The Actor and the Housewife

by Shannon Hale

  But now, she’d seen him on her home turf. That was passing surreal. That was getting downright dangerous.

  Felix Callahan. From Rattled Cages. She’d seen it, oh, let’s say, a dozen times, because she’d never counted (and if she had, it would be closer to twenty-one). Enough, anyhow, to know most of the dialogue. Enough to be able to replay that final scene in her head . . .

  Calvin watches Katie with those dark, soulful eyes. He is painfully shy, but Katie needs him to speak. She can’t risk everything on a hope.

  calvin: Katie, I . . .

  katie: Yes?

  calvin: I’m . . . we’re out of birdseed. I need to reorder.

  katie: Oh. I guess you’re busy. It was nice knowing you, Calvin. I’ll stop by again, if I’m ever back in the city.

  calvin: That’d be . . . that’d be great.

  He watches her go, his face pained. We know he’ll lie awake for days just picturing her face. We know he’ll never love again.

  He stares down, angry at himself, at his own failure, and picks up the change she left on the counter. Beneath it, he sees again the mark she scratched into the wood—the reason his boss flipped out at this troublesome customer, the reason Calvin first stepped in to protect her, the way their friendship started, how he had the courage to buy the shop from his boss, strike out on his own, change his life. He’d never noticed before what she’d scratched there—it’s a heart . . . and we know he’s reminded of those conversations they had about what a heart is. Just a vital organ? Or the house of the soul? The most precious thing one owns and yet is eager to give away?

  He runs out into the rain.

  calvin: Katie! Katie, wait!

  She stops, her heart pounding, wondering if he’s going to say it.

  Her love life has been an endless succession of men who appreciated her looks but never saw her heart, and like Katie, we believe that Calvin is the first and perhaps only man who could love her right. But she needs Calvin to speak this time. Please, Calvin, speak . . .

  calvin: I . . . I . . .

  katie: You’re getting wet!

  She pulls him under the umbrella, their faces inches apart. His dark hair is dripping, water running down his face. The rainstorm thickens, so it almost seems there’s no world outside that space. They’re both breathing a little faster.

  calvin: Katie, I . . .

  katie: Yes? What, Calvin?

  calvin: For your birthday, I was thinking of getting you a hamster. Unless there’s something of mine you might like.

  And he looks at her, in her eyes, and smiles just a little. It’s enough. Man, even the barest wisp of a smile from that man is breathtaking. He doesn’t say “I love you,” but by cleverly echoing what she’d said earlier about hamsters and the giving away of one’s heart, we know that’s what he means. (I love you, you’re perfect, you’re everything, you toast my marshmallows, baby.)

  Katie’s mouth twitches as if she’d like to laugh, but he’s so close it’s all she can do to just keep breathing.

  His hand touches her face, tentative, and he looks at her as if she were the world. Her eyes close. He comes a little closer, as if melting into her. Then his lips—those wonderful, wonderful lips—are on hers. One long slow kiss. Then another. Another. The umbrella droops. Her arms go around his neck, she drops the umbrella entirely, and they kiss long and deeply in the pouring rain.

  Yes, she’d seen it a dozen times (or twenty-one). And yes, each time that final kiss made her heart sputter, and she’d returned to Mike feeling particularly amorous and often downright frisky. Mike once declared it his favorite movie of all time. And he’d never seen it.

  Becky was standing in her driveway. She wasn’t sure how long she’d been there, reliving the last scene in Rattled Cages and waiting for Felix to show up. He didn’t. She peered behind the leafless shrubs then walked around the mammoth sycamore in their front yard, eyeing Hyrum’s treehouse for any occupants. Nobody. But Felix had been at the library, right? There, in the back row. In Salt Lake City. That hadn’t been an incredibly vivid daydream, a sign that a stiff white jacket would be in her future? No. If there was one thing in this world Becky was sure of, it was her own sanity.

  “That was one of the weirdest things,” she said to the rosebush. “Ever. Weirdest things ever.”

  The rosebush needed pruning. It didn’t respond.

  Putting out of her mind the “Why on earth did he come see me?” question because it was impossible to answer, she asked instead the “how” question. How had he known where she’d be? She went inside the quiet house and opened the white pages to “Jack.” In the Layton area, there were only three, and the first one listed was her brother-in-law Clark.

