When I fling them open, sure enough, Clay Price is standing there.
His hands are stuffed in his pockets and he’s wearing an oversized dress shirt that’s now wrinkled, and his hair—always a bit wild and unkempt—flies about his head. “We need to talk,” he says in a flat voice. His face is blank. That’s the thing with Clay Price. He never shows you what he’s really thinking.
My back goes up. “I don’t think there’s anything to say,” I tell him icily.
“So it’s true, then? You’re gonna go off to Stanford?”
He sounds pissed. Good, I’m pissed, too. I’m hurt and angry that he’d think my opinion matters so little that he could decide my future for me. “I just might,” I say lightly. “What, you think I should stay here and marry you?”
The moment I say it, it feels like a mistake. The knot in my throat increases, and I can see him visibly flinch as the words come out. And I’m surprised, because it seems like for the first time, Clay looks vulnerable.
“No,” he says softly. “I guess not.” He puts a pair of fingers to his forehead and gives me a mock salute. “Have a nice life. I’m heading to West Texas with my pop.”
“Bye,” I tell him in a flat tone. “I’m going to Stanford.” And I turn around and slam the door behind me.
The moment I do, I burst into tears again.
* * *
Hours later, I’m all cried out. I realize we’ve both been acting childish and I want to talk to him. Maybe we can work things out. Maybe I can make him see that my education is important, and what I want is just as important as what he wants. Maybe we can still get married and I can go to college part-time while we make a home together. Sniffling, I pick up my phone to text him even though it’s late.
All I know is that I love him and I don’t want this to be the end between us.
Before I can hit the “Send” button, there’s an urgent knock at my bedroom door. “Natalie?” It’s not Jenny, but my stepmom, Johanna. “Natalie, open up! It’s your father! There’s something wrong with him!”
My father? Oh no. He’s old, but he’s still so vibrant that it doesn’t seem like he’ll ever age like normal people. This can’t be happening. I rush to the door to find Johanna’s teary face. “What is it?” I blurt out, racing past her toward their bedroom.
“I think he’s having a heart attack!” she wails in my ear.
Texting Clay is completely forgotten.
Chapter Three
Present
Natalie
I know it’s going to be a bad day when I wake up to find my dad standing over my bed.
I sit up, rubbing my eyes, and glance at the alarm clock. Five in the morning. “Dad?”
“Where’s the cat?” he asks. “I heard it meowing.”
Biting back my sigh, I get out of bed and put on my slippers. “There’s no cat, Dad.”
“Of course there’s a cat, Jenny. I gave it to you for Christmas. Remember? You said you wanted a cat and I paid one of Frankie’s friends to bring you one.”
“Right,” I say, since it’s better than arguing with Dad. I’m not Jenny, first of all—that’s the maid we had who retired over six years ago. And I’m betting “Frankie” was Frank Sinatra. At any rate, there’s never been a cat in all of my twenty-five years. “I’ll go find it. You go back to bed, okay?”
My father continues to argue with “Jenny” about the cat as I take him gently by the arm and lead him back to his room. Even though he protests, I help him back into his bed and tuck the covers around him like he’s a child. This is a typical “bad” morning for us, though lately they’ve been becoming more the norm. He holds my hand, mumbling about the cat for a bit longer until he falls back asleep, and then I’m able to tiptoe away . . .
Right into a warm puddle on the floor.
Oh no. Because that’s how I wanted to start the day—stepping in pee.
But my father can’t help it. He’s eighty-seven now and his Hollywood looks have gone. His shoulders are hunched, part of his face is still slack after his stroke, and his dementia has been worse every year. It’s a long fall for someone as proud as Chap Weston, so I do my best to make things easy for him. Not that he knows who I am most of the time. He’s lost in memories, and I can’t hold it against him if he can’t hold his bladder. So I get towels and clean it up, then wash my feet before getting dressed and heading downstairs to start the day. I’m not going to let this morning’s episode with my father depress me, even though it’s obvious he’s getting worse.
One crisis at a time.
