Really Something

by Shirley Jump

  Mostly, she’d tried to sink into the floor, blend into the walls. Be as quiet as possible and make people forget she existed. With everyone but Duncan.

  Inside the box, nestled in some white tissue paper was a pair of chopsticks and a gift certificate to the Chinese restaurant in downtown Tempest—a short-lived venture that had been Allie’s favorite after-school haunt.

  “Maybe,” Duncan had said as she’d looked at him, a question on her lips, “we could go there?”

  Her world had hung in those five words, wrapped in all those hearts in the back of her notebooks, all the dreams that had filled her nights, all the hopes she’d almost not dared to have. “You want to go…with me?”

  “Sure,” he said, then gave her another smile, the kind that tickled in her stomach. “To thank you for all the help you’ve given me this year. But, you know, if you don’t want to go with me, you don’t have to. That’s why I gave you the gift certificate.”

  Had he or had he not asked her on a date? Or was he…nervous? She couldn’t tell, then decided there was no way a guy like Duncan Henry would be nervous about asking someone like her out. The numbers on the gift certificate blurred in front of her vision.

  “Uh…okay. Thanks again.” Then, because she hadn’t known what else to do, hadn’t known whether to believe him, she’d opened her math book, flipped to the page for their homework from the night before and started in on the first problem, even though she’d already worked it out on her paper twelve hours earlier.

  Duncan laid his hand over the page. “Maybe we could go together…before the prom.”

  Allie remembered staring at the back of his hand, at the broad, muscled fingers that had caught a dozen winning touchdowns, the same hand that had brushed against hers, tracing over equations and grids. The same one that had held hers, for just a moment, when he’d confessed his heart’s secret desires—to ditch the business track his father had planned for him and become an investigative reporter, the kind that stood up to men like his father.

  “Prom?” she’d repeated, sure she hadn’t heard the word. Couldn’t possibly have heard him right. “But won’t your date be mad?”

  “Would you be mad?” he asked.

  She hadn’t dared to turn her head, to see if he was teasing. She’d clutched her pencil in her lap, her thumb pressed against the tip so hard, the lead broke off and pinged against the metal leg of the desk. Allison held her breath, heart pounding. Date. Prom. Duncan.

  Her?

  “Allison,” Duncan said, and then, he reached for her other hand, turning her to face him, waiting until she finally dared to draw her gaze to meet his, “will you go to the prom with me?”

  Allie shook herself out of the memory, watching the same man who had broken her heart seven years ago make his way back to her, smiling with a no-clue grin on his face.

  Somewhere in some secondhand shop, there was still probably a size 2X pink ruffled dress that had never seen the inside of a ballroom. And in this studio was a heart that had never forgotten those chopsticks—

  Or the way it had felt to show up at the prom and see Duncan on the arm of Lisa Connelly.

  “Want to get a cup of coffee over at Margie’s?” Duncan asked as he reached her. “I have a half an hour or so until I have to put together the evening broadcast. I just checked with the new nurse and everything’s going fine with Katie, so let’s grab a snack.”

  The news report was going to air in a few hours, and undoubtedly someone else, someone as smart as Ira, would put the pieces together and figure out who she was. It didn’t matter anymore now anyway. The movie was well underway, her goal had been accomplished.

  The time had come to tell Duncan the truth. Vanessa was right. She couldn’t keep running from her past. She needed to confront it head-on.

  She already knew what his reaction was going to be. So she’d beat him to the punch, and save her heart in the process. After all, that’s what she had come here to do. To give him a taste of how she’d felt that night, standing in the parking lot, watching him walk into that building with the lithe, beautiful Lisa on his arm, while she stood under a flickering streetlamp and cried.

  She couldn’t tell him the truth at Margie’s, though. That was too public. Tonight, after dinner.