  His wife, Angela, answered the phone—Angela of the Perpetual Happiness, Angela of the Ubiquitous Exclamation Marks.

  “Becky! Hi! How did your little thing go?”

  “It was great, thanks. Hey, listen, did anyone . . . one of my friends call your house asking where I was recently?”

  “Yes! Your nice friend from England called! Hendrix, was it? Just this morning! He thought this was your number! Well, I gave him yours and Mike’s number, but I told him, I happen to know she’s not home now, because her kids are here while she’s doing a little thing! ‘Did you know that she’s a professional screenwriter,’ I said, ‘and she’s presenting today at a conference for professionals?’ Well! Wasn’t he happy for you! I can tell you! He said I was helpful beyond words! Wasn’t that nice?”

  “Yes, that was nice. And helpful. Thank you.” And part of Becky thought, thank goodness Angela didn’t give all her private info to some creepy stalker. Then again, did Felix fit that bill? It seemed he had flipped through an airport phone book to find her, taken a cab or something to sit in on her “little thing,” and then left again. Definitely questionable behavior.

  “Okay, I’ll see you later. Say hi to Clark.”

  Angela cleared her throat. “So, um, Becky, are you home now?”

  “Yes, I’m all done.”

  “So . . .”

  Becky waited. So . . . ? She was feeling antsy standing in the kitchen, tethered to the wall by the phone cord, and really wanted to go sort laundry and sort her thoughts with it.

  Angela’s voice turned shy. “So, will you be coming to pick up your kids sometime soon?”

  Her kids! Mike had gone with Fiona to a father-daughter church party, so Becky had dropped off Hyrum and Polly at their aunt’s house, and she was supposed to go straight there, not wander home to talk to unresponsive shrubbery and fl ip through an expired white pages! What was the matter with her? Usually she was the first minivan waiting outside the school, the first mom to sign up for the bake sale, the responsible one, for Pete’s sake! And now here she was completely forgetting her kids and thinking in gratuitous exclamation points!

  “Yes! Yes. Thank you. I’m on my way right now, so I’ll see you later, you know, like, in five minutes. And I’ll just wait in the car—you can send them out so we don’t take up any more of your time. So say hi to Clark for me, you know, since I might not get a chance to talk to you from the car. But thanks so much for watching the kids for me, and I’ll see you later . . . in five.”

  There was a pause. Then Angela’s voice piped up, as enthusiastic as ever.

  “Okay, see you later in five!”

  Oh great, Becky thought as she jogged back to her car. Now Angela would be using that phrase, convinced it was a real idiom. And it would be all Becky’s fault. As if the poor lady didn’t have enough communication problems as it was, what with the excessive exclaiming.

  Becky drove the familiar route to Angela’s, past the brick bungalows, down Gentile Street, turning by the field with horses that Hyrum loved. What would Layton look like to Felix? A dull little backwater, she guessed. Just then, it did seem run-down to her, squatty and rough compared with Los Angeles, with its glossy skyscrapers and expensive pollution. Her backbone straightened. How dare he make her sweet town look dumpy? Who did
he think he was?

  Polly and Hyrum raced for her car as soon as she pulled up, none too sorry to leave their cousins. Apparently there had been a prolonged incident where seven-year-old Jayden had chased Polly with a “snot rag.” Polly was exhausted from her desperate flight, and Hyrum was glum because no one would play Dinosaurs Rule the Earth with him (probably, as Becky suspected, because Hyrum wanted to be the dinosaur and make everyone else Doomed Cavemen). Both kids were silent on the ride home, giving Becky a chance to keep thinking. But the meditative time wasn’t especially productive, churning out such thoughts as, That was weird. Is he gone for good? Weird, definitely weird. But fun too?

  When Becky pulled into the garage, Felix still wasn’t there.

  “Mom, Mom, Mom,” Polly said, panic quivering her voice, “I think one of my teeth is loose.”

  “Okay, honey.”

  “It’s loose, Mommy, it really is. It’s loose!”

  “It’s okay, honey, it’s okay. If it’s barely loose, it won’t fall out before Monday and we can run to the dentist after school.”

