by Wendy Wax
No one comments on the fact that the high-profile individual, whoever he or she might be, has been chosen because Do Over needs a major ratings boost to survive.
“Has anyone else noticed that we’re going to be on another barrier island in the middle of hurricane season?” Deirdre asks.
“We’ve all noticed.” Avery starts to roll her eyes then remembers she’s on-camera. “I have a feeling they’re not going to be happy until they get footage of us clinging to a rooftop waiting for someone to rescue us.”
“I guess Hurricane Charlene wasn’t enough for them,” Mom says. Charlene was the hurricane that roared up the Gulf Coast, right past Bella Flora, just after we finished renovating her, causing us to spend the night cowering in a Tampa motel bathtub. Last summer, when we were in South Beach, the disaster we faced was entirely man-made.
I see Troy smiling and I can’t really blame him. We’re all so excited that we barely notice that he’s here recording all of our warts and foibles for playback at a future date.
Dustin slides down off my lap and races over to the tree, where my father picks him up and helps him choose a candy cane off a branch. I wish I could forget that he and my mother are no longer the single entity I’ve always considered them. I’m a mother now myself, and the idea of being a child of divorce at the ripe old age of twenty-four is ridiculous, but it still makes my stomach hurt. The thought of Tonja Kay taking her anger at me out on Bella Flora makes the ache even worse.
I hear the loud whine of a boat motor out in the pass. An explosion of flashes lights the sky just long enough for someone to get an exterior shot of Bella Flora with a hint of us inside. I wish I were wearing my burqa right now. Or even the big hair and strap-on boobs that I wore in Nashville. I’m going to have to come up with a lighter, more breathable disguise, something that’s water-repellent, before we head down to the Keys.
I can feel Troy zooming in on my face. He pans the camera lens slowly across the couch, carefully pausing on each of us briefly before moving on. Unlike his lens, my thoughts move in quick jerks and starts. My mother says it’s all about accepting change and moving forward. But I think that’s easier for the person making the change than it is for the people who are forced to accept it.
I try to imagine who the “high-profile” individual in the Keys might be, but of course high-profile could mean about as much as celebrity does. The house we’ll be renovating could belong to the president of the United States. Or a Project Runway all-star.
Dustin runs to me and climbs into my lap and I hold him tight against me. I don’t have to look to know what Troy is shooting. We are the tabloid version of the Madonna and Child, but our powers are confined to selling magazines and, maybe, if we’re lucky, a successful network television show.
I look around me and I’m reminded that Dustin and I are not alone. We’re all bound up with each other and with Do Over. And another chance to “do over” our own lives. We’ve had two shots at this, and we’ve all made progress. I know I’m not the only one who’s hoping that the saying is true. That the third time, somewhere down in the Florida Keys, will be the charm.
A BELLA FLORA
CHRISTMAS
This story takes place between
the novels One Good Thing and
Best Beach Ever.
Chapter One
Celebrating Christmas with real-life celebrities can be complicated. This is partly because of the paparazzi they attract and partly because of the oversized personalities they possess. No matter how many times we look at their photos splashed across a tabloid cover and tell ourselves that famous people put their pants on one leg at a time just like we do, the truth is they probably don’t.
My name is Kyra Singer, and I know all this because I became famous—make that notorious—for falling in love with a movie star named Daniel Deranian while I was working on my first feature film, believing him when he said he loved me, and giving birth to his child. And because my mother, Madeline, is dating a rock star. Yes, my mother. Who I’m pretty sure is one of a very small subset of 52-year-old grandmothers who can claim this distinction. (More on this later.)
It’s only a matter of days until Christmas and I’m standing in front of Bella Flora, the seriously cool 1920s Mediterranean Revival–style home perched on the southernmost tip of Pass-a-Grille, a historic fishing village on the west coast of Florida. I don’t know where you’re spending the holidays, but it’s a sunny seventy degrees here and the sky is a brilliant blue streaked with eyebrow-thin white clouds. The streetlights are garland-wrapped with great big red bows tied at the top. Blow-up Santas and palm tree trunks wrapped in Christmas lights line the two small roads that lead on and off the barrier island. There’s a much better chance of toasting marshmallows at a bonfire on the beach than in a fireplace. Anyone who’s looking for a white Christmas should stay where they are.
