by Kim Law
“We were cute, huh?” They’d looked amazingly happy. Especially for two people who would be divorced a short twenty-four hours later. “Don’t we all wish we could still look the way we did at eighteen?”
At her question, Heather and Trenton rose to their feet.
“I understand the two of you went down different paths after that,” Patrick pushed.
“That’s right.”
“Cal came back home.” Patrick stressed the last word. “But you went to California. You had an LA address for a while.”
“You’re a thorough man, Mr. Whitaker.” This bit of news didn’t surprise her.
Trenton inched closer.
“Just doing my job, Ms. Sadler. So let’s talk about LA, shall we? Why there?”
She gave a casual shrug. “Why anywhere?”
“What did you do?”
“A little of this, a little of that.” She used the words as a stall tactic as she worked out how best to play this. She wasn’t about to give him the reasoning she’d given her friends at the time. It was none of his business that her father was supposedly a big-name actor. And she sure as hell didn’t plan to tell him she’d gone out there with big hopes and childish dreams.
But she could see she’d have to give him something. Otherwise, he’d keep digging.
So she decided it was time for a useful sound bite or two. The purpose of coming on the show was about winning new clients, after all, and she could totally provide a story in keeping with how the town had seen her at the time. It was bound to tug on hearts.
She glanced at her hands before looking back up. “Mostly, I tried to get lost.” She said the words with heavy emotion, making sure to show the same on her face.
Everyone around them seemed to hold their breath.
“From Cal?” Patrick asked.
She shook her head. “I didn’t need to hide from Cal. He wasn’t looking for me. I was hiding from myself. Have you ever just not wanted to be you, Patrick? Ever had that bad of a day? A week?” She paused for dramatic effect and pressed her lips together as she swallowed. “Years?” she whispered. “I wasn’t hiding from someone. I was simply not being Jill Sadler for a while. That girl had a rough start to her life.”
Patrick nodded—the wind had been knocked out of him. “I understand that she did.” He glanced at Heather and Trenton, and legit concern seemed to fill his eyes. “Did you want to go ahead and talk a little about that now?”
The three of them had decided to tell the stories of how they’d come to be orphans by being interviewed together.
“Not now.” She glanced up at the one-and-a-half-story house, at the now-missing porch roof, and pictured the open trusses they’d eventually add to create a more welcoming entry into the home. And she let herself go to a place she rarely visited. She thought about coming home to discover that her life was suddenly different. About how her mother had killed herself—without consideration for her only child.
She pictured her mother as she’d found her.
She thought about all the times she’d tried her best to be there for her mom. To give her mother something to live for.
And she thought about how she’d failed.
Jill allowed the hurt from those years to define her features, and other than noise from the work going on at the other house, no one made a sound.
Before the memories became too much, she forced her mind to the man next door. To the competition at hand. She hadn’t lost the ability to show the cameras what she wanted them to see. She knew that now. Which meant that she had Cal beat when it came to winning viewers. He might have charm on his side, but she had skill. And she had a backstory.
She let a tear slip from her eye, then wiped it away and refocused on the job at hand. “I needed to escape.” She faced the camera. “To find the real me. And when I did, I came home.” She motioned toward Heather and Trenton and saw that another cameraman had repositioned on them. “The three of us started out together almost sixteen years ago . . . and then we found each other again ten years later. I came home when it was time, Patrick. As did all of us. And I decided to make something of myself other than just being ‘that poor little Sadler girl’ from Red Oak Falls, Texas.”
Trenton and Heather swiped at their eyes as she finished her monologue, and Jill knew she’d scored. Because her foster sisters cried as rarely as she did.
“I cannot believe all of that was fake.” Trenton was horizontal in the grass again, all three of them under the massive oak that shaded both the front yard and the crumbling sidewalk, and none of them were currently wearing their mic packs.
Jill had declared a break from being recorded after finishing on the porch—also insisting that Len find someone else to harass for a while—and instead of simply muting their mics, they’d taken great pleasure in stripping them off each other. The tape and wires weren’t the easiest things to get out of, and Patrick would be annoyed when he realized someone would have to redo it all. But after the wedding photo he’d sprung on her, Jill didn’t care.
“I wasn’t bad, was I?” Jill took a sandwich from Heather. “I even made you both cry.”
“Only because we thought you were crying,” Heather protested. She passed a bottle of juice and a sandwich to Trenton, and Trenton pushed to one elbow to eat.
Trenton made a face at the sight of the green juice. She wasn’t nearly as health conscious as Heather—but she would also never reject anything with calories. She unscrewed the cap and looked up at Jill. “You were so believable that I’m beginning to think being around all those LA types for so long must have worn off on you. You shine on camera, chica.”
Jill grinned. She’d take that compliment.
“And I totally get why they wanted to center the show around you,” Heather added. She unwrapped her own sandwich, though it was on a spinach wrap—and likely only contained veggies. “I had no idea you had that in you.”
