by Lucy Score
Rainbow Berkowicz, in her boxy bank president suit took the stage with Ernest Washington. Ernest, sporting his trademark bandana, threw Jax a peace sign, “That Nova still working out for you?”
Jax nodded and grinned. While Ernest was at heart a true VW aficionado, he usually had a classic project car squirreled away on his car lot somewhere. Jax had bought his ’68 Nova from Ernest his first week back home when he and Summer had gone on a Blue Moon-style shopping spree.
“Cool,” Ernest said, rolling on the balls of his feet.
“Ready to get started, Jax?” Rainbow asked.
Ready for what, exactly? “Sure,” he said with a confidence he didn’t feel.
Rainbow turned on the mic she held and addressed the crowd. “Excuse me. If I could have your attention please.” The crowd slowly quieted and Jax took his first good look around the theater.
It felt like a sea of faces the size of Beckett’s wedding audience, but this time they were all looking at him. He picked out a few friendly faces here and there. Jules from the juice place was there with her husband, Rob. Gia, Evan, and Ellery were splitting a box of candy a few rows back from the front. His mother was cozied up between Fitz, who was sporting a pair of glasses that made him look like an academic burnout, and Elvira Eustace. Mrs. McCafferty from McCafferty’s Farm Supply on the square was looking chipper in overalls and a purple turtleneck in the front row.
“Thank you all for coming tonight. As most of you know, we’ll be viewing Awake in the Night, which was written by our very own Jackson Pierce.”
The applause was overzealous and a little embarrassing in his opinion, but Jax waved politely. It would all be over soon, wouldn’t it?
“Jax, would you like to give us a synopsis of the film and maybe take a few questions before we start?” Rainbow suggested.
“Uh, sure,” Jax said, his amplified voice bounced around the theater. He stood up, more comfortable on the move than sitting under the scrutiny. “I wrote Awake in the Night on spec while I was working as a production assistant after moving to L.A. I think I was a little homesick for Blue Moon, which is why I wanted to write about a small town.
“It’s about a woman who married her high school sweetheart right out of school, started a family, bought a house. And she just wakes up in the middle of the night one night and starts wondering if she made the right choice. Her whole life is routine. She works Monday through Friday in a job she doesn’t care about. Wednesdays are laundry. Thursdays are groceries. Kids have swim team and soccer practice. She and her husband haven’t had a conversation about anything but the school pickups or the lawn mower in weeks. And every night, she wakes up and lays there, regretting and wondering.”
Jax paused. “Am I going to ruin this for anyone if I keep going?”
People in the audience were shaking their heads.
“Really? You’ve all seen this? Raise your hand if you’ve seen Awake in the Night.”
He froze as nearly every person in the audience raised their hands. “You’ve all watched it?” He watched the audience nod enthusiastically as one.
“We had a viewing party when it came out,” Lavender called from the front row. “Even had a red carpet rolled out!”
It sounded vaguely familiar to him. His mother had probably mentioned it, probably hoped he’d come home for it. He hadn’t, though. Jax had been too busy, writing the next project, chasing the next paycheck. Hoping to come home when he was finally worthy.
“Wow. Well, thank you for watching. Anyway, I guess for the four people who didn’t raise their hands, the main character, Jenny, decides she’s going to do something when she wakes up in the middle of the night instead of just lie there and think. So that night she goes up into the attic and digs out her old painting supplies and she starts painting. Every night she paints these huge, abstract canvases. She’d painted in high school, the same crazy, vibrant scenes, but her art teacher told her no one would buy them, that she would never make it as an artist if she couldn’t make art that the world understood. So she gave it up. She got married, trained to be a bookkeeper, and tried to be someone that the world understood. And now she lies awake every night and wonders why she feels so empty.”
Jax took a few steps to the other side of the stage, uneasy with the audience’s rapt attention.
“Soon, she’s waking up with paint splattered skin and a smile. She stops trying to be early for school drop off, stops worrying about her job, she even stops seeing her husband as a schmuck.”
