by Loree Lough
Her mini tirade rocked him to the core. “Look, Deidre. I mean no disrespect, but I can’t let you talk about her that way. Especially not in her own house.” Logan was glad she’d already come up with an excuse not to visit his mom. “She’s dying, and she knows it. And she’s exhausted. Terrified. Someone like you, who’s always been healthy as a horse, probably doesn’t get that Mom doesn’t mean to be rude. It’s just the pain talking.”
Deidre lifted her chin and laughed. Laughed. Had she been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s and nobody told him?
“That’s what I needed to see! A son who loves his mama, no matter what, and knows that sometimes they say things they don’t mean—even when they aren’t sick.” She punched his shoulder. “I’m proud of you, Logan Murray. Couldn’t be more proud if you were my son!”
So…she’d tricked him into defending his mom? But why?
She smacked him again. “Oh, don’t look so surprised. Sometimes it takes a good swift kick to the bee-hind to make a person see where his true loyalties lie. And you can stow the ‘Nancy is a saint’ malarkey. Anyone who’s known your mother as long as I have will tell you she’s always been…shall we say…difficult. Opinionated. Now don’t get your neck hairs bristlin’ all over again, kiddo. I’d never say a thing like that to just anybody. I’m just being up-front with you so you’ll know I’m here if you ever want to talk. No judgments. No reprimands.”
One last poke. “Just so you’ll know it’s okay to get mad when she takes advantage of your good nature…that doesn’t give you carte blanche to respond in kind.”
He remembered plenty of times when Deidre, who’d raised his classmate Brooke and her sister, Beth—may she rest in peace—had marched into the school to give her granddaughters what-for, for forgetting their homework or lunches, for leaving the house without making their beds with no thought to who might be listening. And what about Beth and her husband, Kent’s, double funeral, when he’d stood two rows behind Brooke and heard Deidre accuse her—right in front of little Connor—of being self-centered for letting her mind wander during the sermon? She had no room to talk, and only respect for his elders kept a lid on his exasperation.
Deidre breezed out the door with a whirl and a flourish as the scarf fluttered behind her like an oversized cape. If she exited the stage with as much fanfare, no wonder she’d been the talk of Broadway in her day.
Logan climbed the stairs two at a time, then paused in front of his mother’s door. She’d asked for orange juice, and now he had to break the bad news: thinking its acidic nature would burn the chemo sores in her mouth, he’d let Sam and Sally drink the last of it with breakfast. He couldn’t leave her alone while she was awake, which meant no trip to the corner store for another carton. But rather than explain all that, he walked into the room talking. He talked as he administered the morphine. Talked as he adjusted the television. And he was still talking when she fell asleep half an hour later.
He backed out of the room and quietly pulled the door closed behind him…
…and he nearly leaped out of his skin when his cell phone buzzed against his hip.
“Murray,” he whispered, hurrying down the stairs.
“Whoever taught you telephone etiquette needs to enforce a refresher course.”
He’d recognize his agent’s gravelly baritone at rush hour in Penn Station. “Hey, Knute. How goes it?”
“It goes. How’s your mom?”
“Holding her own. Considering.”
“The dreaded day is getting close, eh? Sorry. I know it isn’t easy.”
Knute’s dad had died of lung cancer a few years back, so the guy really did understand.
“Hate to lay this on you with your mom in such awful shape, but we need to talk, like, yesterday. How soon can you get out here?”
“To California? You’re kidding, right?”
Knute muttered something unintelligible under his breath. “All right. So if I came there, could you give me, say, two hours?”
Knute measured everything by nanoseconds, not hours, and he hated to fly. If he was willing to hop a plane to Baltimore…
Logan began to pace. “You’re worrying me, pal.”
“Schweetheart,” he said, doing a horrible Bogart impersonation, “you don’t have a thing to worry about.” He paused. “Trust me.”
Logan heard paper rattling. The click of a ballpoint. One side of a muffled conversation.
