by C. D. Reiss
When Nicole got back she gasped in horror. She’d spent a ton of time on that stable.
“Hush,” her father said, oblivious.
Nicole had been well trained in hushing. From her days in the coffee shop cabinet, when her mother couldn’t get a sitter, she knew she had to stay quiet when a parent was working, so she did.
I stayed quiet too. For now.
When I got to the pool house, Blakely was curled up on the couch with an iPad. Her hair was cut short and dark brunette.
“Your hair,” I said.
“Like it? I look different, don’t I? Would you recognize me?”
“Yes. And Paula’s a bitch,” I said without preamble.
“You mean Miss Mint Julep Ladygirl Fiddle-dee-dee? Yeah. Screw her. Every time Brad wants his daughter around, she looks at me as if it’s my fault I have an hour off.”
“How was last night?” I asked.
“Boring. I was with her for an hour, then I stayed in the limo for the next two hours waiting for him to bring her back out.”
“Was she scared of the cameras?”
“A little. Not too bad.” She looked up at the clock. “I have to bring her to gymnastics at two. I’m testing the hair. See if the guy at the desk thinks I’m a stranger.”
We were interrupted by a knock on the front door.
“When you get back we’ll switch,” I said, opening the door. Brad was on the other side in aviators and a white T-shirt. The previous day came back in a flood of skin-tingling hormones. The shower, the fantasies, walking with his arm on my shoulder, me undressing him.
“I’m going to take Nicole,” he said without a greeting, then pointed to me. “You should come.”
It was Blakely’s shift, but she just shrugged.
“Okay,” I said. “Let me get my shoes on.”
CHAPTER 21
CARA
Celebrities living in Los Angeles drive more often than you think and do everything else less than you think. Driving is an entitlement. It means you have control. And Brad I-Didn’t-See-Anything Sinclair was trying to prove he was in control.
Nicole sat in the backseat humming. She had a book on her lap and her leotard under her summer dress.
Brad leaned on the wheel of the Range Rover, arms toned and tan, sunglasses glinting, looking disaffected and in charge. It was hot, but for my part he needed to cover himself all the time, every second of the day. With a tarp. Because the night before came back to me full force. Starting with the dream of him in the shower, the imagined feeling of his skin against mine. The erection on my soft bottom. His lips on the back of my neck . . . all the way up to his very real questions about how I like to fuck.
“Yesterday . . .” I started but couldn’t finish. I knew what I wanted to say, but the thought of him watching me froze my tongue.
“You know, the steam coming out of that bathroom, I thought the place was on fire.”
Jefferson Avenue at midday was clear, and we were going to be at the gym in ten minutes.
“Mr. Sinclair. Really?”
“Oh it’s Mr. Sinclair now? Listen. I didn’t see anything, ma’am.”
“I need you to really not just come in the back house again,” I said. “Where I’m from, when you come to someone’s house, you knock. You put your fingers together in a fist and—”
“Where I’m from,” he started with full good-old-boy accent, “we don’t leave the doors unlocked unless we want people running through.”
His tinge of Arkansas accent implied a superior upbringing with traditions buffed with time.
“Knock anyway.”
“Believe me,” he said, flipping his blinker and changing lanes for no apparent reason. “I’m never going in that house again without an engraved invitation.”
“Okay. Good. No more peeking.”
So. What do you remember?
“I wasn’t raised like that.”
“You keep saying that.”
“When did I say that?”
He’d said it last night, at my window. But if he didn’t remember, I didn’t want to remind him. We’d crossed a line. If he blacked out, then what had happened the night before was mine and mine alone. If he remembered, then between the shower and the fantasies? I’d have to resign.
“Some interview, I think. Did you have fun last night?”
He smiled and made a pfft sound. “Sure. After I sent Nicole home I had a few drinks and woke up in the guest room.”
Did he remember the water and aspirin? Did he assume Paula had left it? Or was it just an empty glass when he woke?