The audience chuckled.
“By painting, Jenny starts to see the beauty in her world and she slowly comes back to life. And that’s, well, that’s basically it.” Jax ran a nervous hand through his hair and wondered when he’d had his last haircut.
A slim hand rose slowly from the middle section of seats.
“Uh, yes? You in the red.” The woman in her forties came to her feet and smiled shyly. She wore her hair cut short with a sweep of bangs that fell at an angle across her forehead. Her cheery tunic matched the glow of her cheeks.
Rainbow marched the microphone over to her and the woman bobbled it before recovering. “Um, hello.”
“Hi,” Jax said with a smile. It was nice to know he wasn’t the only nervous one in the theater.
“I’m Cynthia and I’m not from Blue Moon, but when I heard you’d be here tonight I was so excited to come. I wanted you to know that your movie changed my life.”
Jax blinked.
Cynthia smiled even brighter. “I was Jenny. My husband and I dated in high school and the week after we graduated college we got married. Kids happened right away and it wasn’t long before I stopped thinking my life was about me. It was about everyone else but me. And I could feel little pieces of myself slipping away. There was no time to do the things I’d always loved to do, the things that made me feel alive. I was too busy working or coaching basketball or cooking dinner or buying eight thousand kid birthday presents.”
She took a breath and looked at him dead in the eye. “And then I went to the movies with a couple of girlfriends on a ‘Mom’s Night.’ We saw Awake and I woke up.
“I stopped on my way home and bought a bottle of champagne and that night, after the kids went to bed, I dragged my husband out on the deck and we drank the entire bottle and talked. Really talked.”
Her smile blossomed across her face. “The next day I quit my job and cashed out my 401k. I bought the campground my grandparents used to take me to when I was a little girl and now I spend every day outside in nature. And I don’t feel lost or sad or tired anymore. Because you wrote that story. Because I realized I didn’t have to change everyone else in my life to make me happy, I just had to remember who I was.”
There was a moment of complete silence when Jax felt like it was just he and Cynthia in the room. The connection was so strong. Then someone started clapping and he couldn’t hear anything but applause. But he did see Cynthia mouth the words “thank you,” her eyes shining brightly with tears.
He did the only thing he could think of. He got off the stage and met her in the aisle. Her hug calmed his troubled mind. Her long, strong arms squeezed him gently.
“Thank you,” she whispered again, in his ear.
He shook his head. “No. Thank you.” She had no idea what it meant to him to hear those words and he had no way to tell her.
Rainbow confiscated the microphone again. “Does anyone else have any questions for Jax before we show the film?”
Hands shot up around the theater and Jax laughed. “Okay, we’ll start over here.”
* * *
That night, Jax lay in bed staring at his ceiling. His thoughts swirling in his head. There’d been questions and confessions after Cynthia’s. Julia’s husband, Rob, announced that after seeing Awake he’d made a point to start talking to Julia about more than juice and babies. Mrs. Nordemann said the movie had inspired her to start writing and publishing erotic short stories.
And then there were the questions
.
“Was Jenny based on Joey?”
He’d answered as vaguely as he could. Of course Jenny was Joey and that screenplay was him working through his feelings of leaving her. He’d started it with the intention of convincing himself that Joey would have been full of regret had she tied herself to him so young. But something had changed as Jenny had blossomed in his head. And the deeper he went, the more he realized that Jenny’s problem wasn’t her situation, it was her priorities.
He couldn’t imagine Joey ever losing herself in a marriage or a job or parenthood. Joey was a woman who understood what was important to her. She was so much stronger than he realized when they were together. He’d nearly killed her and then abandoned her without a goodbye—which seemed to be the part that she wasn’t willing to forgive—and Joey had picked herself up and built herself a life without him.