“Okay. Alice says she can get me into Baltimore day after tomorrow. This lazy secretary of mine wants to know what hotel you’d recommend.”
He could almost picture Knute’s wife aiming a dirty look at her partner.
Grinning, he said, “Tell Alice I said hey,” and then rattled off a few high-rises near the Inner Harbor. “You need me to pick you up at the airport?”
“Nah. More important that you stay with your mom. I’ll grab a limo. Alice will email the itinerary.” A pause. More whispering, then, “Will you be available all day?”
“You said two hours.”
“Well, yeah, the you-and-me part of this conference will take a couple hours. But we’ll need to do some long-distance stuff. Internet. Teleconferencing. All that techno-mumbo stuff. So it might be more like six…if I can’t get all the high muckety-mucks in the same place at the same time.”
Sandra couldn’t have timed her homecoming better. “So I guess we’ll play it by ear.”
“Yep. Oh. And Alice says we need to make dinner reservations.”
Alice, being half-Italian, would love Chiaparelli’s. “Best gnocchi on this side of the pond. But what’s up with all this ‘we’ stuff?”
“You’ll find out soon enough. See you in a couple days. Oh. And you might want to start shopping for a leather briefcase.”
“A leather brief—” He shook his head. “For what?”
“Because mine’s on its last legs, and you’re gonna want to buy me a nice, pricy thank-you gift when this is over.” On the heels of rib-racking laughter, his agent hung up.
Logan repocketed his phone, wondering why, instead of sharing the agent’s enthusiasm, a strange sense of dread closed around him. Last time he’d felt this way had been in the waiting room outside Stan Fletcher’s office. The announcement that sent that first domino toppling had led to a long line of dark and dangerous choices.
The timer dinged, his signal to administer Nancy’s antinausea meds. On the way to her room, he replayed the conversation in his mind, then muttered, “This had better be good news, Knute….”
Because he didn’t know if he could bounce back from that kind of trouble again.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
KNUTE TIPPED THE goblet right, then left. “I love watching the cling-and-release value of a good red.” He glanced at the Monet-like paintings that decorated the restaurant’s brick-walled alcove. “A charming place, Murray old boy. You were right. The gnocchi was excellent.”
Logan sipped his iced tea, knowing full well that Knute felt duty-bound to test his sobriety every chance he got. “Can’t be too careful,” he’d said, time and again, “with a client like you.”
In other words, a former boozehound whose drunken exploits had made the news…and cost him his last agent.
Knute had met every attempt to get on with things with an assortment of excuses. Turbulence had been terrible, and the airline had lost his luggage. Though why the man had needed to check bags for a simple overnight trip, Logan couldn’t say.
“So how’s the Hotel Monaco?”
“Everything the website promised and more.” Knute snickered. “Better be, at those prices.”
“Speaking of prices…” Logan glanced at his watch. “You know the old saying, time is money, so how ’bout we cut to the chase? I need to get home and let the dog out.”
Knute put down his wine goblet. “Okay. So here’s the deal.” He leaned forward and lowered his voice. “Got a call from one of my Hollyweird insiders about a script and a role that’s very hush-hush. It’s a sitcom,” he said, “th
at features a former NFL quarterback who hit rock bottom before rising to the top again, doing commercials and voice-overs, playing supporting roles in a couple of major motion pictures…”
Logan opened his phone and pretended to dial. Maybe a well-timed joke, rather than prickly impatience, would convince Knute to just spill it.
The agent frowned but said, “Oh, I get it. Calling to check on your mom?”
“Nope. My lawyer. I’m thinkin’ instead of signing to do a series with these schmoes, I might want to sue ’em.”
“Sue ’em? For what?”
“Because it sounds like they wrote my life right out from under me.”
Knute loosened his tie. “Ha ha. You’re a regular Jeff Dunham, aren’t you?”
“I hate to point out the obvious, but if I’m Jeff, that makes you… What’s the grouchy old dummy’s name…?”
“Oh, you’re on a roll tonight.”
