Mean Season

by Heather Cochran

  “Hey, Max,” I said.

  He looked up and waved. He nodded to the clerk who also looked at us—well, mostly at Judy—before hurrying off.

  “Hey, Leanne,” Max said, pointing at the stain. “You’ve come at a special time. We’re trying out the industrial mop.” Then he broke into a certain smile and as soon as he did, most of what I’d said to Sandy and most every excuse I’d made ran clear out of my head. I should have called him, I thought.

  “This is Judy,” I said. “Judy, this is Max.”

  Judy smiled and shook his hand. “Judy Masterson. I remember you from the Hollywood Express piece. You saved the apples,” she said. She seemed to be watching him very closely.

  “They train us in fruit-and-vegetable rescue,” Max said. “Not everyone passes the final exam.”

  Judy laughed. “I’m Joshua’s publicist,” she told him.

  “Seems like a guy like that would generate enough publicity on his own,” Max said. “He must run you ragged.”

  I wondered whether he even knew what a publicist did. Not because Max doesn’t have a good mind, but because I hadn’t known, when I first wrote to Judy. It’s not like there’s a big need for them in Pinecob.

  “Oh, I make time for new talent. It’s always an adventure,” she said.

  He smiled at her and I was suddenly sorry she’d come along. I wanted to be alone with him, to tell him that I was glad he’d stopped by the house, to say that I wished I had been there.

  “Judy’s been in town for the last couple of days,” is what I said instead. “Joshua said you stopped by—I meant to call, but with Judy and Lars here, there’s been a lot to do.”

  “No sweat,” Max said. “I was just passing by.” I wondered if he thought I was getting back at him for not calling about South Pacific, three years before. I wondered if maybe I’d been doing that, at least a little bit. But I knew if he’d give me a chance, I wouldn’t do it again.

  “So you’re from Pinecob, too?” Judy asked.

  “Born and raised,” Max said. “Just like Leanne here.”

  “Judy lives in Los Angeles,” I said.

  “Malibu,” Judy corrected me.

  “I hear it’s nice out there,” Max said. “All that sun. Those palm trees.”

  “We’ll have to get you out for a visit,” Judy said. “It’s just a simple airplane ride.” I looked over at her. Nice as she’d always been, she’d never mentioned getting me out to Los Angeles, or Malibu for that matter.

  “Yeah, right,” Max said. “Not sure it’s the place for me. I doubt I’d fit in out there.”

  I wondered whether Max’s hesitance sprang more from his idea of California or from the flight he imagined taking to get there.

  “You never know until you try,” Judy said. “I used to say the same thing. Now I wouldn’t live anywhere else.”

  I hated that she was so put-together. I wished I had thought to put on mascara before going to the Winn-Dixie. I watched Judy smile at Max, and I realized that I didn’t know what she was after. Something didn’t feel right, though. I trusted she wasn’t interested in him in the same way I was. Judy and Lars had always struck me as a solid, go-getter couple.

  “What happened to your ear?” Judy asked him.

  Max raised one hand to his torn-off earlobe.

  “He got bit by a dog, isn’t that right?” I said. “It wasn’t his fault or anything,” I added.

  “Leanne knows all about my sordid past,” Max said to Judy. “Killer poodle.”

  “Ouch!” Judy said. “But it makes a great story.”

  “Long list?” Max asked me. “Sardines?”

  “Not today,” I said. “Fancy olives and cheese mostly. But I could use some inspiration for Beau Ray’s birthday party.”

  “Oh, right. Another July birthday for you to get through. First the nation and now Beau Ray.”

  “In two weeks,” I said. “Can you believe he’ll be thirty? You guys are getting old.”

  “Aw, don’t say that,” Max said.

  “Thirty? Really?” Judy said. “You don’t look a day over twenty-five.”

  “I don’t know about that.” He laughed. “I could arrange for the bakery to do a cake and bring it by when I come to the party,” Max said. “You want me to do that?”

