Little Lies

by Cherie Bennett

  As I got into Brett’s classic Shelby Ford sports car, he pronounced me “stunning.” I liked that but thought he was the one who looked stunning. He wore a vintage seersucker suit from the 1940s, a gleaming white T-shirt, and white bucks. We got our share of stares as we motored through Beverly Hills and West Hollywood to the restaurant on Melrose Avenue. There, a couple of valets—guess what color outfits they wore—practically fought for the chance to park the Shelby.

  Whitehall had a gleaming white interior, white tables, and a bleached-wood bar backed by a long mirror. There were a few private side rooms and no art on the walls save for some white abstract wall sculptures.

  Brett and I sat side by side instead of across from each other; he chose our dinner. For me, a creamy and delicious cold zucchini soup, sautéed scallops on a bed of spaghetti squash, and, for dessert, a dish of perfect coconut gelato. For him, a small arugula salad, roast lamb with fresh green pepper, and a fruit-and-cheese dessert.

  I tasted everything at his insistence. Paradise on a white plate.

  The conversation was light and banter-y, until dessert. Then, it turned more serious.

  “Alex has a major-league scar,” I confided.

  Brett winced. “Ouch. There goes bikini season.”

  “That’s what she said, pretty much. Before she cried.”

  “I’ve cried, too. Seriously, Nat. There’ve been times when I’ve thought about that night and cried,” Brett confessed.

  I took a small spoonful of the gelato. Superb. A lot better than Mankato’s best Baskin-Robbins. “I remember. When you and I talked in the hospital? You said it wasn’t your job to tell Alex what to do or what not to do. That she was a free agent, who could make her own decisions.”

  “Yeah. I said that,” Brett acknowledged.

  I looked at him closely. “Do you still feel that way? After you saw her today?”

  “There’s another way to look at it,” he admitted. “If you see a car full of passed-out people heading for the cliff, and you have a chance to jump in and yank the emergency brake? You could say, ‘Well, it’s their choice to be passed out, I’m going home.’ Or you can pull the brake. I’d rather be the one to pull the brake and discuss it later.”

  I kissed him on the cheek. “Thank you for saying that.”

  He leaned in toward me. “That doesn’t mean I’m never going to have a beer at a party. Or two beers. Or smoke a little four-twenty. Alex is Alex, you’re you, and I’m me.”

  Of course my iPhone vibrated with a text. Thinking it might be my parents or one of my siblings—things had been pretty tense at home of late—I turned toward the aisle to check it. Not Gemma or Chad. Not my parents. Sean. In Mankato. All-capping.

  WOOHOO—FLT CONFIRMED FOR NEXT MONDAY. CAN’T WAIT!

  “Something important?” Brett asked. He signaled our waitress for the check.

  I didn’t want to bring up Sean right then. Brett knew he existed, of course. He even knew that Sean had talked about coming out to Los Angeles to see me. He’d seemed unfazed by this. Whether he’d be unfazed by this text would be another story.

  “Nah. No biggie.”

  “Good.”

  As Brett scanned the bill quickly, then gave his black AmEx card to the waitress, I felt both grateful and a little bad. Grateful for the meal, though God only knows how much it cost. I hadn’t even seen a menu. Grateful for Brett, who was unlike any other guy I’d ever met in my life. A little bad that I couldn’t even offer to split the check. I didn’t have the money. Not that Brett would have let me. But still.

  Right then and there, I started to think about getting a job for the rest of the summer.

  Brett reached over and started stroking the inside of my arm, the way he had on the pool deck.

  Goose bump thoughts replaced employment thoughts. Everything around me might have been white … but my cheeks were flushed pure pink.

  CHAPTER TWO

  For the first sixteen and a half years of my life, my family had been a rock of stability. For example, until we moved to Beverly Hills, we lived the whole time in the same house in Mankato, about a ten-minute drive from our church.

  As I’ve said, the place was no great shakes. With three bedrooms, there were one bathroom with a combination shower/tub and a second half bath. A detached garage had space for one car and a loft for storage. All told, the whole place couldn’t have been bigger than sixteen hundred square feet. That is, about the size of my walk-in closet at Ricardo Montalban’s mansion.