But he was smiling when he said it, so Logan put his phone away. “Have you worked with these people before?”
“Once. I’ve checked them out. They seem like stand-up guys. Well, as stand-up as you can get in Tinseltown.” Knute described the storyline. “In the pilot, a has-been quarterback gets a frantic call from his brother. White-collar crimes put the brother and his wife in prison. Five years. Meaning their kids—”
“Let me guess. If the has-been doesn’t take them in, they’ll be farmed out to some Dickens-type orphanage.” Logan frowned. “I thought this was a sitcom.”
“It is.”
“I haven’t heard anything funny so far.”
“Balance, Murray. If it’s all hilarity, viewers will get bored. That’s precisely why the brother guilt-trips the has-been into trading sunny California for some Podunk town in Maryland, to play Mr. Mom to twin teen girls and a ten-year-old who makes Dennis the Menace look like Little Lord Fauntleroy.”
Now Logan could see the potential for humor and drama. He hated to admit it, but the idea was beginning to appeal to him. Especially when he acknowledged that things like this took time. Years, in most cases. He could probably accept the role, spend as much time as possible with his mom and get the school up and running long before they filmed the pilot.
“But wait a minute. This whole thing sounds too signed-and-sealed. Is this meeting supposed to be my preparation for the online conferences you were talking about?”
“You’re too new to the game to be so jaded. But I hear ya. Suffice it to say in this wacky business, a lot can change in a little while. When I called you the other day, the whole thing was a big fat ball of vague. Now we’ve got a shoot location. Costars. Director. Writers. Heck, they’ve started building sets for the house where the has-been will live. Trust me. It’s a sweet deal. If you so much as consider saying no, I’m personally gonna sign you into the nearest funny farm. And insist that they do a vasectomy so there’s no chance an idiot like you will ever reproduce.” Knute drained his wine. “We already have too many fools in the world.”
Okay, so he was serious. But it was a lot to absorb in just a few minutes. Logan stacked their plates and flatware, and remembering his days as a waiter, slid them to the edge of the table to make them easier to reach.
“So why the hesitation?”
Logan leaned back and crossed both arms over his chest. “The reviewers went easy on me in the past, but I’m not fool enough to think it was based on my talent. I got lucky, working with some of the industry’s best.” He slid the napkin off his thigh, balled it up and tossed it onto the pile. “Something doesn’t smell right here. Why me, when half the population of L.A. is made up of real actors? Actors who’d sell their sainted grannies for a primo role like this.”
“Do you work at being a buzzkill, or have you been out of the spotlight so long that it just comes naturally?” He refilled his glass. “Don’t look at me like that. I’m not driving.”
He blamed his guilty conscience for making it seem Knute wanted to tack on an AA reference.
“They want you, baby. Haven’t even considered anyone else for the role. I don’t know why. Who cares why? Say yes, and you’ll be set for life.”
“And so will you.”
Knute laughed. “Well, yeah, but—”
“I’m already ‘set.’ So if it’s really me they want, here’s how it’ll have to go….”
Logan demanded script approval. On all scripts. And costar approval. Credit as a producer, which meant he’d own a piece of the show. “I want them to commit to three seasons minimum. Good for me, the rest of the cast, the crew…” That way, even if the show was a flop, it stood a good chance of being syndicated. And if that happened, the cast and crew would make a few bucks every month off the residuals, and Logan stood to earn tens of millions. “I get to write a couple of episodes. Direct a couple, too. I want a house near the studio. And a car. Scratch that. I remember what L.A. traffic is like. I want a driver.”
“When did you go all prima donna on me?” Knute shook his head. “Think for a minute, Logan. They might make a deal like that for a movie…if they really, really believe they’ll get a return on their investment. But for TV?” He shoved back from the table. “You ask for all that, you might just be asking yourself right out of the competition.”
Logan nearly choked on his iced tea. “What competition? You said they didn’t even consider anyone else.”