  “That’d be great,” I said. “If you don’t mind.”

  “I am invited, right?” Max asked.

  “I’m sure you are!” Judy said, before I could make a sound.

  Judy and Lars left on Friday to return to Los Angeles—or Malibu, I guess, if you want to be a stickler about it. Judy said she’d be back in two weeks time, when preproduction for Musket Fire was scheduled to begin and there was publicity to be made and managed. Before leaving, she reminded me that the fan club’s summer newsletter still hadn’t gone out, and could I get it done before she came back. It wasn’t really a question.

  I’d been avoiding writing the newsletter, and I knew it. Usually, I sent the summer letter out in late June, but there it was mid-July and I hadn’t yet begun. It wasn’t a huge task or anything. Mostly cutting and pasting pictures and articles. But I knew that the “Joshua in the news” section would have to include his arrest and punishment, and I wasn’t sure how best to frame that.

  That Saturday morning after Judy left, Joshua and I were eating breakfast in the dining room. He’d been reading the paper when he looked over at me.

  “Nice to have the place to ourselves again,” he said.

  I was surprised and also flattered. I thought he enjoyed hanging out with Lars and Judy. I thought he would have appreciated visitors, and I said as much.

  “Oh, they’re fine,” he said. “They’re just so demanding, you know? It’s like everything that isn’t L.A. Is wrong. It’s too hot or too humid or it’s so green, as if there’s something wrong with that.” I just stared at him, I think, because he laughed and said, “I know, I know. Me saying that.”

  “What are you going to do today?” I asked him. Lars had left a new pile of scripts, and I figured that Joshua would probably lie in the sun and flip through them.

  “What are you going to do?” he asked back.

  I told him I was fixing to draft his fan club newsletter.

  “Can I help?” he asked.

  I wasn’t sure whether he was serious or not, but figured I might as well find out.

  We went down to the basement after breakfast, and I showed him the spring edition as an example.

  “You did this?” he asked. “I never saw this.”

  “Judy okays them, then I send them out.”

  “This is funny,” he said, pointing to a quiz I had written, asking fan club members which outfit Joshua Reed had not worn in one of his film roles. The choices were a tartan kilt, a toga, surgical scrubs or a cowboy hat and chaps. A lot of people had guessed the kilt, forgetting that he’d had that cameo role in the Scottish thriller, Bagpipe Dreams. The answer was a toga.

  “It’s part of the job,” I said while he read through. I was embarrassed just then that I knew so many of his details, as if for the past seven years, I’d been his official stalker or something. When I’d started running the fan club, Joshua Reed felt almost like a made-up person, like a fairy-tale prince, some sort of dashing composite of the characters he played. The more real he became, the more the fan club seemed like a job. But now he was no longer 3,000 miles away, and keeping tabs on his career and coming up with trivia and being an overall cheerleader with Joshua there in front of me—that didn’t seem like something that someone with a full life would spend time on.

  “How do we start?” he asked. I pulled out my most recent file of clippings and handed them over.

  “Go through this, and separate out whatever pictures you want to include.”

  The newsletter always had the same basic parts to it. There was the “picture page” where I photocopied pictures of Joshua taken from magazines and newspapers (plus any publicity stills Judy might have sent). There was the “Joshua in the
news” section where I listed all the articles I’d found, with little blurb descriptions, so that anyone who’d missed an interview somewhere would know about it. I figured that’s what they paid fifteen dollars a year for, and that’s what I set to working on. There was also the “trivia corner,” with lesser-known information about Joshua (that’s where I’d stuck the quiz). And usually there would be a listing of appearances Joshua was scheduled to make (benefits, store openings, movie premieres, press conferences—Judy always sent me the dates and I’d paste them in. That’s how come I knew Joshua had never been to West Virginia).

  “Now what?” he asked. He handed me the photos he’d chosen.

  “I guess there can’t really be an appearances list this time,” I said.

  “I appeared in court,” he offered. “Twice.”

