Once Friends

by Z. L. Arkadie

  Finally, she pulled into the special parking space for guests of LH Real Estate Group, which was in a wide open subterranean parking structure beneath the building. Sonja closed her eyes and rested her head on the back of the seat. She figured her grandmother wanted to talk to her about handing over the responsibility of running the complex to Robin until a new full-time manager could be hired. But then she recalled her grandmother’s tone. No, Lorraine was unhappy about something that she didn’t want to discuss over the phone. What could that be?

  Maybe her grandmother wasn’t as pleased by Sonja’s new opportunity as she’d let on, and the thought of Gran not being happy for her made Sonja jittery. It probably wasn’t good that her gran’s approval still affected her contentment. At some point, she had to stand on her own two feet and stand firm in the decisions she made for herself. However, Lorraine Hester was such a remarkable woman in every way imaginable.

  Lorraine Hester had left her tiny town in Michigan for Midland, Texas when she was sixteen years old. Her father was a drunk, and she and her mother were his victims. Gran had never gone into detail about how she’d suffered at his hands, but she had zero love for the man and rarely mentioned him. Before escaping home, Gran had one of her friends make her a false ID that made her eighteen years old. Gran used that to get a job at Drillers diner, which was near an oil rig in town.

  Gran had never said much about her first two years in Midland, other than to say they were hard and she tried to keep a low profile the best she could. Sonja had seen photos of her grandmother when she was in her early twenties. She’d had a wavy bob haircut, a graceful ballerina’s neck, delicate pink lips, and a fawn’s eyes. She had been a stunning creature then and still was at the age of seventy-nine.

  Sonja hated to think of how often, as a young single girl from another state, Gran had had to fend off the men who worked on the rig. Regardless, she was eighteen when she met and married her first husband, Harlan Duke, the oil baron who one day happened to choose her diner to lunch in. After she walked over to take his order, the first thing he said to her was, “You’re the prettiest thing I’ve ever seen.”

  “I’m not a thing,” she replied.

  He didn’t laugh, which she liked because she wasn’t trying to be funny. Instead he studied her with one eye narrowed, and Gran stared back at him, refusing to the be the first to look away. He next asked if she liked steak.

  She shrugged. “Sometimes.”

  And that was when the oil baron, Harlan Duke, who had a reputation for loving money, cars, and gorgeous women, asked her on a date.

  She said no thank you, even though she was living in a trailer where the water didn’t run and the circuit box blew out every other week. Gran said she felt no attraction at all for the arrogant man who was twenty years her senior and, according to kitchen chatter, three times divorced. As far as she was concerned, a man with three ex-wives had to be an awful lot like her father, who didn’t know how to get along with women.

  Harlan was handsome though—tall, lean, dark hair, and keen hazel eyes. But Gran had never put much stock in the way a person looked. Her father was considered handsome too, and knowing him had taught her that monsters could not only be beautiful but also look absolutely normal.

  But every day for one month, Harlan came to the diner during lunch and sat at a table in her station. Mostly he sat alone, but sometimes he held meetings with other big-wigs. When he sat alone, he would read his paper and pretend to not watch her thwart advances from roughnecks. Then one day, one of the guys called her a low-grade piece of ass before he grabbed her and pulled her into his lap. Gran elbowed him in the throat, which allowed her to scramble out of his grasp. But the guy wasn’t done with her. When he went to kick her in the gut, Harlan was there to catch the man’s foot, punch him in the jaw, and fire him from his job.

  A few weeks after the incident, Harlan had asked her out again.

  “I’m under no obligation to go on a date with you because you stepped up for me.” Harlan bowed his head graciously and was about to say something when she said, “But I think I’m ready to have that steak, if you’re still offering.”