  Because Polly, you see, was petrified of loose teeth and so had to have each of her baby teeth professionally removed by a dentist. This was all thanks to her sister’s son Luther, who convinced Polly that if you accidentally swallow a tooth, it will eat through your stomach and come out your belly button. The little rat.

  So Becky was pretty well occupied the rest of the afternoon keeping Polly calm and distracted, the Felix question barely twitching there in the back of her skull until she and Mike were alone in their bedroom that night.

  “Maybe he’s insane?” she asked.

  “That’d be my vote. Did you get that crazy vibe?”

  “No,” she said, disappointed, because it would have been such an easy explanation.

  Becky had recounted all the details from that afternoon—except how Felix could make her heart skippity-skip. In Becky’s opinion, you don’t ooh over a fine young actor on the screen in front of your husband. That’s not okay, any more than it’s okay to hear him say, “Check out that babe” at the community pool. Maybe Mike did notice other women, maybe he did have secret crushes on Sharon Stone and Teri Hatcher, but exclaiming about their perfections in front of your wife is like saying, “Why can’t you look more like her?” So Becky kept her mouth shut. Besides, she was embarrassed about the whole thing.

  Not that it mattered. This time, she was certain, she’d never see Felix again. He’d shown up to see her, sure, but then she’d outed him. He must have been upset, since he hadn’t even stayed to say hello. So that was it, the end of the Felix sightings. Thank goodness, really. Who needs that kind of heart-smacking hassle?

  Right?

  In which Becky receives an unexpected phone call

  “Hello?” Becky clamped the receiver between her ear and shoulder. Her left arm held a nursing baby, her right hand turned off the oven timer and stirred the green beans, her left leg was occupied with Hyrum, clutching her and screaming that he was starving, and her right leg itched. Probably a spider bite.

  “Hello?” she said again, not hearing a response over the noise.

  “Uh . . . Becky Jack? This is Felix Callahan.”

  “Who?”

  “Felix Callahan? We met in Los Angles four months ago. I accompanied you and your fetus to dinner.”

  She stopped, baby still nursing, four-year-old still screaming. The sound of his voice made her limbs freeze and her heart pump—that is, Felix Callahan’s voice had that effect. She was used to her toddler’s screams. Nothing a predinner cracker couldn’t cure.

  “Felix Callahan,” she said flatly, once Hyrum had run off with his cracker, crisis cured.

  “Yes. I am. That is my name.”

  “You’re calling me. On the phone. At home. Felix Callahan. Ahem, well, hi, how are ya?”

  “Fine, thanks. I am—”

  “Just a second.” She muffled the receiver against her shoulder and shouted, “Fiona, just because I’m on the phone doesn’t mean I can’t see you sneaking those olives! Finish setting the table, young lady, or there will be no dessert.” She tucked the phone back under her shoulder. “Sorry, you were saying?”

  “I was . . . er, how are you?”

  “Uh, fine. I’m fine. The whole family’s fine. Thanks for, you know, stopping by my presentation in November. That was—sweet? Or something? Actually, it was odd.”

  “Yes, I suppose it was.”

  “But kinda funny too?” she offered hopefully.

  “It was impulsive. I had a layover in Salt Lake City on my way to Los Angeles.”

  She wasn’t going to let him get away with that. “A layover that just happened to coincide with the exact time I was presenting?”

  “Yes.”

  “Really?”

  “I was surprised myself. I just . . . I realized you were the only person I knew in Utah and . . . it was impulsive.”

  “Okay.”

  “Hmm. So.” He paused. “My wife, Celeste, and I are coming out your way on the twelfth for a skiing holiday, spending a week in Park City. We thought we might”—he cleared his throat—“we might meet up with you. And your husband. For dinner.”

  Becky didn’t say anything for some time.

  “I think you’re still there,” he said. “I think you’re shocked.”

  “Sort of. Sort of still here. Sort of shocked.”

  “Dinner is always a shocking proposition.”

  “That’s the truth. Lunch, supper, after-school snack—all respectable and appropriate sessions of nutritional intake—”

  “Whilst dinner is practically Neanderthal.”

