by Jen Malone
When he hung up, I moved the conversation quickly around to my favorite subject. Well, maybe not my favorite, but one I had a hard time staying away from.
“So, hey, Joe. I was wondering. You’re gay, right?”
“Card-carrying member of the rainbow flag brigade.”
“Well, so, um, I was wondering what you thought about what Graham’s doing. I mean, assuming you know Graham isn’t really, you know . . .”
“Gay? Oh, dollface, that’s laughable. I’ve known that boy since he was nine. He’s straighter than the blade on my chef’s knife.”
“Right. Well, so, whaddya think then?”
Joe propped his foot across his knee and rubbed his hand over his sock in kneading circles. He didn’t speak for a moment, and then he said, “Well, listen. I don’t think it’s right what he’s doing, obviously. I have half a mind to whack his mother over the head with a frying pan for her role in all this. I don’t know if you know, but I was the producer on The Ben Show. I gave Graham his first long-term gig and I spent a ton of time with him when he was little. The kid’s amazing. Total natural talent and a sweetheart to boot.”
Joe got up and began to do yoga poses while he talked. His little potbelly got in the way every time he tried to bend over and I almost joked that he should lay off Mom’s cookies for a bit. But instead I sat quietly, waiting for him to finish.
“Kid backed himself into a tight corner and I feel bad for him. But as far as the whole pretending to be gay thing? Well, in a way I have to laugh that the pendulum has swung as far as it has. Up until a few years ago, stars went out of their way to disguise the fact that they were gay. It would knock your socks off if I started naming names, but I can tell you there is a long and storied list of stars who’ve done exactly what Graham is doing, but in reverse. Faked relationships, marriages even, to protect their career. Awfully hard to get cast as a leading man when the public saw you as a miscreant. So, as much as I feel for Graham, I’m a little giddy that we’ve come such a long way that it’s now considered a career boon to be gay, instead of a career killer.”
I saw his point. But I still wished the revolution was being led by someone who actually was gay, instead of someone every bit as hypocritical as the stars who’d done the opposite.
Joe interrupted my thoughts. “Thing is, Annie, we all wear masks.”
“I don’t,” I told him. “What you see is what you get.”
“Oh yeah? I’ve been around actors all my adult life, and you’re not that good, baby girl. When I look at you, I see someone trying to get along, but seems to me you have someone besides Graham to pick a beef with. Maybe you’re finally ready?”
He meant Dad. Of course Mom had enlisted Joe to get me to cross enemy lines. Made perfect sense. I bet he was bought off real easily too—probably didn’t take more than a couple dozen oatmeal raisins.
But, if I was honest, maybe I was finally ready. Losing my cool with Graham had been the end of us, but it had felt really good to finally speak my mind. I’d been so afraid to even talk to Dad because I couldn’t trust I’d be able to keep my emotions in check, but maybe that wasn’t what I should have been worried about. Maybe I needed to not keep my emotions in check.
“You’re kind of good at this psychobabble stuff,” I told Joe, giving him a sideways glance.
“I’m a producer. You ever try to talk a neurotic actor off an emotional cliff? They’re nearly as bad as writers. I’m basically one hissy fit short of earning Dr. Phil status at this point in the game.
“Anyway, I feel for you kids. Not easy, this growing up stuff. You’re learning it, Graham’s learning it. The two of you are just on different stages. Graham’s life is always going to be supersize, so it makes sense that his screw-ups are also going to be bigger than everyone else’s. That’s just part of the gig he signed on for. The second-hardest part about growing up is trying to figure out who you are. The hardest part comes after you’ve figured it out and the rest of the world wants to pull you in a different direction. Trust me, I wouldn’t want to be back there. It’s hard enough watching my own kids go through it.”
I dropped the copy of Architectural Digest I’d been absently flipping through. “You have kids?”
“Yup. Two.”
“Why haven’t I ever heard you mention them? Or met them?”