“Daddy told jokes the whole time!” Nicole chimed in. We both turned. She bounced her little light-up toes. “Like . . . Ask me if I’m a tree!”
I obeyed, reminding myself to keep it clean in the front seat. “Are you a tree?”
“No!” She laughed. “What’s brown and sticky?”
“I don’t know.”
She and Brad answered together, “A stick!”
Nicole was beside herself with laughter.
“Where are you from, anyway?” Brad asked me.
“Everywhere. Nowhere.”
“You trying to get mysterious with me?”
“I grew up on air force bases. Diplomat housing. That kind of thing. There really is no, ‘Where I’m from the gates are locked and the doors are open,’ because it changed all the time. But mostly we were behind big walls with guards. I needed an escort in some places. Pakistan. That was crazy.”
I shook my head and looked out the window.
“How crazy? You get kidnapped?”
“No. I wore a head scarf whenever we left the base because I wanted to fit in. There was no Lycée so I didn’t go to school. I had this nowhere feeling. I guess that doesn’t sound very crazy.”
“How old were you?”
“Twelve. I bet you were doing something completely different when you were twelve.”
He laughed to himself.
“Shit. Yeah. That was my first summer working at the lumberyard. Hot as f—heck. The sawdust stuck to me everywhere. Every night I had it in my butt crack.”
I laughed, but it was only to cover up the fact that I was envisioning his gorgeous ass filled with sawdust. Nicole had her own reasons for cracking up.
“Daddy said butt again!”
“Again?” I said. Brad shrugged and Nicole just kept laughing. At least they were getting along.
He pulled into the lot and put the car in park.
“I’ll get her,” I said, opening the door. “You lay low before the paps find you.”
“Cara,” he said, taking his sunglasses off.
“Yeah?”
“It won’t happen again.”
The way he looked at me—he meant it. Every word came from a deep well of sincerity and regret.
“I know,” I said, dealing with my own well of regret.
CHAPTER 22
BRAD
Cara got out and unbuckled Nicole. I twisted around to look at her. She was freaking cute when she smiled. If I could harvest those dimples and sell them on the open market, I’d be richer than I already was.
“Turn around,” she said. “I need to fix this hair. Who made this braid?”
“Daddy!”
“It was perfect when we left,” I defended myself from the front seat.
Cara rearranged Nicole’s stray brown strands and dangling bobby pins into a tight ponytail.
“I’m going to do the balance beam all by myself,” Nicole said, patting her hair to make sure it was flat. “I won’t even be scared.”
A bobby pin popped off. Cara leaned over to get it. I could see down her shirt, and the way her naked body looked in the shower came back to me. I turned around to face the front.
“Hop down,” Cara said. Nicole jumped to the ground and pushed the door closed with both hands. Had to do everything herself. Was the self-sufficiency from my family or Brenda’s?
I didn’t know, but when my daughter turned and wave
d at me, I could put money on where she got the smile.
I hadn’t even known Brenda, really. She’d had a nice smile. The kind of smile you wanted to look at all the time because it was so warm. When customers came into the store, the girls came to me and everyone else went to Brenda. Everything about her had been inviting, but the smile was more than all that put together.
See, you do remember her.
I did. Not much more than the smile came to me though. I didn’t even remember our night together. Or nights. There may have been more than one. She was from a time long ago when I needed a comforting smile.
I watched Cara’s ass sway in her jeans as she went toward the double glass doors with Nicole’s hand in hers. She was something. Not my type. Too serious. Too bossy. She was an art film that had a SAG waiver. I liked big summer tentpole girls. Cleaned up and produced. Bigger than life. I could work them quick and move to the next without ever thinking about it again.
But that shower scene. Open mouth when she came. I shouldn’t have seen it, but I did. I walked right into it. I’d had a good thirty seconds where I could have turned around and gone into the other room, but I was turned on like a thirteen-year-old.
What kind of man stays and watches?