Jill chewed on her bottom lip as her foster sisters dug into their lunches. She couldn’t eat thanks to the anticipation suddenly filling her. She wanted to tell them. The feeling of failure had always been so prevalent that she’d preferred not to think about those six years. About why she’d gone out there. But for the first time since coming home, she wanted to talk about it. She wanted her friends to know.
She plucked a blade of grass from beside her thigh and spoke while staring at the ground. “It might not come from being around those people, so much as from the years of acting classes I took.”
Heather choked on her juice. While Trenton shot upright.
“The what?” Trenton screeched.
Heather coughed into her fist.
“The . . . uhmmm . . .” Jill gave them an apologetic grimace. “Acting. Classes.”
“Since when?” Heather wheezed.
“Since . . . the whole time I was out there.”
Heather and Trenton just stared at her. Several people had glanced their way after the initial commotion, but when nothing else happened, they returned their attention to their work.
“I thought you went out there to find your dad,” Heather finally said. Her confusion drew a vertical line in the space between her eyes.
“I did go out there to find him,” Jill hurried to assure them. “That wasn’t a lie.” She had wanted to go to Hollywood to find her father. From an early age she’d had fantasies of bringing him home so her mother would finally have someone who would love her enough. “Only, I . . .”
Only, her mother had died, and her wants had shifted.
“Only, you wanted to act, too,” Trenton accused. She’d managed to sit up even straighter, so that she now looked down her nose at Jill. “You said you took classes the whole time you were out there. Does that mean you knew you wanted to act before you left?”
Jill nodded.
“And what?” Trenton continued. “It just never occurred to you to mention this to us? Neither before, nor in all the years since?”
“I’m sorry,” Jill whispered. She
felt horrible, but the reality of the situation was that she’d never truly expected to see them again. They’d been great friends, sure. Life wouldn’t have been the same if she hadn’t had them back then. And they’d all said they would keep in touch.
But words were easy. She’d learned that with her mom.
It was also far too easy to believe you meant more to others than you did.
Pain touched Trenton’s eyes. “Did you think we wouldn’t support you?”
“No,” Jill protested. “That’s not it. I just . . .”
She swallowed. She’d just needed a layer of protection around what she’d desired the most. And the fact was, they had lost contact for a few years.
“I’m sorry,” she said again. “I think it was more that saying it out loud scared me too much. It scared me more than the thought of not going. And I really wanted to go. I used to watch the drama club at school.” She could remember those days clearly. She’d be in the background as part of the stage crew, but at the same time, she’d keep an ear out for everything being said on stage. She’d never missed a rehearsal. And she’d memorized every line. “I so wanted to be in the plays,” she admitted now.
Those words had never been uttered out loud.
“But I was too terrified to try out. Too afraid to fail.”
“You should have told us,” Heather said. She reached over and rested a hand on Jill’s thigh.
“I know.” Jill nodded. She put her hand over Heather’s, and she glanced at Trenton. “I should have. But we all had our issues, right? I wanted to prove myself before sharing something like that.”
She’d wanted to be the fourth person from Red Oak Falls to make it in the world.
After Cal left her in Vegas, she’d been too mortified to talk to anyone. About anything. She’d ignored her phone for weeks. Then she’d just been angry. That anger had fueled her stubbornness, and her visions of grandeur had grown. She’d worked her rear off trying to make it as an actress. Only, grandeur never came. And by the time she’d been on the bus heading back to Texas, she realized she was even more alone than she’d ever been. She hadn’t spoken to either Heather or Trenton in years—they’d drifted apart as time passed—and she’d had no idea if Aunt Blu would so much as open her door for her.
She’d failed. No one had wanted her. And she’d had nowhere else to go but Red Oak Falls.
“So what happened?” Heather asked. She was more easily forgiving than Trenton.
“Nothing in the end,” Jill answered. “I went out there and I was instantly overwhelmed with the talent I saw everywhere, so I enrolled in a class. I took every acting class I could find for the first few years, and after that, I mostly did improv. Stuff like that. I couldn’t keep up with the cost of the classes all the time, but I kept trying. Because I really thought I had talent. That I could make a career of it.”
“You do!” Heather flapped a hand toward the porch. “You could. We just saw it. And it wasn’t only today, either. You were stellar when Bob and Debra were here. We just didn’t say anything because we thought that was about putting on a face around Cal.”
“Oh, it was about putting on a face around Cal. Don’t think for a second that I’m not still angry at him. But there’s no way I’ll give him the pleasure of seeing it play out on screen.”
Of course, he’d seen it in person Wednesday night.
“So you just beat the crap out of our kitchen instead?” Trenton said, and Jill gave a little nod.
“At least it was work that needed to be done,” she offered.
Her foster sisters had commented on the kitchen’s destruction the morning after, but neither had asked a pointed question about it until now. Jill had also kept secret the fact that Cal had come over while she’d been in the middle of it.
“That was a little concerning,” Trenton told her. “Coming in and seeing that. You haven’t lost your cool like that in a long time.”
“I would maintain that I didn’t lose my cool so much as have a controlled burn,” Jill explained. “The first few days of this week were tough. I wasn’t prepared for everything. You know”—she nodded toward the Cadillac House—“with him. I needed to work out a few kinks.”