  Bear with me. There’s a point to this.

  When I was ten—which meant that Gemma was eight and Chad was five—the kid decibel level drove my folks to a remodeling decision. Writing at the kitchen table was not going to cut it any longer. If my dad was to have any hope of finishing another book, he needed a Fortress of No-Interrupting-Children Solitude.

  My parents decided to enlist my grandfathers’ help and converted the garage loft into my dad’s home office. Since the house had been built in the 1950s, that space had been used for many things. Playroom. Home gym. Storage room. When we cleared out all the junk and took down the false walls—I helped as much as a ten-year-old could—we saw that the original walls were covered in decades-old purple Minnesota Vikings wallpaper. No shocker there. The Vikings were Minnesota’s second faith, behind Lutheranism. However, since my dad loved the Packers and hated the Vikings, the wallpaper had to come down.

  Easier said than done. After renting a steamer and spending hours scraping, we learned some bad news: that Vikings paper was just the top layer. Under it was a daffodil pattern, and under the daffodils was some horrid red-velvet-flocked stuff, and under that was corkboard paneling. It all came off. It was a good thing, too, because we found the original walls striated with rot and mold. Hurl bait, not to mention dangerous. It took weeks to take them down and replace the drywall.

  Here’s the point: When I came home from my date at Whitehall with Brett, I found my family on the back deck of the Church of Beverly Hills parish house, aka the hilltop mansion formerly owned by Ricardo Montalban. At first blush, everything seemed normal. However, under the apparent conviviality, my family framework was as papered-over as the walls of the garage loft, with the same dangerous rot underneath.

  “Hi, Nat!” My father—the chef in the family—was at the grill, barbecuing a late dinner of free-range chicken, fresh corn, and shiitake mushrooms. Though I’d just eaten, my stomach growled. It smelled great.

  “Did you have a good time with Brett?” my mother asked, resting her chin in her hands.

  I was happy to see that she was home. Most nights at this new gig, she didn’t get in until after nine o’clock. “Very.”

  “How nice,” Gemma quipped. Taller than me, blonder than me, and with a better body than me, she wore a short pair of cutoffs and a men’s sleeveless undershirt. “Did you guys talk about Sean and how you’re supposed to be in love with him?”

  “Was this date before or after driving school?” Chad asked, popping some pretzels into his mouth. He was sitting apart from everyone, on a wooden deck bench that overlooked the canyon. Chad was a swimmer—one of the best in the country in his age group—and had the body of an eighteen-year-old. No wonder Lisa Stevens was into him.

  “Kids …” My mother’s voice was weary.

  “Sorry. I’m just crushed by situational depression.” Gemma mock-apologized, then went back to buffing her nails.

  I saw my folks exchange hopeless looks. This wasn’t the family dynamic they’d raised us with, but the family dynamic hadn’t been normal since we’d convened at Will Rogers State Beach to vote on whether to put an end to this perilous Los Angeles experiment and return to Minnesota.

  Gemma couldn’t vote fast enough. She was desperate to get back home to Minnesota, back to Mankato East, where she had been a big fish in a small pond. Here everyone was beautiful. Everyone was special. My father wanted to leave, too; he was worried about us, about all the bad influences. Chad wanted to stay. Ditto for my mom.
It had all come down to me. Me, the one who had assured herself of social leperdom by calling her father to come to Brooke’s ill-fated party, in a vain effort to rescue Alex from herself.

  At that sunset meeting, I’d confounded expectations by voting to stay. Why? Faith, not facts. Facts dictated that we depart. Yet I somehow had faith that we were in Los Angeles for a reason. That God wanted us here. I admit that the evidence was thin, but as Mia had told me on the afternoon of the vote, “Sometimes faith is all we’ve got.”

  Maybe Brett Goldstein had a teeny little bit to do with it.