I make myself a cup of coffee in a Chap Weston souvenir mug, choke down a cold Pop-Tart, and gaze at one of the posters on the wall as I eat breakfast. This one’s from one of my dad’s biggest hits in 1952—a musical about sailors in a submarine. His handsome, strong form is in the center of the photo, with a cute girl clinging to his arm. No wonder my dad likes to live in the past.
I have to admit, the present isn’t exactly my favorite, either.
Back then he was world-famous, rich, and popular. Now he’s just a senile old guy with a too-young daughter and a mountain of bills. I glance at the overflowing inbox on my desk, tucked into the corner of the kitchen, and try not to shudder. I’ll look at them later. Maybe.
I make three dozen oatmeal-walnut cookies—the Chap Weston favorite—for the gift shop and wrap them with colorful Saran wrap and stickers of my dad’s face from a black-and-white Western movie, Big Sky Callin’. I put them in a basket, take them to the front parlor (which has been completely revamped as the gift shop) and then begin the process of cleaning up our large ranch since tour groups will be coming in starting at ten in the morning. There’s a lot to do between now and then. I move through the twenty rooms of our twenty-five-room ranch that have been designated as the “Chap Weston museum tour” and begin picking up trash from the night before. There’s always crap that guests have left behind—gum stuck to antique furniture, candy wrappers tucked away in corners, cigarette butts . . . I even found a used condom in a bedroom once.
People are freaks.
I continue on, dusting props, vacuuming, straighten up the velvet cordoned ropes that guide the guests through the home, and make sure that none of the movie props been moved to the wrong room. Each of the rooms is set up with a theme from one of Dad’s biggest movies, complete with cardboard cutouts of my dad in the appropriate costumes. It’s corny as hell but people get a kick out of it. As I pass through each room, I turn on the music from each of the movies. Big Sky Callin’s soundtrack in the Western parlor, Little Tiki Princess in the hula room, Ahoy, My Lady in the submarine room, and so on. Even the guest restrooms have a theme—The Adventures of Roy Danger, another cowboy movie musical that made my dad a star. Unfortunately, the restrooms also have leaky toilets and tend to get clogged, and so I spend a good portion of the morning scrubbing the horseshoe-pattern tiles on the floors before heading upstairs to change into my work uniform.
Oh, the work uniform. How I hate it. It’s humiliating to have to dress like Loretta Paige from Roy Danger, but it sells tickets and makes people open their wallets in the gift shop more than the regular dumpy, too-young daughter of Chap Weston does. And these days, everything I do is designed to bring money in. So I suck up my pride and dress like the redneck cousin of Elly May Clampett, because that’s what makes people really enjoy the “experience.”
I have to do all of this to pay for my father’s medical bills. Because even though he was a huge star in the fifties and sixties, my dad also lived like a movie star all his life. Before his stroke, he had a constant entourage of at least five to six people at all times—accountants, agents, assistants, publicists, you name it. There were lavish vacations to private islands and endless gifts for wives, ex-wives, girlfriends, and anyone else Chap Weston wanted to impress. After a string of questionable life choices and a string of even more questionable ex-wives, he’s flat broke, senile, and has to rely on his daughter turning his home into a museum in order to keep t
he lights on.
It’s not exactly how I envisioned my dynamic father’s twilight years.
For a moment, I stare into the mirror at my reflection—the brunette in a shirt that looks like a cross between a fringe explosion and a pink sausage casing—and I feel so much older and far more tired than I should be. Sometimes I just want to get up and run out the door and never look back. I can’t, though. I’m trapped. My skin prickles and I feel hot.
Trapped. Twenty-five years old and trapped. There’s no escaping the crap-fest my life has become.
I close my eyes, take a deep breath, and then exhale, calming myself. There’s nothing I can do. My dad doesn’t have anyone else to lean on. Managers, agents—those people disappeared when the money did. All he’s got left are a few ex-wives that call once a month for their support checks—and his lonely, lonely daughter.
So I suck it up and take care of things the best I can. Chap Weston’s got no one else.
