Last Woman Standing

by Amy Gentry

  “What are you doing here, Dana?”

  “You said we should catch up sometime,” I said. “It’s sometime.”

  He leaned over and wrapped his arms around me, and I was engulfed in a scent I would never be able to describe but that would always smell like home to me.

  “It’s sometime, all right. I missed you.”

  “I missed you too.” My mouth was pressed against his shoulder, so the tremble in my voice was, I hoped, inaudible. A moment later, the hug was over, as we both endeavored to be the first to pull away.

  “Wanna grab something to eat?”

  A wave of hunger rolled through me and I nodded. And, like we had done a million times before, we got into his car and drove to the R & R Diner. It was only five minutes away, but nobody walks in L.A.

  13

  The R & R Diner in Culver City had been one of Jason’s and my favorite places to eat until I’d made the classic mistake of deciding that it would be a fun place to work as well. Jason would still come in sometimes late at night and sit in my section drinking a bottomless cup of coffee and riffing with me over every refill, but of course I could never get any writing done there again, so we’d moved our mutual work spot somewhere else. Now, walking through the doors, I willed the smell of frying eggs and Reuben sandwiches to remind me of late-night writing sessions, but instead it tickled my nervous system with sense memories of hauling ice buckets to the wait stations and rolling silverware in the chemical heat of the dishwashing room. As we waited for a booth, I looked around for people I’d worked with, but in a year the turnover had been complete. It was a bit of a relief. I felt confused enough just standing next to Jason again.

  Noticing me looking around the restaurant, he said, “You miss working here, I can tell. Ask the hostess for an application, I’m sure they’d take you back.”

  “Ha-ha,” I said with a fake glare. “Actually, I was just thinking it’ll be nice to get my coffee refilled, for a change.”

  “I guess you wouldn’t need a day job if you moved back out here.” He watched me out of the corner of his eye. “After all, you’re besties with Cynthia Omari now, right?” I didn’t answer, just rolled my eyes, and he moved on, catching me up on some of our mutual acquaintances—who was booking what jobs where, who’d moved back to Detroit to care for an ailing parent, who’d gotten really into Scientology and disappeared for a while, only to reappear with straightened teeth in a plum role. But after we were tucked into a booth with food in front of us, he returned to the topic that was obviously on his mind.

  “So, are you?” He kept his eyes on the syrup he was squeezing over his plate of pancakes. “Moving back, I mean.”

  I dipped a triangle of grilled cheese into a bowl of tomato soup and said, “I don’t know.” Chewing, I marveled at my ability to sound as if I were considering it for the first time. “I guess it’s within the realm of possibility.”

  “What are you here for, an audition or something?”

  In fact, as my head began to clear of Amanda, all my reasons for being here rose up to take her place. Cynthia’s assistant had called me back while I was on the road, and, to my wonder, we’d set up a lunch the next day. “A meeting,” I confessed, and then I added, “I don’t want to get into the details until it’s over.”

  “Oho, big shot!” he crowed. “When I heard you booked The Bestie Cast, I have to admit, I was jealous. My agent’s been trying to get me on that show for months.” He gestured toward his face. “I have straight-white-male disease, I guess.”

  “Boo-hoo,” I said.

  “Come on, don’t I get even a little bit of sympathy for being out of fashion?”

  “Every time you think I have it easy, just repeat these words to yourself: Even J. Lo had to play a maid.”

  “But she got to bone George Clooney in Out of Sight.”

  “And Ben Affleck in Gigli.”

  He hissed. “Oof. You win. But bringing up Affleck in a conversation about white male privilege, now, that’s just playing dirty.”

  I shrugged and ate a fry from my grilled-cheese basket. Jason used to say stuff like that to get my goat, just to watch me get irritated. Now it seemed like a joke, not on me, but on him. Sitting across from Jason’s smiling face, surrounded by the sights and smells of our favorite diner, I found it easy to believe in my own success.

  “So tell me what you’re auditioning for. Or is it a writing job? Come on, somebody in L.A. called you after that podcast. Who was it?”