  Family unity never recovered. Gemma was now barely speaking to me, thinking that I had ruined her life forever. Because she hadn’t left the house since, maybe she was right. Chad was initially happy but then decided he was barely speaking to me, too. He blamed me for his getting busted at Brooke’s party and the monthlong grounding that followed. He still had more than two weeks to go on his sentence.

  As for the parentals, things weren’t so great for them, either. The chairman of the church board—mega-entertainment producer Kent Stevens, father of teen sex bomb Lisa Stevens—was supremely pissed at my mother. Not because of his daughter’s below-the-waist designs on my brother, but because my mother had rejected his demand to use the church for a family wedding on a particular Sunday, since it was already booked for an Alcoholics Anonymous convention.

  Kent wasn’t used to people saying no to him—not when he was ready to rent hotel ballroom space for AA. He took out his anger on my father. That option he was about to take on my father’s new mystery novel? The one he wanted Natalie Portman to star in? Ciao, bella.

  Which is Hollywood for “Stick it where even a colonoscopy can’t see it.”

  Now, almost two weeks later, I wondered what would happen if we took that same vote again.

  My sister must have been reading my mind.

  “Can we have a re-vote?” she asked plaintively.

  “Nope,” my mother said emphatically.

  “Because I think Dad might change his vote,” Gemma went on.

  “Shut up, Gemma. We’re not leaving. Looks like you’re going to have to suck it up,” Chad sneered.

  Gemma stood. “I’m not hungry. I’m going to my room.”

  “Me too. Or should I say my cell?” Chad declared.

  “Don’t—”

  My dad was too late to stop them. Gemma had already slipped through the sliding glass door, with my brother behind her. My mom raised a “Charlie, pick your battles” hand to my dad. He sagged, knowing she was right, but unused to this kind of disrespect. To his credit, he shifted from anger to humor. “Apparently, we’re going to have plenty of leftovers.”

  My mom looked at her waistline. She was trim for her forty-eight years but nowhere near the size-zero women who populated Los Angeles like so many bipedal lollipops. “Here’s the mystery,” she pronounced. “I don’t have time most days to eat lunch, and I’ve still put on five pounds since we got here.”

  “Well, let’s not fix that tonight,” my dad declared. He lowered the grill lid so the chicken could absorb some of the hickory-chip smoke. “I think I’ve earned a beer. You want?”

  My mother smiled. “Ordinarily, no. Tonight? Definitely.”

  “Good. Otherwise I’d have to drink yours, too.” My dad put down his barbecuing tongs and tugged at the baseball cap he always wore when he barbecued. He looked like a dad in his forties—a little overweight, with a balding head under the baseball cap, blue eyes, and style-free shorts and a T–shirt. He headed in to get the beers, leaving my mother and me alone. For a while, the two of us watched the tail end of the sunset. As always, I hoped to see the rare green flash on the western horizon at the precise moment the sun disappeared. I’d only ever seen it on a YouTube video, and even that I couldn’t be sure hadn’t been faked.

  As always, there was no green flash. It was the astronomical equivalent of a unicorn.

  “God does good work,” my mother said quietly. “Obviously, better than I’m doing as a parent.”

  Despite the family drama, I was still pretty upbeat after my date with Brett. “It’ll get better with Chad and Gemma.”

  “Yes. By the Second Coming.”

  I smiled thinly. “I think that they just need time to adjust.”

  My mother frowned and shook her head. “Actually, I’d like them to stay the same and for Hollywood to adjust.” She rubbed her chin and then gently changed the subject. Or so I thought.

  “Did you have fun with this boy Brett?”

  I nodded and told her about our dinner, trying not to go into too many details that would lead to further questioning. I knew conversation about Brett could segue to conversation about Sean, which was but one segue away from confession and catastrophe. “He’s really nice.”

  My mother cut to the chase. “Does he know about Sean?”

  I nodded again. “Yep.”

  “And he’s okay with it?”

  I shrugged. “I guess so. Sean texted while we were having dinner. Remember I said how he’s planning to come out here? Well … he’ll be here Monday.” Saying it made my stomach hurt a little bit. I couldn’t quite wrap my head around Sean’s being here. In L.A. With me.