Every now and then, I think about the life I might have had if my dad hadn’t had his stroke that night and everything came crashing down. If Johanna hadn’t run for the hills and left me with an elderly, ailing father, and his accountants hadn’t called to inquire about the mountain of debt that was slowly crushing my father’s legacy. I’d been blissfully unaware of such things. Johanna would have stayed, maybe. I would have gone to Stanford and pursued a career in psychology or anthropology.
That girl would have texted Clay back and asked him not to leave. She would have told him she needed him, and she didn’t want Stanford nearly as much as she wanted him.
But that girl’s dead and gone, I guess. All that’s left is Howdy Doody’s more garish cousin, Pinky Doody. Or something. I make a face at my reflection.
A riding lawnmower roars to life outside, which means that there’s no more time to fart around. I finish putting my dark hair into the Loretta pigtails, stuff on my pink cowboy hat, and head downstairs. Time to kick things into high gear. I grab another cup of coffee for myself and a bottle of Gatorade, heading out onto the porch just in time to see Old Jimmy, our neighbor, wave as he mows the sculpted lawns of Weston Ranch’s twenty-five acres. Well, kind of mows. More like he drives the mower over the lawn and cuts most of the grass. Not all of it. I like to think that it looks a bit like a cinnamon roll. Or zebra stripes.
Or like a nearsighted ninety-year-old mowed it, which is the case.
It’s too much yard for anyone to tackle, but Old Jimmy’s a fan. He’s the sweetest man and a great neighbor, and it’s not something I can handle on my own. When he volunteered, I took him up on it, no questions asked. I can’t even complain, really. He loves doing the yards just for a chance to come and have dinner with us once a week. He’s not very good at them, but he tries. He tries really, really hard.
Story of my life. Seems like that’s what’ll be written on my tombstone. Natalie Weston—she’s not very good, but she tries really hard. I trot outside to greet Old Jimmy and hold out the sports drink, yelling over the sound of the motor. “Morning, Jimmy.”
He flips the mower off and beams at me, his lined face crinkling. His glasses are already sliding down his nose—no surprise, since the lenses are thicker than magnifying glasses. “Morning, Miss Nat. How’s your dad today?”
I put a smile on my face. “It’s not gonna be a great day, but he might perk up by the time it’s autograph time.” Dad loves having his picture taken, even to this day, and manages to have a few lucid hours for his fans most of the time. “Gonna be a hot one. Stay hydrated, okay?” I hand him the drink.
“Of course. You fix that leaky faucet upstairs yet? Want me to come take a look at it?”
“It’s fixed,” I lie, giving him a cheery expression. “Called the plumber last week.” There’s no money for a plumber, but there’s also no money to pay Jimmy, and I feel bad enough abusing his goodwill as it is. I’d do the lawns myself but there’s absolutely no way I could do the yards and the cleaning and the museum on my own. Plus, I have to stay close enough to Dad in case he trips and falls.
Plus, if he fixes it half as well as he mows the yard . . . well.
“Got a few loose shingles on the roof,” Jimmy comments, unscrewing the lid on the Gatorade and taking a gulp. “You got someone to look at it for you?”
“I know a guy. I’ll call him.” I pat Jimmy on the shoulder. “Don’t you worry about it. Anyhow, I need to get inside. It’s almost opening time.”
Clay
When the limo comes to a stop, a surge of memories comes over me at the sight of the sprawling Western ranch ahead of us.
“What in fresh hell is this shit?” Knox asks, rubbing his beard as he stares out the window. “Bonanza Land?”
“Chap Weston Land, more like it. Supposed to be a museum now.” I tip my baseball cap back and gaze out the window on his side. He’s not wrong about this place being a bit like a movie set—the ranch is sprawling but . . . man, is it ugly as fuck. The lawns look like they’ve been mowed by a three-year-old, and the main house itself looks like a reject from a Western movie. A really old, cheap one. There’s a red Spanish-tile roof over a bright yellow exterior, and a big weather-aged sign shows a picture of the black-and-white movie star Chap Weston welcoming visitors to his home. There’s a gravel parking lot and a few wood cutouts of horses in the distance. It looks different than I remember it from back when I was dating Natalie.