“They live in Hawaii with my ex. They were his from his first marriage. To a woman,” Joe stage-whispered. “Since I don’t have a biological claim to them, I don’t get any kind of steady visitation rights. I see them, just not as often as I’d like. But when they were little, and my ex and I were together, they lived with us. I’d walk them to school every day, ya know? The first five years, they hold your hand every time they cross the street and then there’s that day they just . . . drop it in the middle of the crosswalk and run ahead. And that’s when it starts. I call it the longest let-go.”
He let out a long wistful sigh. I giggled in spite of myself and Joe jerked his head over to me. I think he got so wrapped up in his soliloquy he forgot I was next to him.
“What’s so funny?”
“Nothing. Sorry. I didn’t mean to ruin the moment.”
“No, seriously. What’s funny?” he asked again.
“The Longest Let-Go. I was just thinking that would make a killer name for a country song.”
Joe laughed too. Then he stood up and clapped his hands suddenly.
“What?”
“Not a country song! A television show! The Longest Let-Go. Father and son struggling after Mom dies and trying to make their relationship work through the teen years. Annie, we’re brilliant. Okay, I gotta go. I gotta call Amy Sherman-Palladino!”
Snatching up his shoes, he skipped out the door wearing only socks.
But his words stayed with me. Not the ones about his kids, but the ones that had made me rethink my stance on Dad. Maybe it was time to get good and angry.
Mom had me start with a letter. She blared bad heavy-metal music and told me to just write in one stream of consciousness. She said she did it one time when she and Dad broke up while they were engaged and it worked wonders. I don’t know about wonders, but I did put a lot of emotions on the page. And discovered I was not likely to ever become a headbanger.
I mailed the letter. Mom took me to an actual therapist, who wasn’t as good as Dr. Joe, but who gave me exercises—exercises!—I could practice to learn to be more assertive about my feelings.
And then, one Sunday in late August, I got home from crashing an open house at this amazing estate designed by the architectural firm Godritch & Firth and there was Dad at the dining room table, looking the same as he always did and yet completely different.
When he saw me he froze, like a squirrel in the yard who’d just spotted a person in the window, measuring its next step and calculating how long it would have to flee up a tree. But after a second or two like that, Dad got up and rushed over to put his arms around me.
“Principessa,” he murmured into my hair. I stiffened but I couldn’t bring myself to jerk free. I wanted to. But I also didn’t want to.
And then we were both crying.
Mom retreated to her room, giving us space. We sat up all night, talking and going through an entire box of tissues. The weird thing was, after I’d put everything into the letter, I didn’t really feel like I needed to say it again. I remembered how much it had meant when Graham had listened to me tell my story on the RV and I tried it myself. Just listening.
Right before daybreak, Dad insisted we all drive to the ocean to watch the sun come up, even though Mom and I laughed that it was the sunset everyone flocked to on the West Coast. We staked out a spot on the deserted beach and the three of us huddled under a blanket, watching the sunrise and a faraway man with a metal detector comb the sand for treasure. As a family.
It wasn’t as easy as all that. Obviously. But Dad’s vi
sit stretched longer and longer and eventually we started calling it his relocation instead.
He and Mom found their own therapist to program into their phone next to the number of the Chinese takeout place, just like everyone else in LA. We started settling into life in La-La Land. Mom even began drinking protein shakes that looked like seaweed threw up in the blender. She and Dad met with Joe almost every afternoon to brainstorm a business idea Mom had. They said they wanted to surprise me when they had all the details worked out, but everyone was excited about it.
In September, I started school. I was sort of surprised when I actually met a few normal people, at least normal for Hollywood. One girl even introduced me to an architectural club her dad belonged to. I went to the beach, though I never did follow Wynn’s advice on the surfing lesson. I went to movies, which everyone did a whole lot more than we did back in Georgia. Mostly because their parents produced them or starred in them or ran the props department at the production house.