Personally, I’ll take fine white sand squishing between my toes over snowflakes falling on my head any day—not that I’m an expert, seeing as how I was raised in Atlanta where even the mention of snow empties grocery shelves and causes embarrassing events like 2014’s Snowmageddon.
The first time we saw Bella Flora, which was all my mother and co-owners Nicole Grant and Avery Lawford had left in the wake of Malcolm Dyer’s Ponzi scheme, she looked like a once-grand dame in serious need of reconstructive surgery and smelled like a locker room. We brought her back to life out of sheer desperation and she did the same for us.
In the afternoon sunlight Bella Flora looks like a wedding cake fresh from the bakery box. Its pale pink walls and acres of windows are trimmed in white icing and accented by bell towers and wrought-iron balconies. The whole confection is topped by a multi-angled barrel-tile roof.
I step through the low wall that encloses a front garden filled with original plants from the twenties and feel the warm glow of love for this home that has been our one safe haven. As I follow a bricked path past a Deco era dolphin fountain, take the rounded steps up to the colonnade, and let myself in the wooden double doors, that glow is dimmed by the knowledge that I’ve put Bella Flora at risk and could actually lose her.
In the foyer I pause as the house wraps its arms around me in welcome. Then I follow the sound of my four-year-old son’s laughter down the central hallway past the formal living and dining rooms and the Casbah Lounge, which is an ode to Spanish tile, leaded glass, and Moroccan leather, and into the kitchen where he and my mother are making Christmas cookies. Dustin’s standing on a chair next to her just like my younger brother Andrew and I used to, pressing holiday-shaped cookie cutters into the dough then transferring them onto the cookie sheet.
His dark eyes are intent on what he’s doing, and based on the amount of green and red icing smeared in his dark curls and across the smooth golden cheeks and chin that he inherited from his father, they’ve been at this for a while. He looks up at me through long dark lashes that any woman would covet and flashes his sunniest smile, also an exact duplicate of his dad’s. Except Dustin’s is not calculated while his father can flash it—and pretty much any other emotion—on cue. Sometimes I have to remind myself just what Daniel Deranian does for a living and how very good he is at it.
Because of my all-too-public pregnancy and the fact that I gave birth to Daniel’s only biological son, at the ripe old age of twenty-seven I’ve had way more than my fifteen minutes of fame. Dustin has had a whole life full. What began as me signing papers promising to keep Dustin’s paternity secret—a feat that proved impossible—has evolved into Daniel’s open involvement in Dustin’s life, his insistence that Dustin bear his last name, and his more recent demand that Dustin play his son in his upcoming directorial debut. I’m glad that Dustin has a relationship with his father and extremely grateful to him for buying Bella Flora for Dustin and me when we were forced to sell it. I’m less happy with the idea of Dustin portraying Daniel and his real life movie star wife Tonja Kay
’s son, and there’s no more time for hedging. They’ve already pushed filming back twice. I have to commit or refuse before New Year’s.
“Look, Mommy. I cutted out a Santa Cause. And a helf.” He holds up the now-smooshed shapes in both hands, beaming.
“Here. There’s room for them right there on the baking sheet.” My mother shows him where to place them, her smile as warm as her tone is gentle. Mom’s always known how to make the most of a holiday without going all Martha Stewart in the process. She’s also created a “home” everywhere we filmed Do Over, the renovation-turned-reality TV show that took us from Bella Flora to South Beach, to a private island in the Keys that belonged to a then-reclusive down-on-his-luck rock star named William Hightower, and back again.
I staked everything we had, including Bella Flora, to remodel the Sunshine Hotel, a moldering mid-century hotel just up the beach, in an attempt to take back control of Do Over, and lost. We also lost the non-compete lawsuit the network slapped us with. Which has left my mother and me glaringly unemployed and virtually penniless.