It was a shit time to assess my life, but it wasn’t like I had much of a choice. I’d gotten drunk the night before, but the escape had been short and painful.
I was a single dad.
The papers had already told everyone that. Ken made sure he used the phrase whenever he opened his mouth. I hired people to help. I painted a room in my house pink, but the words single dad still sounded like I was talking about a character I was playing. Like when the hosts on the morning shows say, “You’re a single dad when the spaceships land on Los Angeles. How did you prepare for the part?” And I say, “Well, Tammy or Joan or Christy or whatever, I just got myself this really cute kid. You should meet her. She’s the bee’s knees and my parents love her.”
This wasn’t a part I was playing, but I couldn’t shake feeling like it was all fake.
Cara held the door open for Nicole. My daughter deserved better, but she didn’t have better. She had me.
CHAPTER 23
BRAD
Arnie liked having a cigarette in his mouth when he shot pool even though the ashtray was right fucking there.
I’d brought a few guys from Arkansas with me. They’d all found their own life or found their way home eventually. Not Arnie. Arnie was kind of an asshole. And by “kind of” I mean “completely.” My buddy Michael wondered why I kept him around. He said stupid shit, had a sense of entitlement that put people off, zero work ethic, and a very small constellation of talents. His gold chain was so heavy it made creases in the skin of his neck and he wore his sunglasses inside because he’d spent two hundred dollars on them.
He was the asshole who had nowhere to go. No one else wanted to be his friend. I felt sorry for him. In fifth grade, he’d given Ray Borden a shiner for calling me a pansy. In eighth grade, he didn’t tell Maryann Jonas that I was the one throwing pebbles at her window that certain night, even though her dad really held his feet to the fire. He’d let me copy his homework most days and corrected the spelling on my essays, never asking for a thing in return. The list went on.
So maybe he wasn’t a complete asshole. Maybe he just had a narrow worldview and no filter.
He was great at pool though. Geometry hadn’t been his thing in tenth grade, but somehow it came together for him when he shot nine-ball. He shifted a little, lining up, the gold rope curving along the edge of the cue.
“The nanny’s on her way out, right?” he asked, threading the cue through his fingers. I was sure he had the whole table figured out already. “Then I can go for it, right?” He looked at me over the top edge of his blue wraparounds.
“We’ll see.”
“We will.” He took his shot, sinking the eight off the one.
We’d agreed on a month, and time was up. It was going to be me, Blakely, and Nicole soon enough. Plus some mystery nanny the agency was searching for. I needed one who could travel.
“Might keep her,” I said, chalking my stick. “If I do, you’re sidelined indefinitely.”
I said it as if it was an option, but Cara had been clear she wanted to move on.
“Come on, man.” Arnie circled the table, eyes on the balls, still in sunglasses and with cigarette. “If you’re not going to tap that body, at least let me do it.”
“No and no.”
He pulled his smoke from his lips and wedged it between two fingers he held up for me. “Just twice. I wanna see how those tits shake when she’s taking it from behind.”
“Shut the fuck up, Arnie.”
“Then I wanna see her face with my dick in it.”
When I was twelve, Grady Markham had made a crack about my sister’s face. Something about how it would look with her knees on each side of it.
I’d been deeply offended. That’s what I told the sheriff when he was in the principal’s office. “Deeply offended.” Which was southern for “So fucking mad I had no problem breaking a soda bottle on the table and slicing Grady’s cheek open.”
That was my sister. He was insulting my family.
Arnie saying shit about Cara wasn’t anything like that, because she wasn’t family. No, my feelings weren’t brotherly, but the rage was the same. Arnie put all the things I’d thought about Cara in the most disgusting and disgraceful words possible.
Which made me disgraceful.
And this was the woman who took care of my daughter.
So it was family.
But it wasn’t.
But it was all confused and I was mad as fuck.