Even though his name was constantly on the tip of my tongue and in the front of my brain, I never mentioned Graham to my friends, and it wasn’t like they had any reason to ask me about him. No one had matched my face to the Eiffel Tower video, mostly because it was probably the last place they’d picture me. They called me “Smalltown” and took ridiculous amounts of glee in introducing me to In-N-Out Burger and Jamba Juice and fish taco beach shacks.
The sale of our house in Shelbyville went through and in October we moved out of our apartment and into a cozy stucco bungalow rental with Dad. It was much smaller than the house I’d grown up in, but Dad was very insistent that a chunk of the money from our house sale go toward replenishing my college fund. Even though the bungalow was tiny, it had a cactus in the backyard and a patio with an outdoor fireplace and wisteria climbing up a wooden overhang. Mom hung twinkly lights around the perimeter of the fence.
They finally clued me in on their big idea: they called it Dough Re Mi, a food truck that would roam the city selling Mom’s cookies streetside. Dad would help with the business side of it and try to line up catering gigs and birthday party appearances and Joe would be the behind-the-scenes bankroll. He told Mom she could pay his dividends in cookies and I think he was only partly kidding. He said he envisioned getting even richer on franchising the idea. They threw all their energy into testing recipes and outfitting the truck using Dad’s supplier contacts.
One day, not long after the move to our new place, Joe wordlessly handed me an airmail letter postmarked New South Wales, Australia. It had no return address. When I opened it up, there was nothing in the envelope but a picture of a road sign on a dusty and deserted road, warning of kangaroo crossings. I turned it over to see if there was anything written on the back, but it was blank.
I tucked it in between the pages of Ancient Churches of Europe, returned it to my bookshelf, and tried to forget it was there. Or that my lucky (ha!) rabbit’s foot was nestled behind it. I tried to forget everything, and some days it even worked.
Chapter Fifteen
“I can’t believe I get to be here for the launch of Dough Re Mi,” said a windswept Wynn, after we returned from our third straight afternoon at the beach. The girl was obsessed with a certain lifeguard and was one step short of plotting out a Thanksgiving Day rescue at sea.
But for now, we had the grand opening of the food truck, and I was so excited to share it with my best friend in the world. Dough Re Mi had been hired to park alongside the curb during the ceremony while some aging talk show host got his handprints on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. She’d barely heard of the guy being honored, but Wynn was beside herself with the possibility of seeing an actual star.
Even though I’d bought a Map to the Stars and cruised all the famed streets with her, I hadn’t been able to show her anything more than fancy gates. Joe had promised her an industry pool party at his place on her last night, but in the meantime, she was taking Hollywood in any dose she could get. And if it meant an afternoon handing out cookies to tourists in front of Grauman’s Chinese Theatre in exchange for a taste of the glamorous lifestyle of the rich and famous, she was all in.
Me, not so much. I wanted as little as possible to do with the industry scene and had spent months going out of my way to avoid it in any form other than a darkened movie theater with my friends. But I was excited to see Dough Re Mi become operational.
It wasn’t until we were halfway to the theater that Wynn leaned over our perch in the back of the food truck. We were huddled with our arms wrapped around stacked carts of baking sheets, trying not to lose our balance as we took corners.
“So, I have to tell you something you’re not going to like,” Wynn said.
“Spill it.”
“No, I mean you really aren’t going to like it.”
The look she gave me made my heart hammer. “You’re scaring me. What it is?”
“The handprint ceremony today, um, it isn’t exactly for Patrick Palmer. It’s for someone else.”
“Who?” I asked.
Wynn was quiet and eventually I caught on. My eyes widened. “Oh. Ohhhhhhh.”
“Joe booked it and your mom didn’t find out it was for Graham until yesterday. She really wanted to tell you and I’m the one who talked her out of it. I thought it might be the kind of thing where too much preparation would be worse than being blindsided with no time to agonize. Or back out. Except now I’m seriously hoping I called that one right.”
Old me would have taken all this lying down. New me didn’t have to, but I also knew it meant a lot to Mom and Dad to have me at the first event and, honestly, I wanted to be there. This would be a wrinkle, but I was pretty sure I could handle it. I was getting to a point where Graham was only the second or third thing I thought about when I woke up every morning.