  On their first date, Harlan bragged about how he’d acquired his first oil rig. Gran sat and listened attentively as he described how he out-negotiated, pulled strings, and outsmarted his competitors. He had found a few investors willing to give him enough capital to make the bank loan officer, who he had promised a large cut of the first year’s profits, happier about giving him a substantial amount of cash, which he hadn’t nearly enough capital to back. The more Harlan talked about how he’d become a rich man, the more fascinating she found him.

  “I loved his mind,” her grandmother had said, which was why after their fifth date, he asked her to marry him and she said yes.

  According to Gran, Harlan had taught her a lot of what she had come to know about business. It didn’t take long for her to learn that money, cars, and women weren’t what he valued. He loved playing and winning at the game of being an industrialist. In Gran, he had found the perfect wife. She listened closely as he expounded his deals for the day. He even asked her opinions about his business and would validate her when he thought she was right and teach her when she could’ve used more illumination on the subject at hand.

  She’d said Harlan was a very good guy. He was kind and fair. He didn’t need to prey on the weak to feel powerful. He was the ultimate human being, which was why it shook Gran to the core when one night, only three years after they were married, Harlan lay down beside her to sleep and never woke up. The doctors said he had suffered a massive brain aneurysm.

  After she’d mourned and buried her husband, Gran learned he’d left everything he owned and every dime he had to her. And that’s when she began a fierce fight between his business partners and ex-wives, who claimed to have had children by him. But Harlan had taught Gran the biggest lesson that guided her success until that very day.

  “A man’s got to know when he’s outmatched and use this here”—he would nudge himself on the temple—“to win the war.”

  Harlan’s partners wanted the rigs, all of them. Gran had two major strikes against her. She was a woman with no allies. She was also seven months pregnant with their first child. So she sold her husband’s major stake in his business to the highest bidder.

  What a story her grandmother had, and that was just her first husband. Harlan Duke was Theresa and Robin’s grandfather. Roy Davis, a fair housing attorney from Los Angeles, was Sonja and Elaine’s grandfather.

  Sonja took a deep breath as she opened her eyes. She wiggled her head and shoulders to get loose, and that made her feel a lot better about cutting the cord that attached her to the one woman she wanted to be like but was too afraid to become.

  The time on the dashboard said she was seven minutes early, which meant she was right on time. Without another delay, she got out of the car, walked into the lobby, and rode the elevator up. Gran must’ve arrived not too long ago because Sonja could smell her floral scented perfume in the hallway. She was going to miss that scent, and thinking about it made her heart break a little.

  Gran’s operation took up the entire eighth floor. The action started early at LH Real Estate Group. The agents and brokers were in their offices, closing deals, and their assistants, who worked in cubicles in the center of the space, were sweating it out with them.

  Sonja waved at Regina, who was on the phone at her desk right outside her grandmother’s office. Regina waved back and pointed at the open door. Sonja showed the pretty woman, who looked impeccable with her hair tied back in a bun and wearing a turtleneck silk shirt under a black blazer, a thumbs-up.

  As soon as Sonja saw her grandmother, she felt her eyes brighten. “Morning, Gran,” she sang as all the trepidation she had regarding their meeting dissipated.

  Gran watched her with a stern expression from behind her enormous black wooden desk. She looked stylish in her flawless white blazer and rounded rimmed glasses. “Close the do
or behind you please.”

  Caught off guard by her grandmother’s tone, Sonja hesitated but did as she was asked.

  “What’s going on?” she said as she sat in the chair across from her gran.

  Gran opened the top drawer of her desk and pulled out a stack of white pages that looked as though they had been handled. “What is this?” She dropped the papers onto her desk.

  Sonja craned her neck forward to get a better look. She frowned as she picked up the top page and read it. “Is this my screenplay?”

  Gran’s eyes remained cold. “I’ve never read it until last night.”

