Summer. A terrible name. Was Ethel or June already taken? Summers should be reserved for thirteen year old girls with braces on their teeth. He slowed down a little, brought the speedometer needle under sixty and watched the man’s shoulders relax a little.
“Yes,” Cole answered the question, his foot shifting to the brake as he looked for the turn.
“An extra?”
He chuckled. “No.”
“Not… I mean you mentioned Minka…” The man—Ben was it?—swallowed hard and pointed right. “That’s the street.”
Cole applied the brakes, the cheap car skidding to a stop instead of turning. He shifted the car into park and turned to face the man. “What’s wrong? Spit it out.”
“Nothing.” The man’s hands moved nervously in the limited space between them, his gaze flitting to Cole’s eyes, then down, then back up, the entire production a little nauseating. Literally nauseating. Cole grabbed his arms, stilling the movement. “Stop that. Talk.”
“Summer… she’s not an actress. No background in film. I asked her already. Tried to get her a job.”
Cole shrugged. “And?”
“And…” Ben looked away. “She can be a little headstrong.”
The corner of Cole’s mouth turned up and he smiled. “Yeah. I got that.”
“Maybe you should let me bring it up to her. I don’t think…” He twisted his mouth, and if Cole could open his lips and drag the words out of him, he would. Instead, he waited.
“I don’t think she likes you very much.” The words rushed out of the man quickly, and he gripped his seatbelt as he said them, his eyes jumping to the side.
For the first time since Nadia left him, Cole laughed. Not long, just a few beats in time, but he felt a pinch of something tight relax, felt a bit of himself come back. I don’t think she likes you very much.
“Good,” he said, shifting the car back into drive and turning down the dirt road. “That’s a good thing.”
CHAPTER 31
“The only reason I'm in Hollywood is that I don't have the moral courage to refuse the money.”
~ Marlon Brando
I was in my bedroom, fishing items out of the laundry basket, when the knock came, the crack of the door heard, then Ben’s voice. “Summer?”
I stepped out of the bedroom and into the hall, my steps hesitant until I saw that it was just him. “Hey,” I said.
“Hey,” he repeated.
We looked at each other for a long moment, then burst out laughing.
“So tell me,” I said, my butt on the back porch, my feet in flip-flops on the top step, the lines of the wood against my bare thighs. “How badly did I screw things up?”
I cradled a Miller Lite in my hands, Ben’s colder than mine; I had grabbed the fridge door the minute Ben’s car left the yard.
“Pretty bad,” Ben laughed, pausing in his sip to straighten up, his index finger pointed straight out, a furious look on his face. “Get OOUUUUTTT!” he mimicked, and I covered my face, laughing.
“Pretty bad,” I agreed, finishing the remainder of the beer and setting it down on the porch. “Did I at least look kick ass?”
“In your baggy tee, grandma bathing suit and ripped shorts?” he grimaced. “Oh yeah. Totally kick ass.”
There was a quiet moment as he took a sip, and I swatted a mosquito, crickets starting their cadence from across the field.
“He wants you to star in the movie,” Ben finally said, his eyes on the field, his hands joined together around his beer.
“What?” I stared at him, willed his eyes to meet mine, a joke on the edge of my lips. But when he turned his head to me, when his eyes met mine, I saw the sincerity in them. Saw a bit of something else, too. Sadness? Worry?
“Are you serious?” I demanded, jumping off the porch and standing before him, my hands on my hips. “Bennington…” I searched for his last name.
“Payne,” he supplied.
“Bennington Payne, are you yanking my leg?”
“I’m not.” He tilted back his beer and took a long pull of it, a line of condensation running down its stem. “He does. Wants you to take Minka Price’s place. Thinks you’re perfect. Authentic.” The word ‘perfect’ was enhanced by a gesture of the jazz hands variety.