Didn’t remember it being quite so . . . garish. So very . . . Chap Weston–y. I should have expected this, given that I remember coming to this place as a teenager . . . but still, seeing it again is strange as hell. Knox is right—this place is garish as fuck and it looks like it’s gotten worse over time.
“Thought this was the girl that turned you down, man.”
I elbow Knox for sayin’ that shit. He knows good and well who I came after. There’s only ever been Natalie Weston in my life, far as I’m concerned. I’ll flirt with waitresses and buy a girl a drink at the bar if I’m feeling particularly lonely, but no one goes home with me. No one gets my digits. Never been room in my life for anyone but her. Knox knows that.
Never been anyone but Natalie. Even now, thinking about her makes my heart ache, just a little. Growing up, everyone at school hated Nat because she was the rich girl and her daddy was an old, famous geezer with buckets of money. She was all shy and sweet if anyone talked to her, but no one ever did. ’Cept me. I remember how pretty she was, though. How she wore these demure little pink sweaters and had her dark hair all shiny and glossy like a movie star. Her big blue eyes and the shy, reserved smile that she shared with me alone. Her lean little body and the way she kissed.
I remember a lot about Nat.
And I remember the last words Nat ever spoke to me on the night that she broke my heart. “What, you think I should stay here and marry you?”
Shit’s burned into my brain. I can’t forget. And now it’s time to take action again. I’ve let seven years pass. No sense in letting more slip through my fingers. I gesture at the driver, then point at the gravel parking lot that only has one other car in it. “Just wait here for us. I don’t think we’ll be too long.” I nudge my brother Knox. “Come on. Let’s go inside.”
“Can’t believe you dragged me out here to this,” Knox says, but his tone is amused and he’s smilin’. Knox is a weird one. He loves to be surprised, and I’m guessin’ this is a big surprise. I know it is for me. I keep picturin’ classy, prim Natalie in this tourist trap and I’m drawin’ a blank. Maybe they sold the place? If so, they’re still involved somehow—there’s only one Chap Weston, movie star. I know that bastard well. He makes me fuckin’ sick with how he put on this big air like he’s the world’s nicest guy when he’s really a controllin’ jackass and his daughter ain’t much better.
I straighten my baseball cap as I unfold my long body out of the car. I’m wearin’ jeans and an old T-shirt that probably shoulda been washed weeks ago. Maybe I shoulda did something with my beard and overgrown hair, but I ain’t here to imp
ress Nat, I remind myself. Fuck it. There’s no getting through that ice.
I turn to Knox. “Stay out here.”
“Fuck that noise.” He grins at me, rubbing his hands. “I can’t wait to see the inside of this place.”
“You steal shit, you buy it. All right?”
“Thought we were here to put your ex in her place?” He cocks a bushy eyebrow at me.
Damn it. I glance down at my hand, where I have a big R markered in across the back of my knuckles. It’s for “Ruthless” and it’s so I won’t forget. I’ve just always had a soft spot for Natalie. I’m just a big ol’ puss when it comes to her, and she wrapped me around her finger so easily back in high school. Even now, I feel a mixture of longing and anger when I think about how she led me around. What, you think I should stay here and marry you? I rub the R on my knuckles again. “Just stay quiet, then.”
“Oh, I’ll be quiet,” Knox tells me, amused.
I shove my hands into the pockets of my jeans and head toward the ranch-slash-museum. As I get closer, I can’t help but think the place looks rundown. Like a tourist trap that’s seen better days. The garish yellow of the ranch—which I don’t remember, so it must be new—looks faded near the windows. The building’s huge just like in my memories, but one of the windowpanes is cracked on the upper floor, and there’s a few tiles missing at the edges of the roof. The patio furniture set near the Western-style fountain looks old and faded, and the gravel parking lot’s got potholes you could lose a boot to.
Whoever’s running this place needs his ass fired yesterday.
Me and Knox head through the front door, and immediately, Knox makes a sound in his throat. The place is . . . well, it’s hideous. There’s old Hollywood memorabilia, along with kitschy decorations from movies and pictures of Chap Weston everywhere. Cheesy music plays overhead. It’s an assault on the senses.