  “I couldn’t agree more.” Becky took a deep breath, reminding herself that she was not talking to Augie Beuter. “Well, okay, well . . . we’d be happy to have you over for dinner, as shocking as that is. You could meet the kids and see the new baby. Sam is four weeks old, and he got Mike’s looks, thank goodness, narrowly escaping my family’s tendency to resemble hairy little trolls at birth. I guess I’m just a bit subjective, but I think he’s worth looking at.”

  “Oh. I see. That might do, except we’d most likely stand round staring at it, and I’d know that I was expected to admire it and I wouldn’t know what to say, which would be awkward for everyone.”

  “Especially if you kept referring to him as ‘it.’ Well, then—Polly, you can either clear your crayons off the table or help your sister set it! I’m not going to ask you again. Sorry, um . . . dinner . . . well, Mike and I are going to the Valentine’s Ball the Saturday after the fourteenth . . . whatever date that is. It’s our yearly tradition, and the first time I’m getting out of this house since the baby. You and your wife might like to come. The Salt Lake Chamber Music Association puts it on—dinner, ballroom dancing, rather nice, though you’re bound to roll your eyes.”

  “I most certainly will not! It will be a delightful experiment in anthropology.”

  “Okay. Then it’s a date—uh, I meant, it’s an anthropological experiment.”

  “Right then. Saturday it is.”

  “Okay, we’ll see you then.”

  “Very well.”

  “Good-bye.”

  “Yes, good-bye.”

  There was a silence. After a time she said, “You’re still there, aren’t you?”

  Pause. “So are you.”

  “I guess I am.” She hemmed. “Did you want directions or anything?”

  “It’s in Salt Lake City, isn’t it? I imagine if we wander round, we should run into it before long.”

  “I really am hanging up now.”

  “That’s probably for the best.” His voice went low, quiet, and made her stomach drop. “I’ll see you soon.”

  “Soon.” She hung up and looked at Mike, who’d been frozen in the kitchen, staring at her since she’d spoken the words “Felix Callahan.”

  “That was him?”

  She nodded. “He and his French model wife are coming to the Valentine’s Ball. So they can
hang out with us.”

  “So they can hang out with us.”

  “Yep.”

  “Okay,” he said.

  And they laughed.

  They kept talking and laughing about it until four-year-old Hyrum gave the prayer on the food. Then it was time to focus on the eating of shepherd’s pie and the official Family Talking Around the Dinner Table. Mike was solemn as he listened to Fiona recounting her third-grade spelling bee, and Becky guessed he’d become as thoughtful as she had.

  Felix Callahan. And Celeste Bodine. Coming to Utah to hang with the Jacks. There was that funny tickle in Becky’s stomach again, and she didn’t think it was the shepherd’s pie. At least, she hoped it wasn’t. She prodded the meat for signs of undercooking.

  The question of Felix Callahan ran under everything she did that night—cleaning up, dressing kids, reading to kids, kissing good-night. It was ten o’clock before she and Mike had their sacred time, just the two of them alone in the bedroom—well, almost just the two of them, and no, not for that yet. She hadn’t been cleared by her doctor postpartum. No, just to see each other, hear each other, maybe smell each other a little.

  With Sam curled up in her arms, Becky leaned into Mike and inhaled the scent of his neck. It was like drinking water, how it filled her. Sure, Mike had first wooed her with his attention, his strength, his stability and future-father-ness, but let’s be honest—a hearty slice of what had attracted Becky to Mike were his highly compatible pheromones.

  Sam began to cry with a little dry cackle, squirming, his face rooting around Becky’s chest.

  “He’s not very subtle, is he?” Becky said.

  “The kid knows what he wants.”

  Becky climbed onto the bed, settling into the stacked pillows. When Sam latched on and began to nurse, his twelve-pound body relaxed into blissful contentment, and hers followed in kind, calm radiating out from her middle. She sighed. Kids asleep, baby happy. Life was good. And now her undercurrent thoughts jumped back up.

  “But you know what’s weird, honey? That it’s not weird.” She didn’t name the “it” and Mike didn’t need clarification. He was sitting on the floor, smearing brown polish on his good work shoes. He was a marketing analyst at a biotech firm, and he liked having polished shoes.