.”
“Oh my God. I’m so sorry.”
He’d held out his cigarette and examined it. “Probably the last thing I should be doing.”
“Don’t be too hard on yourself. Plus, I won’t tell. I don’t even know you.”
“Bob Abrams.” He offered me his right hand to shake.
“Louana Higgins. And I still won’t tell on you.”
“So why are you smoking?”
“Ugh. I just had a horrible meeting with a headhunter. I basically told him to take my résumé and shove it where the sun doesn’t shine. Not a super smooth move considering I needed a job, like, yesterday.”
“Distract me with the details,” he said. He inhaled, then flicked the cigarette into the plastic ashtray.
“I have a double major and a lot of work experience, so I thought I had a pretty good chance of landing a good job. He suggested I work at a rent a car company.”
“Ouch.”
“I don’t know; maybe I’m delusional, but I thought I was better than that. And it made me mad—mad at him for not seeing my potential, and mad at myself for thinking I could come to L.A. and find a job where I would be appreciated.�
�� I’d put out my smoke and exhaled the final fumes.
“Let’s see your résumé,” Bob said.
I dug the papers out of my bag and handed them to him.
“English and accounting. You worked through college and had a great GPA. He’s an idiot.” He handed them back to me.
“Thanks.”
Bob sat back in his chair and shrugged. “If you only had some music background, I’d hire you.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, I’m actually looking for an assistant. I’m a producer for a film and TV composer.”
“Really? Who?” His job sounded a million times better than anything else I’d applied for.
“Mario Mendina. Have you heard of him?”
I had. He had been nominated for an Oscar the year before. Mario was known for his dark, simplistic, and haunting scores. If the music in a movie from the last ten years ever made people want to piss in their pants, chances are he had something to do with it. Opportunity was knocking.
“It’s not on my résumé, because I didn’t think it was relevant to the jobs I was applying for, but I can read music and play a bit of piano.”
Bob didn’t seem convinced, so I had to play the one card I could. This was a chance of a lifetime. “My grandmother was an opera singer.”
“Seriously? Who?”
“Well, she’s French. You wouldn’t know her.” Crap. I hoped I hadn’t blown any sliver of a chance I’d had.
Bob pushed back from the table, stood, clapped his hands together, and declared, “Only one more thing to do then. Let’s go meet Mario.”
Mario Mendina was not what I expected. He was not a disheveled Einstein type. In fact, he came off more professional than Bob. He had dark hair with a bit of grey around the ears; it was short and coiffed, with every hair perfectly in place. He wore dark jeans and a light pink, button-down dress shirt with the sleeves rolled up to his elbows. He was also handsome; with more grey hair, he would creep into the silver fox category, no questions asked.