“True.” Knute stroked his chin. “True.”
Logan didn’t expect the decision-makers to give him everything he’d asked for. But he knew it would be a sweet deal. He read Knute’s silence to mean he knew it, too. Logan didn’t need to be a mind reader to know that Knute was doing math in his head, trying to figure out his cut. He wondered how Bianca would feel about him spending the equivalent of half a year on the left coast.
The thought shook him. She’d been the furthest thing from his mind. What was it about the woman that made her pop into his head at the oddest moments?
Focus, he told himself. Think about what you can do with all that money.
For starters, he could institute before-and after-school programs, to make things easier for working parents, and provide some therapy sessions to help harried moms and dads cope.
“So you’re serious. You want me to take all those points to the table.”
He met his agent’s eyes. “Serious as a cage full of pit bulls.”
“A cage full of…” Knute groaned and slapped a palm over his eyes. “And he wants to write and direct episodes.”
The waiter delivered the check, and Logan grabbed it.
“I told you I’d pick up the tab,” Knute said.
“Way I see it,” Logan said, “buying dinner beats having to shop for your man bag.”
“Briefcase.”
“Potatoes, potahtoes.”
The men shared a round of hearty laughter, and then Logan got to his feet. “Bet now you’re wishing we’d done all this by phone like I suggested.”
“No. Things like this? Always better face-to-face.” Knute got up, too. “Besides, I need to check up on you from time to time. Make sure you’re still walking the straight and narrow.”
Despite the grin and wink, Logan knew Knute was only half kidding. He couldn’t blame him, though. Considering what was at stake here—for him and for Knute—it made perfect sense to get firsthand assurances that Logan was still clean and sober.
He reached into his pocket and pulled out his newest AA coin. The front of the gold-rimmed navy medallion said TO THINE OWN SELF BE TRUE. He flipped it over, scanned the Serenity Prayer and handed it to Knute.
“‘Six years sober,’” he read. “Last time you showed me one of these, it had a five in the triangle.” He handed it back. “I’m proud of you. You should be proud, too.”
Logan repocketed the coin. It had taken willpower he hadn’t known he had to overcome his love affair with whiskey. If the day ever came when he wasn’t tempted by booze, then he’d allow himself to feel a little impressed with himself.
During the
short drive between Chiaparelli’s and the Hotel Monaco, Knute promised to have Alice type up Logan’s list of requests and have it couriered to the producers. He reminded Logan that things like this sometimes took weeks, months even.
“If it looks like they might cooperate, even a little, make sure they know I won’t leave Baltimore with my mom in the shape she’s in.”
“Goes without saying. But stay close to your phone for the next few days, just in case.”
Knute opened the passenger door as Logan said, “I appreciate this, Knute.” And it was true.
“I understand your reluctance. Wasn’t easy earning that AA coin. And because living in L.A. is what got you into trouble in the first place, I understand your reluctance.”
“I’m not reluctant. Exactly. But in all fairness, I can’t blame L.A. for my own stupidity.” Better to let the guy think fear of backsliding was responsible for his lack of enthusiasm than admit the truth: he didn’t like the idea of putting two thousand miles, five-hour flights and a three-hour time difference between him and Bianca.
He wanted to thump himself in the forehead. He’d been thinking between him and the school. So why had Bianca’s name come up? Again!
Maybe he was an idiot, as Knute had inferred. Why else would anyone with a fully functioning brain feel this way about a woman he barely knew, one he’d never even kissed?
“I appreciate everything, Knute. The opportunity. You, braving the friendly skies to deliver the news… Means a lot that you believe in me this much.”
“Aw, jeez. You’re not gonna go all huggy-kissy on me, are ya, and spoil your image as a big tough football player?”
“Close the door,” he said, waving a hand in front of his face. “You’re letting in a hoard of moths.”
“Hoard?”
“Okay, flock.”
“Eclipse. Don’t ask me why I know. But that’s what you’ve got there, hovering around your dome light. An eclipse of moths.”