  My mother frowned. “Does he have a hotel reservation?”

  “Uh … I don’t think so. I think he, um, is planning on staying with us.”

  My mom sighed. “Of course he is. Does this new boy know about that?”

  “Not exactly,” I said. “But he will.” I mean, it wasn’t like I could keep his visit a secret, especially if he was staying in our house.

  “Be careful, Nat.” My mom’s eyes bore into mine.

  Red alert. We were deep into Nat-and-Sean territory now. Could what Nat and Sean did the night before Nat came to California be far behind?

  Briefly, I was tempted to seize the moment and just tell her. No. There was stress enough on this hilltop. I didn’t need to pile on more.

  “I’m good. And I will be.”

  Fate and my father saved my butt. He stepped onto the deck with two cold Stellas in hand. “Who over twenty-one wants a beer?”

  He gave one to my mother; they clinked before they drank. “Here’s to the joys of child raising,” my dad proposed.

  “Here’s to Natalie. Let her be a good example.” My mother tilted her head back and took a long swallow. “Delicious. Charlie, you’re a genius for suggesting this.”

  My dad was already turning the destined-for-leftovers chicken. “Beer is easy. Being a teen is hard. Especially in a city where kids grow up too fast.”

  The automatic outdoor lights switched on as my mother took another good hit of her beer. “Well, I’ve been thinking about that. Maybe there is something we can do. At the church. And maybe Natalie can help. If she’s willing.”

  “Let’s hear it,” my father said, prompting her.

  “If it’s good for Chad and Gemma? You can count me in,” I promised. Frankly, I was just glad we’d moved on from Natalie-and-Sean.

  “Fantastic. Here’s what I’ve got in mind.” My mom paced around the deck as she talked, gesturing with her arms as she grew more and more excited. “It’s a lot like what your dad was talking about. How kids here grow up too fast. And I was thinking, there’s no good way for kids to meet other kids who just want to be kids. I don’t mean our church youth group, either. I meant wider. In the whole community.”

  My father closed the grill lid again and faced my mom. “What do you have in mind?”

  “A citywide group,” my mother declared. “We can start it at the church and grow it from there. Call it To Wait Is Great. Here’s the message: All that stuff that kids do out here? The alcohol, the drugs for fun? The sex? I’m not saying don’t ever do it. But for God’s sake—literally!—wait until you’re a grown-up to decide.”

  My mom turned to me. “Or maybe, Wait/Great.”

  My dad nodded. “Nice ring to that.”

  “I need you to help organize it for me, honey,” my mom
said. “What do you say, Natalie?”

  I swallowed. What could I possibly say? That I couldn’t think of a single person my mother could ask who would be a poorer example for Wait/Great, since I hadn’t done a very great job of waiting with Sean? That if I took a leadership position in the new organization, I’d be even more of a hypocrite than I already was?

  “Come on, Nat. No need to be modest,” my father said, cajoling me, mistaking reticence for humility.

  “I’m not being modest,” I managed to say.

  My mother moved to the grill to stand with my father. “It hasn’t been easy for us lately, Nat. I think this project could help turn things around, and having a real teenager spearhead the project would really give it the authenticity it needs to succeed. I can’t think of anyone better to be the face of Wait/Great. Will you do it?”

  I looked at my parents—eager, excited, holding their chilled Stellas. What do you think I said? I said yes.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Why did I say yes?

  That was the question I kept asking myself the next day. I asked it in the morning shower, I asked it when I made myself a breakfast of sliced mangos and date-nut bread, and I asked it as I spent the morning on the deck with my guitar and lyrics notebook, working on a new song.

  I was alone. My mom had left for the church offices at seven-thirty, while my dad had been invited out fishing on a cabin cruiser with one of our congregants, Artem Kachaturian. Artem was semiretired at age forty-five, having accepted a golden parachute from Electronic Arts when that company restructured. Gemma was in her room, door closed. Chad was in his room, door open. I was the unofficial enforcer until my dad got home in the afternoon.