I took a deep, calming breath. “Okay.”
Wynn reached over and rubbed my arm. “I’ve got your back.”
“I’ve got my own back these days,” I said. Then I smiled. “You can have my back’s back.”
When we got there it was chaos. There was barely enough time for Mom to pull me aside to make sure I was okay with everything. She promised me Joe would be by shortly and could run me home if I needed. But one look at the swarms of people and I knew I could never do that to her, even if I’d wanted to. The crowds were as big as they’d been outside the hotels in Paris and London. But this city was ready for them. If anyone knew a thing or two about fan control, it was the LAPD. I shook it off and got down to work. By the time I could tell from the crowd’s reaction that Graham had appeared, I was so slammed with cookie orders I didn’t even have a chance to look up.
Mom’s voice cut through the crush of orders. “Girls, the cops are asking us to shut down for a few minutes so that they can clear some of the crowds back. But they said we could go outside of the truck to sell. Would y’all be up for grabbing trays and bringing them into that madness?”
“Of course,” Wynn answered quickly. I was more hesitant, remembering how long it took certain bruises from elbowing to heal after the pistachio nightmare at Harrods. But one look at Mom’s happily frazzled face had me nodding too. We loaded up and ventured out into the masses to hawk our wares.
I didn’t see Graham, but I knew he’d be up close to the white umbrellas that lined a small seated area for family and guests. I’d seen them setting it up alongside a makeshift stage and podium when we’d first arrived. Sure enough, a few minutes later, I spotted the top half of Boy Wonder as he stepped up to the podium. He greeted the crowd and began giving a short speech about what an honor this was for him.
He looked good. He was tanned from his time in Australia and his shaggy hair was sun-kissed. His hand emphasized a point he was making and I swallowed hard as I remembered the feel of that hand on the small of my back. Yep. He looked good.
At the exact moment he noticed me, he faltered over his words and dropped a few pa
ges of his speech to the ground. His eyes locked on mine for the briefest of moments and then he regained his composure and finished his thought. He’d seemed flustered, but not surprised. Somehow he’d known I would be here.
While I interacted with sweet-toothed crowd members, I kept tabs on him placing his palms into the wet cement. A few more people spoke. Then Graham posed for pictures with a bunch of the dignitaries who pick the stars that get to spend all of time memorialized on a patch of dirty sidewalk, being trampled by zillions of tourists.
As they finished, Graham stepped back to the podium for a short press conference. He scanned the crowd until he found me again and offered a shy smile, looking right at me long enough that a few people began turning their heads to see who he was so focused on.
I tried to look away but it was like he’d locked laser beams on me. Finally he broke eye contact, but he still seemed a little dazed as he fielded questions about his next project, an edgy cable TV show. In between questions, he tracked my movements, but the moment he got a question about who he was dating, he dropped his eyes from mine and mumbled, “Um, no one right now” into the microphone.
“I’m getting told I have time for just one more question,” he said, venturing another glance at me. I wasn’t making it easy on him. I kept my expression neutral. Pleasant. Detached.
Some of LA must have seeped in through osmosis because he seemed to actually believe my acting. Anyone standing close enough would have seen my tray wobbling out of control.
Graham seemed to be seeking out someone in particular. “Yes, you. Jordan,” he gestured, pointing to a reporter off in the left wing of the stage.
“Thanks, Mr. Cabot. Jordan Barrett, Fanzine magazine. I’m guessing this is one you haven’t gotten before. I was wondering . . . what’s your favorite word?”
My tray of cookies threatened to slide to the ground as I stopped in my tracks. Graham’s eyes found mine immediately and he gave me a wistful smile. He held my eyes with his and they seemed to be trying to communicate something. I didn’t know what, but I did know I was rooted in place. Graham held my eyes as he addressed the reporter. “Actually, I have been asked that one before. And I’ve got my answer all ready.”