This is why I’ve agreed to rent Bella Flora to a mystery tenant for an amount that gives me the option of turning down the million dollars Daniel and his wife offered for Dustin to play their son.
A text dings in. The knot of panic tightens when I recognize Daniel’s phone number. Coming in the day after tomorrow to bring Dustin’s gift. Will text when I land. There’s no asking if that’s convenient or mention of the decision I have to make, but I know better than to think the subject won’t come up. He and Tonja are not only starring in The Exchange, they’re investors. And they need Dustin for a lot of reasons, one of them being the publicity value of father and son playing themselves while Daniel’s real-life wife plays his mother.
“Kyra?” I look up into my mother’s face and see her concern for me. “Everything all right?”
“Absolutely.” I can’t face another conversation about Daniel’s movie or the fact that our son wants to act with his father. And no matter how stressful everything feels at the moment, I don’t want to ruin the holiday for Dustin or anyone else. If I don’t find a way to pay off the entire loan I took out, it could be the last one we get to spend in Bella Flora.
I watch my mother help Dustin start filling a second cookie sheet and think about how completely I took my childhood and my mother for granted. When our world fell apart, I was shocked to discover how strong she was. I think she and my father were surprised, too. They ended up divorced because he never figured out how to deal with it.
“I’m making these for Billium.” Dustin smashes another dough elf onto the baking pan enthusiastically. “‘Cuz he’s going to be here in a cuppa days. To see Geema.”
My mother’s cheeks turn red at the mention of William Hightower. It seems that we Singer women have a hard time resisting charismatic personalities. In my case the grand prize was Dustin. In my mother’s, well, like I said, it’s not every woman her age who gets to sleep with someone as hot as the man formerly known as William the Wild. She has a valid reason to blush.
“Thomas is coming with him,” my mother says, referring to Will’s thirty-year-old son. “I thought he and Andrew could share the pool house.”
I nod and step up behind Dustin to help him with a tricky bit of dough. I know that my mother has been a great influence on Will and he, well, there’s a lot more to William than his looks and talent. For one thing he had the good sense to appreciate my mother; something my father had forgotten how to do. Watching her reimagine and rebuild her life out of the ashes of disaster has been completely inspiring. I hope I can be even half the woman she is by the time I turn fifty.
Chapter Two
In late December sunset is an Early Bird Special. At five P.M. I lie in a chaise near the pool watching Dustin play in the Bella Flora replica his father sent him a few Christmases ago and the sky is already beginning to fade. As my son pretends to build a set of bookcases in the playhouse’s salon, I wonder if the anonymous renter is an individual or a couple. Or whether there’ll be a whole family moving in.
I hate the idea of strangers living here even temporarily, but I guess renting her out is a whole lot better than losing her completely. Still, the anonymity thing makes me uncomfortable. In my experience it’s only celebrities and the ultra-wealthy who have reason to hide their identity.
When my cell phone rings I see the Los Angeles area code. It’s not Daniel’s and I freeze for just a minute before I recognize the phone number.
“Kyra?” Sydney Ryan has two first names and both of them are masculine, which is a testament to how much her father wanted a son and not what she looks or sounds like. She has a face and body that can—and have—stopped traffic, coupled with a husky voice that most men wouldn’t dream of trying to resist. Those men are rarely prepared for the tomboy who lives inside the uber feminine package—did I mention how much her father wanted a son?—and are shocked that she understands and cares about what’s happening on the football field or baseball diamond. Or that she knows exactly why the hockey players are beating each other to a pulp on the ice and who will likely win. You definitely don’t want to go up against her in a speed round of sports trivia.
“Hey, Syd. How are you?”
“I’ve been better.”
This admission is your average person’s shriek for help.
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing really.”
“Okay.”