  “I’m not sure Judy would approve that.”

  “I know I don’t have anything on my slate for the next forty days. Unless you count AA.”

  “Which is supposed to be anonymous,” I reminded him, although judging by the newfound popularity of the Tuesday and Thursday meetings, that didn’t seem to be the case.

  “You could interview me. Or I could write something,” Joshua suggested.

  “Like what?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “What do people ask about?” he asked. “I could tell some story I don’t usually tell. Something exclusive. People love exclusives.”

  “What about something from Rackett?” I suggested. “You never talk about that.”

  Joshua frowned.

  “Or not,” I said. “Maybe you had a pet growing up?”

  He didn’t respond.

  “Or something about you and your sister, when you were little?”

  Joshua frowned again. It was obvious I wasn’t hitting on anything he wanted to share with his public.

  “You know, I’ve never seen anything on how you picked the name Reed.”

  “I don’t suppose you have,” he said finally.

  “It doesn’t matter. I’m sure I can think of something to fill the space,” I said quickly. Something in his mood had gone dark, and I wished I could find the switch to bring him back. “I didn’t mean for it to be hard. I can do the newsletter myself.”

  “My sister’s best friend growing up was a girl named Jackie Reed,” Joshua said. “I had a huge thing for her.”

  “Jackie Reed?”

  He nodded and smiled softly, like he was remembering her. “I got to kiss her once. Late at night. She was staying over and my sister was asleep.”

  “And?” I asked. “What then?”

  “Nothing. She just let me kiss her. But only once. Said that would have to be it. Even then, she knew she didn’t want to get too close to my family. Smart girl. Man, she was something. I could look at her for hours.”

  “She was your Brennie,” I said.

  “My what?”

  “Everyone’s got those people they wish they could keep near and maybe actually be at the same time. For whatever reason. Girl or guy.”

  “And it’s called a Brennie? You have people like that?” he asked. He sounded surprised.

  “Everyone does.”

  He looked like he hadn’t considered this before.

  “I bet to a lot of people, you’re that person.”

  “Now, that’s scary,” Joshua said.

  “So did Jackie Reed stay as great as all that?” I asked. I was thinking about Brennie Critchett. She lived on the far side of Pinecob, out by Paulie’s family’s farm. After she dropped out of college, she had taken a job as a greeter at the Charles Town Supermart, which only required her to greet people with a smile. She wasn’t very good at it.

  Joshua smiled, sort of sad. “I don’t know. But probably not,” he said. “She married some guy I heard slapped her around a little. My sister lost touch with her. But I liked her name, so I took it. It reminds me to remember her.”

  “We could write up that story. Only, not the part about her getting hit.”

  “Yeah, maybe,” he said.

  “So I’ve got a question,” I told him.

  He had gone back to leafing through the picture file. “What’s that?” Joshua asked.

  “When you introduce yourself, what do you say?”

  He looked over at me. “What do you mean?”

  “I notice how sometimes you ask people to call you Josh. I know that Judy calls you J.P.—”

  “She’s known me a long time,” he said. “No one but her and people from home—I mean, Rackett—call me J.P.”

  “You never asked me to call you Josh, and I was wondering,” I said. “I always call you Joshua.”

  “You can call me whatever you want,” he said. “Joshua, Josh, whatever.” He looked at me, a little closer. “What?

  “It seems like Josh is what your friends call you, but you never said ‘call me Josh,’ not to me.”

  “Leanne,” Joshua Reed said. “Maybe I like the sound of it when you say Joshua.”

  I tried to see through him. I thought he was probably lying, or acting, or whatever you’d call it when you’re trying to make someone feel better.

  “Call me Josh, if you want. Or Joshua. Or J.P. Or Hey You. Whatever you want. I’ll answer to whatever you want.”

  “Now anything is going to sound weird,” I told him.

  “You asked,” he said, but he smiled.

  Maybe timing is everything, but that doesn’t mean you have to like it. Me, I hated that timing was everything.