“And you’re better now? You’re okay with him?”
“You do seem better,” Heather offered.
“I’m adjusting.” Jill gave a little chuckle. “I’m also counting down the days.”
Pete Logan came out of the house next door before they could get back to Jill’s story, and captured their attention. The man was not bad looking at all. At least six foot, solidly built. And he currently had clumps of dust clinging to the black cotton of his T-shirt. It was strangely adorable. He glanced at them sitting under the tree, before turning back to speak with someone still inside the house. Then instead of going wherever he’d been headed, he disappeared back inside.
As they watched, Heather let out a mopey-sounding sigh, and Jill looked at her questioningly.
“I still wish we’d gotten that house,” Heather explained.
“But we didn’t,” Trenton asserted. “And we’re not talking about the house right now. We’re talking about Hollywood. And Jill’s rise to fame.”
They’d actually been talking about her temper at that particular moment, but Jill didn’t point out the distinction. “It was more like my non-rise to fame,” she clarified instead. She then returned her attention to Heather. “And seriously, why would you still want that house? It has so much more potential for problems. Didn’t you hear about their plumbing inspection? Even worse than we’d expected. And much worse than ours.”
The report had reinforced the pleasure she’d taken in manipulating Cal into choosing the worst house. During their initial walk-through, she’d caught him studying the three of them. As if watching for a tell as to which house they preferred. So she’d given him the sign he’d been looking for.
She’d oohed and aahed over all the tucked-away spaces and the gorgeous trim work. She’d let her breathing pick up as she’d “visualized” what the main floor could one day become. Only, she’d done it all “secretly,” while making sure Cal witnessed her trying to not let him see. Her acting skills had already been razor sharp on day one.
“But Bonnie Beckman is still going on about it,” Heather told them. “She caught me at the grocery store last night. She’s already calling Cal the winner. That could have been us.”
“It can still be us,” Trenton added, though her tone implied she couldn’t care less about winning at the moment. “Now seriously. Hollywood. What happened? Did you get any parts?”
Jill pulled her thoughts back from screwing with Cal and answered the question. “No,” she stated bluntly. “Nothing worth mentioning, anyway. I went by the stage name of Jessica Grant, so you wouldn’t find my name on anything if you tried.”
“And what made you finally come home?” Heather scooted around until she sat facing both of them. “Because at this point, I’m assuming it wasn’t that you ‘found yourself,’ as you told Patrick.”
Jill grinned. She did enjoy messing with Patrick.
She finally unwrapped her sandwich. “Correct. I did not find myself. In fact, I’m pretty sure I’m still looking.” But she also wasn’t sure she was ready to admit what had finally driven her out of California.
Not all of it, anyway.
“Mostly it was money,” she told them. “I was out of it, and it costs a fortune to live there. I also discovered that I didn’t like LA the way I’d always dreamed I would. It wasn’t . . . home. You know?”
Heather nodded silently, while Trenton simply watched. As if understanding there was more to the story.
“And talk about demoralizing,” Jill continued. She let her eyelids drift closed as she went back to those days. “No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t get anywhere. It ticked me off. But it also broke my spirit.” She swallowed. “It beat at my confidence.”
“That’s why you don’t watch TV.”
Jill op
ened her eyes at Trenton’s statement. “Right. My failure wouldn’t crush me quite as much if I wasn’t constantly reminded of what I failed to achieve. At least, that was the theory.”
“And did it work?” Heather asked.
Jill only shrugged. She still didn’t watch TV.
“Then tell us . . .” Heather motioned to one of the camera crews. “You’re very good at acting. I can understand why you wanted it. So, is all of this making you miss it? Is it making you wish you could try again?”
“I’m not quitting our company,” Jill assured her.
“That’s not what I asked.”
But that was what was most important, Jill thought. It had taken her too long to realize what these two women meant to her. Not to mention Aunt Blu. She wouldn’t give that up now for anything. Or for any part.
However, with Heather’s question hanging in the air—and with Trenton still eyeing her, as well—Jill forced herself to think about the situation. She’d been so focused on lining up the subs and getting work under way that she hadn’t really given thought to how she felt about the rest of it. She put her back to the tree and worked on her sandwich as she stared at both houses.
“I don’t know,” she finally said. She was having fun. She could admit that. “I am enjoying it. More than I expected to. Especially considering that so much of my energy has to go toward avoiding Cal.”
Trenton snorted. “I’d say your avoidance is adding to your fun.”
Jill sat up straighter. “What do you mean by that?”
Trenton rolled her eyes at the defensive tone. “Don’t get your panties in a twist. I’m just saying that you always did enjoy trying to one-up people. And Patrick is like a dog with a bone the way he tries to get you to talk about Cal. Or be caught in the same shot as Cal.”
“That he is.” Jill smiled. “And yes, I am enjoying it. A lot. I sense he doesn’t appreciate my efforts as much as I do, though.”
Trenton and Heather both laughed, and Trenton dropped back to the ground, her head now pillowed by the grass. She stared up at Jill. “So, do you think he’ll stop?”