Sydney is famous for playing female cop Cassie Everheart on a long-running detective show called Murder 101. We met five and a half years ago on the set of Halfway Home where she was playing her first film role and I was the lowly production assistant who was stupid enough to fall for the leading man. Before Tonja went on the warpath—I wasn’t Daniel Deranian’s first or last extramarital fling—I wouldn’t have said Sydney and I had a ton in common other than growing up in the suburbs of Atlanta. But when the shit started hitting the fan and I became a cliché and pariah, Sydney was the only person on that set who didn’t ditch me. Something Tonja Kay did not appreciate. Syd and I have been friends ever since. She’s one of those friends that you don’t see for a year and then pick up right where you left off. Plus she’s one of Dustin’s godmothers.
“Something’s off on the set. I’m not sure what, but I was on my way to FedEx Dustin’s present. And then I thought about how long it’s been since I’ve seen you guys.”
She doesn’t mention Jake Bodie, her co-star and real-life boyfriend, and I don’t ask. Given the things that have been written about me, I will be the very last person on the planet to bring up the shots of him with a young starlet that I saw on the front page of a tabloid during my last trip to the grocery store.
“I’d kind of like to get out of town for the holiday. If you have room.” The last is offered in a timid tone that’s decidedly un-Sydney-like.
“There’s always room for you, Syd. But I just want to make sure you remember that Pass-a-Grille is only about two and a half miles long and two blocks wide.” Sydney swore off small towns, cities, and suburbs years ago, including her own.
“I’m not coming for the square footage,” she says. “I’m coming for the company.”
In my head, I start moving the company we’re already expecting around. Bella Flora is a big house, but she’s going to be bulging with people. Sydney could have Dustin’s room. Or even bunk in with me. Plus the cottage at the Sunshine Hotel that my mother is taking is mostly ready.
“Great.” I get up and walk over to the playhouse where Dustin is putting his tools into his tool belt. “When will you be coming in?”
“Christmas Eve day. The day after tomorrow.”
There’s a brief silence as I register the fact that she knew she was coming before she called. It’s the same day William and Thomas Hightower and Daniel are arriving.
“Perfect,” I say. Now there will be three celebriti
es at Bella Flora. Which makes our chances of getting through Christmas without a visitation from the paparazzi less than zero.
“Text me the details. Dustin and I will pick you up at the airport.”
Friends don’t let friends spend the holidays alone.
* * *
• • •
I’ve just hung up when the doorbell rings. Through the open windows I hear my mother answering the front door. There are greetings and exclamations—I have no doubt hugs and kisses are exchanged. By the time we get inside, Nicole Grant (I still can’t think of her as a Giraldi even though she and special agent Joe Giraldi are now married and the parents of eight and a half month old twin girls), Avery Lawford, architect and newly licensed contractor who spearheaded the renos we did for Do Over, and Bitsy Baynard, who was an heiress and sponsor before her husband ran off with an exotic dancer and everything Bitsy owned, are talking a mile a minute. As you can see, a lot of us aren’t what we used to be. Some of us are more.
A happy woof snags Dustin’s attention. “Cherlock is here!” he shouts as we head into the kitchen. He breaks into a huge smile when he spots the French bulldog that is all Bitsy’s husband left behind when he disappeared with her fortune.
There’s a knock on the kitchen door and my brother Andrew, whom I can no longer refer to as my “little” brother since he’s now a college graduate and well over six feet tall, steps inside. Dustin is in double heaven. “You ready, little man?” My brother hugs our mother, scratches Sherlock behind one bat-wing ear, and scoops up his nephew. “Geedad’s outside. We’re going to have a guys’ night out and a great big manly pizza.”
They’re gone in a flash and we carry snacks and drinks out to the loggia and settle around the wrought- iron table to watch and toast the sunset. Nikki, Joe, and the girls are just back from Miami, and my mother was visiting William Hightower down on Mermaid Point, so it’s been a while since we’ve all been together. Avery reaches for a Cheez Doodle, which is her go-to snack. To my knowledge, Avery’s never met a cheese product that she doesn’t like.