  “No, I can’t have coffee. I promised Jerry I’d meet him over at the diner to discuss tomorrow’s shooting schedule,” she said, surprised at how normal her voice sounded. “But I’ll see you at dinner tonight. Your sister already invited me, and I have something I’d like to tell you.” She forced a smile to her lips, covering all traces of the past as surely as CoverGirl had covered the acne of her youth. “It’s, ah, sort of a surprise.”

  “I’ll look forward to it,” Duncan said, then leaned down and gave her a kiss. And still, even as she knew she shouldn’t, a part of her savored that kiss. “Because I have a surprise for you, too, Allie Dean.”

  Chapter 21

  Duncan’s story about Chicken Flicks’ use of Tempest for its movie production was everything he’d wanted it to be. Smart and witty, timed exactly right. Interspersed with a few about-town interviews, some external shots of the crew at work, the extras getting made up. And done all on his own, without any help from the Mattel Corporation and its handy-dandy Magic 8 Ball.

  Of course, the whole thing had been helped along by Allie Dean’s brilliant synopsis during the interview, but he might be a little biased.

  “Well, that takes the news cake,” Steve said, after he rolled through the tape Duncan had finished editing. He sat back in his chair and pointed at the monitor. “Is it me, or does that woman look familiar to you?”

  Duncan stared at the still shot of Allie’s face, frozen on the screen, caught in freeze-frame. The long blond hair, bright green eyes, heart-shaped face. So he wasn’t crazy. Allie did look familiar, and not just to him.

  Or maybe his increasing disquiet as he’d put the tape together was because she was just down the street, having coffee with Jerry instead of here by his side. She’d only been gone a little while and he already missed her like crazy.

  “Maybe we knew her in high school?” Steve asked, rolling the tape back, then forward, scrolling again past Allie’s image.

  “I’ve been thinking the same thing for days,” Duncan admitted.

  Steve tapped his chin, thinking. “I don’t know. She just…looks like someone we used to know. But if there was a blonde like her in Tempest High or living anywhere in a twenty-mile radius of this town, I’d definitely still have her phone number in my little black book, if you know what I mean.”

  Tempest High. Again, the bell of familiarity rang in Duncan’s head. But he didn’t have time to reach for the memories, because Steve was rising and clapping him on the shoulder. “Run that piece on tonight’s news. Oh, and film a couple promos for it. I want this story splashed across the next three broadcasts. With daily updates.”

  “You really liked it?”

  “Yep, and in fact, I’ll probably regret this, because it means I’ll be killing my own ratings for the weather, but I want to offer you the morning anchor slot. Take that, Matt-freakin’-Lauer.”

  Morning anchor? The morning news positions were even more coveted than the evening news. Evening broadcast watching had dropped off, as CNN, the Web, and e-mail delivery of news began to take over. Most people in the area still liked a little local news with their morning brew, particularly during the school year, so ratings for the morning show remained high.

  “I thought Mitch was being considered for that position.” The noon reporter had been gunning for the morning slot ever since the regular morning broadcaster announced his impending retirement last month.

  “Mitch is a moron, Jane’s made it clear she wants to go home and have babies, and Klein’s got a contract, so we can’t just boot him off the evening news, much as I’d like to. Klein is more trouble than he’s worth, him and his hair in a can.” Steve clapped a hand on Duncan’s shoulder. “I want you. Tomorrow morning, I want t
hree ideas for news stories on my desk. We’re going to get this network to bust some ass if it kills us.”

  “I thought the network was doing well.”

  “It is, it is.” Notes of false cheer rang in Steve’s voice.

  “It’s tanking, isn’t it?”

  Steve sank back into the chair beside Duncan and nodded. “Everyone’s butts are on the line. Corporate thought trying a new network out in this hole-in-the-wall town meant less start-up costs. But it also means our daytime viewership consists solely of Winifred Winchester and her twenty stupid cats. With news, we do great. But we need more lead into our regular programming.”

  “And how is switching me to the morning news going to do that?”