My hand, my left hand, oddly, considering I was right-handed, swiped at Arnie’s blue wraparounds. They went flying, exposing Arnie’s fox-colored eyes and thin eyelashes.
“Fuck? Dude?”
“I mean it. That’s my daughter’s nanny.”
What does that even mean?
Fuck that. I didn’t know what that meant and it didn’t matter. I only had a debt to white-hot rage. I put my finger in his face.
“Any single human being who takes care of my daughter is off-limits for tit-shaking and face-fucking.”
Nice going, using Nicole like that.
Arnie put his hands up like some wronged party. A guy who’d stepped into a pile of shit from someone else’s dog.
Maybe he had. Maybe what I felt had nothing to do with him.
“You know what?” he said. “You want me to keep it in my pants, hire an ugly one, yo. Don’t be dangling some bombshell bitch in my face and say I can’t even talk about touching it.”
“It? You forget where you’re from?” I admit I carved off a little of my voice coaching to make the point. “No Redfield boy talks like that. Your mother didn’t raise you to call a lady it.”
“Don’t you tell me about home. When was the last time you went home? Buddy redid the bar, and you didn’t even go see it. You have nieces and nephews telling all their friends Uncle Brad’s famous, and I bet you don’t even know what they look like. I bring them presents when I go. No.” He wagged his finger at me. “Don’t you tell me shit. I love this life as much as you, and I still make it back home.”
You know how that hit?
It hit below the belt, right where Faye Sweeny kicked me in fifth grade and I passed out. Arnie wasn’t Faye though. She sent me a handwritten note apologizing. Arnie went right back in.
“Buddy fixed Margie up.” Slap. Sunk the six. “Your nephew’s graduating high school. He can act, you know? Biggest talent in Redfield since you.” Slap. Sunk the one off the seven. “And how about taking your daughter around?”
“You know what, you fuck? You sit around here telling me what to do? Want to live my life? I have a three-hundred-page script to memorize and a fucking kid. Sure, let me take a vacation in Arkansas. Great idea.”
Arnie threw his hands up. “Fuck this shit.” He took a step aw
ay from me and swooped up his glasses, then pointed them at me like some community college professor. “I’m your friend. Until you die, I’m your friend. With or without the house. I don’t like outsiders and I like the life here. But you gotta take care of what’s yours.”
Fuck him. I couldn’t get home. I didn’t have long before I was shooting on location in Asia, and you don’t just leave a movie in preproduction. It wasn’t the money. Not my money, at least. Hundreds of people had planned the shoot and without the lead actor no one had jobs.
I wondered if I had time to talk my nephew out of acting.
Did I have time to go back? If push came to shove, could I visit? Bring Cara and Nicole?
I didn’t want to go back. I didn’t want to see the street I grew up on, because it was still fucked up. My parents wouldn’t move. Fixing up their house and my sister’s just made them nice houses in a town that was like a prison.
And I was different now. Leaving was frowned upon. Sure, my friend Buddy was happy for me, but he was going to give me shit that I thought I was better than him. He married his eighteen-year-old girlfriend when he knocked her up and here I was with a secret kid. Party boy. California dude. Shot down from the sky.
Since when do you care what he thinks?
I didn’t care, and I never judged him or anyone.
I should have brought Nicole first thing. I didn’t care what they thought, but they’d think I lost my manners. And they’d all ride me because I’d knocked up a girl. Like Buddy did. Like Dad did.
They’d forgive me because I was like them. No matter what I said, the thought of that bothered me. I’d worked too hard to be better. Do better. Make more of myself.
And I didn’t care what they thought—but I did.
I couldn’t pull it apart. I was getting tense. I hated being tense.
“What’s on your fucked-up brain, Brad?” Arnie asked after missing the seven. I’d taken too long to think about it.
“I forgot your birthday,” I said.
“It’s tomorrow.”
I leaned down to take my shot.
“Party, then. Right here.” Sunk the seven. “But swear, Arnie. You keep your hands off the help.”