  That next day, Sunday, I went to the Winn-Dixie fully expecting to see Max, all set to suggest we go see a movie since I didn’t know of any musicals that were playing. In the managers’ office was the same guy who’d been so taken by Judy during my last visit. I recognized him. He was the assistant cheese manager.

  “Max in?” I asked him.

  “Where’s that lady you were here with a couple days ago?” he asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “She live around here?” he asked.

  I said nowhere near. I told him that Judy lived in California.

  “California.” He said it like it was a place in a dream.

  “Malibu,” I said.

  “Malibu,” he repeated, the syllables playing off his tongue.

  “So, is Max in?” I asked again.

  The assistant cheese manager looked back at me. His eyes were flat again, like I’d interrupted something.

  “He’s out all week,” he said.

  I felt like such a dolt. It was like the two halves of my brain had two different places to be. I knew that Max would be gone all week because he was where Beau Ray was, and Beau Ray was gone all week. Duh. That’s why carrots weren’t on my list.

  Lionel, Scooter, Max, Paulie and Beau Ray were all at Lionel’s family’s lake cabin. It was a yearly thing the guys did, always midsummer. They’d fish and drink and do God knows what else for a full seven days, coming back all unshaven and bleary. Even Max probably didn’t smell clean at the end of those weeks. Normally, I’d have hated that sort of thing, but they never once failed to include Beau Ray, so how resentful could I really be?

  The following Tuesday, when I picked up Joshua after his AA meeting at the high school, he was grinning like he’d taken home first-prize, though I was pretty sure Mr. Pearson didn’t give out ribbons or trophies.

  “What?” I asked him.

  “I talked,” he said. “Back in there. I stood up and talked.”

  I told him I thought that was great.

  “It is great. I don’t do much improv, but I thought, screw it, I can do this. Leanne did it. Homer does it. I can do it.”

  “What did you say?” I asked him.

  “You know how it goes. I said my name. I said ‘My name’s Joshua’ and that I figured that most people probably already knew why I was there, but it was because I’d gotten my second DUI. You know, I told my story. Not all of it, but some.”

  “That’s really great, Joshua,” I said. I had decided to stick with callin
g him Joshua.

  “I talked a little bit about Rackett and how I was staying with you, and that you and your family had been totally cool to me, and how the summer’s been a lot different than I thought it would be.”

  “Different?”

  “In a good way,” he assured me. “That I’ve been reading a lot but also getting a lot of thinking done. You know, Elise told me that she thought I needed to focus on getting myself together. At the time, I figured it was just shrink bullshit. Actually, coming from her, I’m sure it was. But still, it’s worked out that way. I’m so much clearer about what I want to do when I get back to L.A., what I’m going to focus on.”

  He was smiling, but that’s when it hit me: Joshua was going to leave. The ninety days would end and he would return to California. Part of my brain must have known it. Of course, I’d known it, but as he spoke, it still came at me like a surprise. Were we all expected to go back to the way we were before? How could we go back?

  The next night, Sandy and I went for a beer at the Buccaneer. It was the one night she had off between weeks of fourteen-hours on. Alice was coming from Hagerstown to stay with her the following week, so at least they would be able to see each other, even when Sandy was tired.

  Loreen arrived at our booth straightaway. I watched her walk up and wondered if anything had happened between her and Paulie after the Fourth of July party.

  “Hey Sandy,” she said. And then to me, “So I did it. I asked him out.”

  I knew immediately she wasn’t talking about Paulie. And she was smiling this smile, like she was so proud of herself.

  “Oh, yeah? Good for you,” I said. But I was only acting casual.

  “Who are we talking about?” Sandy asked. Neither of us answered her.

  “How’d it go?” I asked Loreen. “What’d he say?”

  She shrugged. “I guess he’s already dating someone,” Loreen said. “You know who?”

  “Who’s this?” Sandy asked again.

  “Max Campbell,” Loreen told her.