  “It’s going to build up the only regular audience I do have, with the morning talk shows and that new soap the network is launching next month. We may get our asses whipped in primetime, but we can sure sew up those daytime dollars. And, having you there will buy me some time to figure out a miracle.” Steve ran a hand through his hair and let out a long breath. “Listen, Dunk. You doing the weather has saved my ass a hundred times over. You keep people watching the news, which keeps them on our channel, at least at six. I can’t help the shit programming corporate gives me for primetime. By switching you to days, I can take what I’ve got and give it all a big dose of ‘bam.’” He gave Duncan a grin. “You know me, I work with what I have. And right now, what I have is you.”

  Being around Duncan today had definitely turned Allie’s thoughts inside out. This was not like her, not at all.

  Not only had she shown up for the meeting with Jerry empty-handed, but she’d ended up spending a good five minutes digging through the stack of papers in her car, looking for her notes. She’d experienced a brief moment of panic before she finally laid her hands on them.

  “Allison Je—” Her mother’s familiar voice behind Allie, cut off midname. “Sorry, I forgot. You’re undercover. Should I call you Agent Ninety-nine?”

  Allie turned around. “No, Ma, you don’t have to do that. I have to get back inside Margie’s for a meeting anyway.”

  Her mother worked a smile to her face, but it fell flat. “Of course. No time for your mother. I understand.”

  But she didn’t, and it was obvious.

  The parking lot was half-full of cars, but empty of people, downtown Tempest as sleepy as a toddler ready for his nap in the heat of the late afternoon. Allie knew that if she didn’t take this moment to try to repair some of the damage in the relationship with her mother, the tear between them was eventually going to become too big. Despite everything, she didn’t want that. “Ma, let’s take a minute.”

  “I thought you had a meeting.”

  “It can wait. You come first.” Allie gestured to a bench that sat at the rear of Margie’s, leftover from a stop for a bus that no longer ran through Tempest. The bench had remained, used now by teens as an after-school hangout, old men looking for some summer shade, young lovers seeking a little late night privacy. It was scarred and in need of a fresh coat of paint, the words SAVE AND SHOP AT JOE’S SAV-A-LOT blurred into something that looked oddly like a bunch of S-shaped snakes dancing across the back of the seat.

  They sat down, her mother on one end, her bag of groceries securely on her lap in front of her chest, like a shield. Allie on the other, the papers in the same position. “What are you doing downtown?” Allie asked, the innocuous question an easy opening before getting to the hard subjects.

  “Running errands. Mailing letters, picking up your father’s prescriptions. Some groceries for dinner tonight.” She raised the bag in her hands, shrugged. “Boring things like that.”

  Another dig, implying the kinds of things that Allie wouldn’t want to hear about. She supposed she deserved that remark.

  Allie sighed. “I’m sorry, Ma, for what happened the other night.”

  Her mother waved her hand. “It’s already forgotten.”

  But it wasn’t, and they both knew it. Allie could easily let the entire conversation end here, and in a day, maybe two, they’d fall into the same familiar pattern, burying this argument under the carpet along with the others, and all the things that had gone unsaid over the years.

  Allie looked up, at the sun beating down, the same sun that shone over Tempest, then made its way westward to L.A. The same sun, the same problems, that had followed her all those miles.

  And hadn’t gone away, even though she’d shed the pounds. She’d changed her appearance, but deep down, had she really dealt with all that had gotten her that way in the first place?

  “Why did you do it, Allison?” her mother asked after a while, her voice quiet and soft.

  “Do what?”

  “Go away? And not come back?”

  Allie knew she could spit out the easy answer, the one about careers and opportunities, about how Tempest didn’t offer much in the way of film and movie jobs, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.

  And she knew her mother would see through that as easily as she could see through Aunt Tilda’s ancient housedresses on a sunny summer day.

  “No one ever understood me here, Ma,” Allie said after a second. “I was an outsider. No, worse than that, I was invisible.”

  “How can you say that? You have a family here, a family that cares.”

  “If you did, then why didn’t you tell me?”

  Her mother shifted on the bench to face Allie. “What do you mean, tell you?”