  “Not you,” I said pointedly. “Though you did text, which was nice, considering you’ve been ignoring me for the past year.” The ease with which this conversation was happening amazed me. So this was what it felt like to have the upper hand.

  “Look,” he said. “I’ve been meaning to talk to you about that. I know I was a jerk to you before you left, and I’m sorry.” He picked at his pancakes. “This is hard to admit, but—I was still mad about Neely.”

  The name dropped between us like a brick. It was the first time either of us had said it out loud to the other since the meeting. The ghost of Neely’s bloodied face in the video floated up, but I pushed it back down, trying to focus on what Jason was saying. He’d never apologized to me before, at least not for anything more substantial than forgetting to call me back or borrowing my car and leaving the gas tank empty. I didn’t want to be distracted from this conversation by something I wasn’t even supposed to know about, hadn’t known about until recently. And anyway, I had Amanda to thank for one thing: I wasn’t afraid of Neely anymore, even though I was back in the same city with him. That was something.

  Jason heaved a sigh. “I just couldn’t believe you took that meeting without me.”

  “I know. I shouldn’t have.” If there was one thing I was sure of, it was this.

  “No, I’ve thought about it a lot since then, and I don’t blame you.”

  “You don’t?”

  “If I’m being honest with myself, I probably would have done the same thing,” he admitted, and I couldn’t help thinking that if he had, the consequences would have been very different. “But then, when you came home sick, and he didn’t call, I thought—”

  “You thought I’d ruined the meeting somehow.” He looked miserable. “It’s fine, you can say it. Anyway, it’s basically true, isn’t it? He never called.”

  Jason looked more and more embarrassed. “Well, actually,” he said, and he took a break from sawing bits off his pancake stack. “Actually, he did.”

  “What?”

  “Yeah. I should have told you, but . . . you’d already moved back to Austin. And the call was for me.” He put another bite in his mouth. “I mean, just me.”

  I couldn’t believe it. For a year now, I’d been feeling guilty about ruining Jason’s chance to work with Neely. And it turned out all that needed to happen for Jason to get his big break was for me to leave.

  He saw my face and nearly choked trying to swallow his bite faster. “Wait, wait, wait.” He held one hand up in front of his mouth and waved the other back and forth. “Before you get mad. It was more of a mentorship kind of thing. He never gave me a steady job. He had me doing punch-up on a few shows he’s producing. Nothing big, nothing you would have been interested in. They cut half my jokes. Mostly I just hung out with him at his house.”

  “I bet it didn’t help your career at all,” I said with a grim laugh, thinking, Oh, to be a man among men. “Did he take you to his Buddhist retreat?” It was something we’d joked about, how we’d know we’d made it when he invited us to his converted ranch property in Montana.

  “Once,” he said, embarrassed.

  “Did you meditate together?” The thought of Neely’s bulbous torso twisted into a pious pretzel of contemplation made for a dark joke.

  “Come on, Dana, cut me a break. Put yourself in my shoes.”

  Put myself in his shoes? Thinking of what had happened in the SUV, I folded my arms in front of my chest.

  “After all these years of shunning
the spotlight, he told me he was gearing up for his own show. Produced by and starring Aaron Neely. He was out scouting locations and everything. It was really going to happen.” He leaned forward in the booth, suddenly intense, pointing his fork at his chest. “And I would have been in that writers’ room. Do you know what that would have been like, being on the ground floor for a Neely show? I mean, writing side by side with him, seeing him deliver my jokes—it would be like writing for the Larry Sanders Show or Curb Your Enthusiasm. You’d be making history.”

  “Sounds awful,” I said, raising an eyebrow.

  He sank back in his booth and put down his fork. “Right, well . . . about a month ago, he canceled it. Just like that, out of the blue. Not interested. And not only that, but nobody’s heard from him since. I’ve tried calling, but my calls get forwarded to his agent now. Or, rather, to his agent’s assistant. Assistant’s assistant.” He picked up his fork again and started jabbing at the flabby bits of pancake he’d sliced into bites, collecting them from where they’d fallen apart on the plate. “So now you know why The Bestie Cast would have helped. I’ve been doing standup, working on my set, circulating scripts, but it’s not like anyone’s beating down my door. Dropping his name is getting me nowhere. I get the feeling Neely pissed some people off or something. I don’t know.”