  Sonja sat very still even though she wanted to run out of the office and get as far away from what was happening as she could. When she wrote the screenplay, she’d banked on her grandmother never reading it. Gran had always been too busy to read anything that didn’t pertain to her business. Sonja surely didn’t want her gran to know how she’d embellished the relationship between her and Ms. Jenkins, as well as her first late husband. Gran would’ve disapproved. Especially since recounts of her past always came with a strange warning label like “the past can be harmful to my business, so let’s not talk about it outside of my presence.”

  “I’ve never found beating around the bush worthwhile, so I’ll get right to it. You cannot make this story,” Gran said and pressed her lips into a hard line.

  Sonja looked from left to right, wondering if the moment was really happening or if it was a bad dream. She threw a hand up. “I know Gran, I crossed a line. But it’s just fiction and the names and places have been changed. So what’s the problem?”

  Her grandmother folded her fingers in front of her. “I have my reasons.”

  Sonja wiggled her head. “I think I deserve to know at least a couple of them.”

  “You don’t,” her grandmother said in a frank and haughty tone.

  “Well, is it the murder?”

  He grandmother pressed her lips together and looked at her defiantly.

  “Gran, come on. Tell me something.”

  Finally her gran adjusted in her seat. “Is that what you believe? That I could murder someone?”

  Sonja’s breaths came rapidly. She wanted to vomit out about a dozen explanations about why she wrote the screenplay the way she did. “Of course not.”

  “It doesn’t take much to figure out that your story is about Betty and myself.”

  Sonja groaned before she sighed. “I know. But I wrote that five years ago.” She shook her head. “Ms. Jenkins started giving me a hard time and you always took her side. So”—she shrugged dismissively—“I just indulged my frustrations. It’s not real, Gran. It’s just a story. No one is going to believe it’s real.”

  Her grandmother watched her with narrowed eyes as she shook her head. Finally she looked off. “You can’t move forward with your project.”

  Sonja’s mouth opened, but nothing came out. She cleared her throat and tried speaking again. “What’s going on? Why are you having such a visceral reaction to a made-up story?”

  Gran looked into Sonja’s eyes as if she wanted to say something but couldn’t.

  “What is it?” Sonja urged.

  Goodness, if looks could kill.

  “I didn’t know you were so interested in my past,” Gran said.

  Sonja could hardly tolerate the coldness. Never in her life had Gran spoken to or looked at her in such a way. She so very much wanted to cave and tell her grandmother that she would do what she asked. But the threat of losing her new job as a real writer, and with Jay too, made her realize how badly she wanted it and how much she was willing to fight for it.

  Sonja sighed and readjusted in her seat. “Gran, I signed a contract.”

  Gran stabbed the script with her index finger. “If this story is made the way it reads, I will be very unhappy with you Sonja Lorraine Hester—very unhappy.”

  Sonja’s heart felt as though it dropped to the pit of her stomach. “Gran, you’re going to have to be more specific. What exactly do you want changed about the story?” She watched her grandmother, eagerly awaiting her answer.

  Gran, who had been sitting so still, finally sighed as she took off her glasses. “I find Ida and Rose irreconcilably problematic.”

  Sonja pushed herself to the edge of her seat. “But without them, there is no story.” Oddly, she felt as though she were fighting for her life.

  “If that’s the case, then perhaps you don’t have a screenplay to sell to Hollywood.”

  Sonja wiggled her head as if what her grandmother had just said had sent shock waves through her body. “What? Do you want me to renege on the contract I just signed?”

  Her grandmother sat back in her big leather chair, looking way too relaxed for the gravity of the moment. “Of course not. But this is business, darling, that’s all. And your story does my business a disservice.”

  “How?” she asked, shaking her hands out of frustration.

  “Listen to me,” her grandmother said.

  Sonja understood that Gran was waiting for her to get ahold of herself and listen closely. She scooted back in her chair, working hard to be the picture of calm. Finally she folded her arms. “Okay. I’m listening.”

  “I want you to be clever and figure out how to keep your deal without making the story that you have written. So I’ll end this by saying, either you fix this problem on your end or I’ll be forced to do so on mine.”