  “All my life, Ma, you never once told me you loved me.” The truth lay there, in the bright Tempest sunshine, finally spoken aloud, and then, the rest of it, rising to the surface, the words unstoppable, yet slipping past her lips in a quiet jerk of a sob, the question she’d never wanted to ask, the doubts that had never gone away. “And you were never there, never took an interest in my stories or the things I wrote. But Carlene, you always had time for Carlene.” Allie thought of all the times her mother had gone to Carlene’s art fairs, choir performances, sat up late with Carlene in the kitchen to hear all about a date. Allie had felt like she walked in and out of the house, ate the meals, and was more a decoration than an active part of the family. Was that what had driven Allie to her room with a bag of chips? Was that why she hadn’t been able to lose the weight finally until she got out on her own, far from home? “Never me, Ma. Wasn’t I good enough?”

  “Oh, sweetie, of course you were. You and your sister both were just fine. I never preferred one of you to the other.”

  “Then why did Carlene get all the attention?”

  Ma sighed. “She demanded it. You…you were the quiet one, never seemed to need much, just kept to yourself. Carlene, she always had to be the star. It was easier, I guess, just to keep on making her that way.” Ma shrugged. “When you were little, I could just give you a cookie and off you’d go, happy as a clam. But Carlene was always, ‘Ma, watch this. Ma, see me do that.’ She took ten men and an army to raise.” Ma released a breath, then shifted on the bench. “Not so much now, though. I don’t know what’s got into that girl since you left.”

  “Maybe I should have spoken up more,” Allie said.

  Ma’s soft hand met Allie’s cheek for one second, then went back to her grip on the sack. “And maybe I could have, too. But I told you how I felt, Allison. In the best way I knew how. With this.” She held up the grocery bag, its contents rustling a familiar whisper of baked potatoes, pot roast, apple pie. “Why would I make all of this if I didn’t care?”

  Food, always food. The Gray family’s favorite means of communication. Allie thought back to her childhood and couldn’t remember a conversation that didn’t have a plate of cookies in the center of it, a piece of pie at the tail end, a dinner or a breakfast opening. Sentences spoken between mouthfuls, the day’s stories told around extra servings.

  Ma, always making sure everyone got enough. That no one left the table hungry. She’d fed everyone from the cable guy to Dad’s friends from the factory, using her universal language, cooking the recipes handed d
own to her from her mother, and her mother’s mother. Generations of the same conversation.

  Allie closed her eyes, blinking back the sting of tears. “Why couldn’t you say the words, Ma?”

  Earl’s dented old mail truck headed down Washington Street, making its chugging, noisy journey back to his office. He cast a curious glance in Allie’s direction, then continued on his way. When silence returned to their little corner, her mother finally spoke.

  “That’s not the way I do things, Allie. I just…” Ma’s gaze softened and she shook her head. “I try, I really do, but I’m just not that kind of person. I show my love. I don’t need to be speaking it all the time.”

  Allie rose and gave her mother’s hand one quick squeeze before releasing it. “Maybe that was the whole problem, Ma. We kept our mouths so full we never talked about anything.”

  Then she went back into the diner before the tears that had been threatening at the back of her eyes made their way down her cheeks.

  Chapter 22

  Duncan stared at the face in the book and wondered how such a smart man could be such an idiot. It had taken him the better part of an hour to find the Tempest High yearbook, buried in a box in the attic.

  He hadn’t wanted to believe it, hadn’t wanted to believe the suspicions that Steve had raised, the same ones that had nagged in his own mind for the past two weeks, to be true, but they were. It was her after all, as unbelievable as it seemed.

  “Allison Gray.” Duncan read the words aloud for the third time.

  But that didn’t lessen their impact.

  Nor did it take away the sting of betrayal. The hurt that rocketed through his chest, launched a razor sharp spray of shrapnel. How could she have lied to him? But most of all—

  To Katie?

  Duncan cast a glance toward his sister, who was wheeling herself up the ramp at the backdoor, the dog trotting happily behind her.