  I knew, and I almost laughed from the irony. A month ago, Neely had exposed himself to a massage therapist, had his face bashed in, and walked away knowing the whole thing had been recorded and could be released to the public at any time. So I had ruined Jason’s chances with Neely, in a way. But if Neely was lying low, why had his reputation suffered? Were rumors beginning to circulate? Had the video appeared somewhere? Was Amanda blackmailing him after all?

  “Don’t look so worried,” Jason said. “We’ve all been through ups and downs out here. It’s part of the ride. The maybes, the almosts. The could’ve-worked-out-buts . . .” He sighed. “I guess that’s why you went home in the first place.”

  I just looked at him, trying to pull my face together. Finally, I said, “I guess so.”

  “Well, I’m glad your career is going better. I really am.” He went back to his stack of pancakes, which, as it shrank, had gradually deteriorated into a sticky pile. “Sometimes I wish we had stuck it out as a team.”

  “Me too,” I said.

  “And you look great,” he said, assessing me slyly through the hair that swung over his eyes whenever he looked down. “I mean it. Success agrees with you. You look amazing.”

  With a quiver of anxiety, I moved to derail this line of conversation. “You keep talking about my success, but nothing’s happened yet. I swear.”

  “Well, if it hasn’t, then I bet it will soon,” he said with undisguised envy. “Because—I mean, here you are.”

  “Here I am.” I waved my grilled cheese with a flourish meant to take in all of L.A. as well as our booth and the diner around us. For a few seconds, we listened to the buzz of conversation and the clink of dishes.

  “When’s your top-secret meeting that you’re not going to tell me about?”

  I smiled. “Tomorrow at noon.”

  “You have a place to stay?” he asked, busying himself with more syrup.

  “I have a motel reservation,” I said. “But I haven’t checked in yet.” It was a concession to him, after all the talk about my success, to tell him that I had driven straight to his door without even getting settled in a motel first.

  “Hey, do you want to take a walk around the old neighborhood?” he said. “I mean, if you’re not worn-out from driving.”

  It wasn’t even nine o’clock, and despite feeling dead tired, I was also wired. “Sounds nice.”

  He grinned widely, as if he’d been genuinely unsure if I’d say yes. “Great. Now I can keep spying on you.” He gestured toward my bag. “Find out who’s blowing up your phone.”

  I looked down quickly. I’d turned it back on in silent mode so I could get calls from Cynthia and her assistant, and now the screen was lit up, flickering rapidly, as if new messages were appearing on it every few seconds. I felt a momentary queasiness. Amanda was not happy about being left behind. “Hang on a second,” I said with an apologetic smile. I hurriedly pulled up Amanda’s number and blocked it.

  The waiter dropped the check, and I put Amanda out of my mind as best I could. “I’ll get this,” I said. After all, I had my contest winnings to spend. “Since I’m the big shot now.”

  The vegetation in Los Angeles got me every time, the Seussian jungle of cacti and palm trees and tropical flowers, trailing vines clinging to dense shrubbery and crawling up metal gates. We strolled past fat agave spikes and jasmine, hibiscus with their veined pink petals curled up tight for the night and spindly yucca bobbing in the breeze. The Austin spring was full of blooming things for only a few weeks before the summer sun came out and fried everything to a crispy brown color. By contrast, the L.A. night was cool and the plants stayed lush year-round, fed on massive quantities of water diverted artificially into the desert. I loved it.

  “We should’ve kept in better touch,” Jason said for the hundredth time. He’d lit up an American Spirit as soon as we were outside the restaurant, and although I wanted to disapprove, had pestered him to quit a million times, I privately enjoyed the old familiar smell on the breeze. “How’s your mom these days?” he said, politely holding up a branch that leaned out over the sidewalk.

  “I just saw her, actually,” I said, ducking under the branch with a nod of thanks. “I stayed with her on the way out here. She’s fine. Same as always. How about your family?” I avoided Matt’s name and kept my eyes on the uneven cracks in the buckled sidewalk.