  Sonja’s frown intensified. It was as if she wasn’t talking to her grandmother anymore, instead she was being threatened by a mob boss. And yes, just like a lieutenant facing a death threat from the Don, Sonja felt a cold shiver run up and down her spine.

  Sonja felt as though she were enveloped by a dark cloud as she walked back to her car and sat in the driver’s seat. What in the hell just happened? She clenched the steering wheel, so confused. On one hand, her grandmother had told her to fix it, and on the other, she’d threatened to stop any possibility of Sonja’s success. What a mind-fuck.

  However, Sonja felt as though she had no other option than to figure out a solution. A face popped in her head. She snatched her phone out of the cup holder between the two front seats to call Jay. But she froze and cursed under her breath after realizing she didn’t have his number.

  “What next?” she whispered.

  Just as she searched her recent calls for Laney, her cell phone rang in her hands. It was an unknown caller, but she recognized the local area code and answered, hoping it was Jay and not the average scammer.

  “Hello?” she said.

  “Sonja?”

  It was him. She slapped her hand over her heart. “Jay. We have to talk. Now.”

  Chapter 9

  Sonja agreed to drive up Doheny and meet with Jay at his place. He also wanted her to meet her co-lead writer, Dexter Frampton, who would be staying with him until they flew out to Vancouver next Wednesday.

  She wasn’t surprised that Jay lived in a white stone mansion that looked more like a modern and angular office complex in the Bird Streets. She plugged in the code he had given her to open the gate. She followed Jay’s directives to a T after she was granted entrance, driving past a lawn that had all the charm of a mall-park, especially with the infinity fountain that spurted water from the edges and had two large black iron balls in the middle of the pool. After passing the lawn, she kept driving straight until the road curved. Next she made the only right turn onto a ramp that led into an elevated parking garage.

  After pulling into a space, Sonja looked through the floor-to-ceiling glass windows and saw her final instruction. Jay and another guy were sitting across from each other on cushiony chairs on the terrace.

  Suddenly, Sonja’s nervousness intensified. The drive up the hill hadn’t taken long enough for her to figure out a strategic way to break the news to Jay about her grandmother. The fact that she was sitting in her position hadn’t quite sunk in. And she still wasn’t clear what her grandmother found so offensive about her screenplay. Was it the murder or
the fact that a character who read a lot like Ms. Jenkins was in the story? Perhaps she had inadvertently captured a truth that her grandmother wanted to hide.

  As soon as she stepped out of the car, both men were watching her. Sonja still couldn’t believe that she was in touch with Jay again, and in a big way. He watched her as if he was seeing her from the inside out and didn’t want to miss a thing. Existing under his intense gaze made her skip a breath. Without looking down, she had to assess whether her outfit made her look her best. She had on her designer black skinny pants and black cap-sleeved ruffled-front blouse. Whenever she was summonsed to her grandmother’s office, she had to dress for work. So she looked good.

  Sonja put on a smile while coaching herself to get a grip. The guy she was having a strange reaction to was Jay West—a person who had a habit of abandoning her whenever he felt like it. He was barely good for her as a friend, and she would’ve been a fool to consider him for something more than that. And so her eyes fell on the other guy—Dexter Frampton, she presumed. He smiled at her appreciatively and he was more than cute; he was beautiful. For a second, Sonja wondered what part of heaven he had fallen from. He had bright blue eyes and caramel skin. His lips were pouty, pink, and kissable, and his angular face resembled a Calvin Klein model’s.

  Sonja sighed when she reached them. Both men stood at the same time, but it was Jay who drew her in for a hug.

  “You look good,” he said then kissed her temple.

  Her heart betrayed her by fluttering. “Thanks,” she said, feeling heat rising up her neck and burning her cheeks.

  “Hi, I’m Dexter.”

  She shook his outstretched hand while noting that he was even more beautiful up close. Wow.