He thought about Cynthia’s confession. A story he’d told had made a difference to someone. Made the difference. Something he created had resonated so deeply with a stranger that she’d changed her life because of it. That’s what it was all about, wasn’t it?
Mattering. Connecting. Resonating.
13
Jax spent the morning riding Calpyso and then Apollo and generally getting in Joey’s way. When he was completely satisfied in his investment of ridiculously perfect horses, Jax decided to pay a little visit to Ellery at Beckett’s office and see what scheme she was up to.
“Hey, Jax! You here to see Beckett?” Ellery greeted him when he walked into his brother’s law office. She had her dark hair pinned back in a tight bun at the base of her neck. Her choker necklace was made out of sterling silver links shaped like cats.
“I’m actually here to see you. Do you have a minute?”
“Sure! Can I get you something to drink?” she offered.
“I’ll take some coffee if you have any made.”
“Black, right?”
“Yeah, thanks.”
Ellery bustled off to dig up a mug, and Jax shoved his hands in his pockets and wandered around the room. In many ways, it was the quintessential small town law office. Hefty leather bound books lined the built in shelves and impressive framed documents proclaimed Beckett a law school graduate, an attorney, and mayor.
But Jax could pick out small pieces of personality here and there. There was the crayon drawing Aurora had done when they’d moved from the guesthouse into the big house, as she called it. Stick figure Beckett had a huge orange smile on his face and was holding stick hands with a lumpy stick Gia and a short, round stick Aurora. Presumably the purple blob on Gia’s other side was Evan. Beckett had the drawing framed like it was a Manet. It hung on the wall next to his wedding announcement and a Monthly Moon clipping about Evan’s debate team.
Ellery returned with a steaming mug.
“Here you go. What can I do for you?”
“I was just curious about something. Joey mentioned she talked to you at Shorty’s the other night.”
Ellery’s smile widened to a grin and she returned to sit behind her desk. “Did she now?”
“I’m a little curious about what you told her. She seemed a bit upset when she came back.”
“Oh, sure. I told her you’d make a terrible couple and that we were working on matching you with Moon Beam.”
Jax sank into her visitor’s chair, and pressed his fingers to his eyeballs, hoping to keep them in his head and not strangle Ellery’s pretty little neck.
“Why in the holy hell would you tell her that? Are you trying to ruin my chances with her?”
Ellery steepled her fingertips. “Jax, Jax, Jax.” She shook her head as if she was deeply disappointed with him. “First, let me make it very clear that I have no interest in you filling my house or your brother’s office with fertilizer. Very creative threat by the way. Anthony was shaking in his sneakers when I caught up with him outside.”
“Thanks.”
“Let’s speak hypothetically, shall we?”
“By all means,” Jax said, morosely sipping his coffee.
“Let’s say that hypothetically, I have a five-year-old daughter.”
“Congratulations.”
“Thank you. Now let’s say she’s incredibly stubborn. Like brick wall stubborn.”
“Uh-huh.”
“She wants what she wants and nothing you can say can change her mind, because everything has to be her idea. She wants chocolate for lunch, but you want her to eat broccoli.”
“Okay.”
“Even though broccoli is clearly good for her and is definitely the right choice, do you think shoving broccoli in her face and telling her its good for her is going to make her want to eat broccoli?”
“Um. No?”
Ellery broke into a broad smile. “Exactly. She’s going to throw up roadblocks left and right when it comes to broccoli. But what happens if you tell Miss Stubborn that she absolutely can’t have broccoli. Ever.”
A slow grin spread across Jax’s face. “Then maybe she decides she can’t live without broccoli.”
“Exactly,” Ellery said proudly.
“That’s a pretty high risk strategy, even for the Beautification Committee. How’d you come up with that?”
Ellery reached into her desk drawer and pulled out a textbook. She held it up.
“The Psychology of Love,” Jax read.
“We’re taking online courses to help us become more efficient at matchmaking.”
“So the BC does want us together?” Jax clarified.