  “My dad remarried recently.” He glanced sideways for my reaction. “Yeah, I know. It was a surprise to me too. And that’s not even the biggest news.” He took a deep breath. “Mattie’s in prison.”

  I kept my expression carefully neutral, manifesting only the nor-mal amount of concern. “My mom mentioned that when I saw her.”

  “It’s the talk of the town,” he said with a scowl. “Robbed a convenience store. What a fuckup. The gun was for show, he never intended to use it—the clerk was already reaching for the till when it went off and nicked a customer who was coming out of the bathroom. It’s just Mattie’s luck the customer happened to be a firefighter. Did you know they can sentence up to twelve years for assaulting a cop or a firefighter?” I shook my head. “But then, it wasn’t his first offense.” A small purple flower brushed up against his shoulder as we passed, and he made a grab for it. “Sometimes I think people were just sick and tired of Mattie’s attitude. He was always such a jackass to everyone.”

  “I’m—I’m sorry, Jason.”

  “Don’t be. He was the biggest jackass of all to me.”

  I nodded. I could still understand the truth of this, even with what Matt had done to me. After all, it wasn’t personal. I was just an opportunity, a warm body he’d happened to have access to. He hardly grunted two words to me the whole time I knew him, before or after the incident. Whereas he had always made sure Jason understood exactly how much he was hated, and why. By Mattie’s warped standards, Jason wasn’t a man and therefore didn’t deserve respect. It was easy to see how living under that dark cloud had shaped Jason’s personality, his way of skulking under the radar, avoiding conflict at all costs, deflecting intimacy with a joke. “How’s your dad doing with it?” I asked, hoping to sidestep into less painful territory.

  “Honestly? I think he’s just relieved to have Mattie out of the house. He got married pretty quick.” He paused, fiddling with the purple flower, as if deciding whether to go on. “I think he’d been dating this woman for a long time. I think he was hiding the relationship on purpose, so—” He broke off abruptly and threw the flower away.

  I watched it flutter sideways into the street. “So Mattie wouldn’t find out?”

  “Yeah,” he said shortly. “So they’d never have to meet.”

  A shudder ran th
rough me. Did Jason know—if not what Mattie had done to me, then at least what he was capable of doing? What an awful suspicion to have about your own brother. A suspicion as toxic, in its way, as Mattie’s poisonous taunting.

  Spontaneously, I reached down and grabbed Jason’s hand and gave it a squeeze. He squeezed back, and we walked to our place—his place—for another ten minutes in silence, still holding hands. When we reached the door, he let go of my hand to get his keys out of his pocket and I took a deep breath. The desert air had cooled substantially while we walked, and my teeth were almost chattering with exhaustion and chill.

  “Come on in,” he said, and there it was, the beige stucco walls hung with kitschy Goodwill portraits on black velvet, the dingy rug, the sofa we’d bought at Ikea together our first day in town and that he’d paid me half the cost of, against my objections, when I drove back to Austin with an empty car. I sat on a cushion, now threadbare and sunken at its center, and waited while Jason put a kettle on to boil in the narrow, pink-tiled kitchen.

  “Everything’s the same,” he called, as if he could hear my thoughts.

  “Except that’s a new TV, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah, well. As you know, my ship came in for about five minutes.” He rounded the corner carrying two mugs. “I thought it was a good idea to invest in the medium. Put something on, if you want. It’ll be just like old times.”

  “Sure,” I said. “What do you want to watch?”

  “I don’t know, let’s see.” He sat down on the sofa, set the mugs on the battered coffee table, and picked up the remote. Then he put it down again without turning the TV on, scooted over next to me so that our thighs were touching, and leaned his head on top of mine.

  Like old times.

  We sat like that for a few minutes. And then I drew back.

  “What’s wrong?” he said.

  “Nothing.” I yawned elaborately. “I guess I’m finally getting tired.”

  “Hey.” He picked at the knee of his jeans. “It’s late. You want to just crash here tonight? There’s still a bed in your old room.” He affected an old-person voice. “Your mother and I haven’t changed a thing, all your old debate trophies are still in there.”