“Duh, Jax.” Ellery rolled her cat-lined eyes. “There’ve never been two people more destined to be together than you and Joey. So don’t screw it up this time or I swear to God we really will make you Moon Beam’s third husband,” she said, pointing a sharp fingernail at him.
“You’re a diabolical woman, Ellery.”
“Yep. You want to see Beckett now since you’re here?”
Jax looked pained for a moment. “Can you do me a huge favor and please make sure he’s wearing pants before I go in?”
“Pants?”
“Trust me. I’ve had some bad experiences lately.”
* * *
Beckett was indeed wearing pants and frowning fiercely at his monitor when Jax walked in his office.
“What’s with the face? Gia breaking your spirit?”
Beckett’s expression transformed at the mention of his wife’s name. Geez, his brothers had turned into grinning idiots over their women. But Jax couldn’t blame them. If he had Joey to go home to every night, he’d have the same stupid smile on his face as Beckett did right now.
His brother swiveled away from the screen and kicked back in his chair. “No, just a custody agreement that’s headed toward battle.”
“That sucks.”
Beckett nodded. “Yeah, it’s the kids that pay the price. Anyway, what brings you by?”
“I was interrogating Ellery on why she told Joey we’d be making a huge mistake by getting back together.”
Beckett’s eyebrows winged up. “Ellery? Beautification Committee Ellery with the cunning and the strategy?”
“The same. Apparently she’s even more cunning than we thought. She’s reverse psychologizing Joey by telling her she can’t have me. The BC is hoping she’ll give them the middle finger and run to my arms.”
Beckett nodded in approval. “Damn. They did their homework this time.”
“Literally. They’re taking psychology classes.”
Beckett laughed. “You realize you’re the first Pierce to embrace what they do.”
“Anything that gets me back in Joey’s good graces,” Jax shrugged. “Besides, it seems to have worked out just fine for you and Carter.”
Beckett straightened his tie and grinned.
“Will you please wipe that afternoon delight grin off your face?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Beckett said, his smile edging toward shit-eating.
“Everyone in this town is getting laid but me.” Jax l
amented, putting his face in his hands.
“I highly doubt that.”
“I walked in on Carter and Summer getting it on in the kitchen on the freaking island. And then last night...Well, I don’t even want to talk about last night.”
“What? Were they doing it in the living room?”
Jax shook his head. “Worse. So much worse. It wasn’t them.” His stomach pitched a little. “It was Mom and Frank—”
“Nope! Nope!” Beckett covered his ears. “If you try to finish that sentence I will murder you and feed you to Diesel,” he yelled.
“I went to Mom’s place to pick her up and she wasn’t downstairs,” Jax continued, oblivious to his brother’s threats.
Beckett jumped out of his seat, hands clutching his ears. “I can’t hear you! I’m not listening!”
“I thought she was in the closet. But she wasn’t. She was on the bed.”
Beckett tripped over his trashcan and gagged.
“They were…” Jax gulped, caught in the endless loop of horror in his head. “Naked. And her leg was like—”
The blow from Beckett’s fist to his face surprised him more than stunned him. Jax shook his head.
“Wow. Thanks, man,” he said, rubbing his jaw.
Beckett laid a hand on his shoulder. “Anytime. Listen, we’re both just going to forget everything you just said. Forget it. Bury it. Lock it up and never let it out.”
Jax nodded. “Okay. Yeah. That sounds good.”
Beckett stabbed a button on his phone. “Ellery? Can you bring two scotches in here?”
“Regular pour or Buchanan pour?”
Beckett glanced at Jax before answering. “Buchanan pour, definitely.”
“Are they still showing up here for ‘counseling’?” Jax asked. The Buchanans were the couple who held the longest record for being on the marital rocks in Blue Moon history. They’d been on the verge of divorce since marrying twenty-two years ago. The couple came to Beckett every six months or so to work on a new divorce agreement that usually ended in a reconciliation for them and a two-day migraine for Beckett.