I had to sit down, could feel the growing crescendo of the crickets closing in on me, the evening heat suddenly too much. I’d been hoping, three days earlier, for a job delivering donuts on set, brewing coffee, running copies. Now… Minka Price’s role? Mrs. Holden would be crushed. She had made plans to come back during filming, her heart set on meeting the actress in the grocery store, or the gas station, or on an evening walk, her pen and notepad conveniently nearby for an autograph and Oh, do you mind a photo? I sat on the closest step and tried to process this.
“It’s a no-brainer, Summer,” Ben said quietly. “No one gets an opportunity like this. Girls in Los Angeles screw, kidnap, and kill for something like this.”
I smiled at the image, a hundred big-breasted bottle blondes in different compromising positions, hands outstretched for a role that seemed undeservingly before me. I couldn’t act, had never tried. Hadn’t taken drama in high school or participated in church plays. And now… to take Minka Price’s place? Town would have a field day, whispers flying at a furious pace, the gossip mill twisting my good fortune into something ridiculous, that much was certain. I’d be famous. Not Price famous but still. I hung my head between my knees and took in a deep breath. I didn’t want to be famous.
“It’d be a ticket to the show…” Ben said soft and teasingly. A ticket to the show. Yes, being in the movie would put me in the middle of the action, would show me everything that I’d been worried about missing and then some. It would be very exciting. I’d seen the budgets, seen the amount of money—Cole Masten’s money—being poured into a production that would trump any event in Quincy’s history. A sudden thought hit, the first one that should have come to mind earlier. “How much does it pay?”
Ben shrugged. “No idea. But you could ask Cole.”
Cole. Oh yes. The man I had banished from my home. I twisted my mouth. “Where is he?”
“In the car. I made him wait there.”
I laughed. “Oh really. You made him wait?”
He smiled ruefully. “He might have offered.”
“How kind of him,” I muttered. A lead role, it had to pay a lot. Enough to set up Mama and properly escape Quincy. More than enough. I glanced back at the field and wondered what I was still thinking about.
“Okay,” I turned back to Ben. “Let’s ask Cole.”
CHAPTER 32
Cole had never had a mother. The official industry story, printed a hundred different times, in different ways, was that a drunk driver killed his mother when he was young. It’s amazing that, after eighteen years in the spotlight, the truth never came out.
The truth was, his mother had been the drunk. She’d always been a drunk. Not a stumbling around, unwashed hair drunk who got kicked out of bars in the middle of the afternoon. No, she was more of a dignified, mimosas at breakfast, cocktails at lunch, wine with cheese as a snack, fall asleep before dinner drunk. He had very few memories of her. She was always in bed by the time he got home from school and was never up before he left. He’d been twelve when it had happened. It was a Sunday, when the maids were off, when the house was quiet. He’d been playing in the front yard, a baseball in the air, tossed up by his own hand, the other posed to catch it, when her car had pulled down the drive. He hadn’t caught the ball. Instead he had stared, her white convertible zipping down the drive, the red top of it up, the glare on the windshield making it impossible to see inside. When the gate at the end of their drive opened, there was a squeal of tires, and then her white car was gone.
He hadn’t known, staring after the car, that it had been her driving. He had only known, reaching down to pick up the missed ball, that something felt wrong.
His mother had never slowed when approaching the stop s
ign. If she saw the minivan approaching, she didn’t react. The minivan’s driver—a forty-two year old divorcee with two children strapped into backseat car seats—saw her, her foot jamming on the brakes, the vehicle skidding to a stop a second too late, clipping the back end of his mother’s Jaguar V12. The bump sent the convertible into a spin that was stopped by the brick corner of a Starbucks. One couple at an outside table dove out of the way and survived with only abrasions. The minivan divorcee and her two children had whiplash and temper tantrums. His mother had a cerebral fracture. She might have survived that except for the spark that hit the broken fuel line, causing an explosion heard three blocks away. An explosion. Lucky for her. Lucky for his father. No autopsy. No blood tests. The Masten name and reputation stayed intact.
Had his mother lived, she would have been nothing like the sunny burst of nurturing that knocked politely on his window.
Cole jumped at the noise, scowling as he looked away from his phone and up through the car’s window. A woman stood there, mid-fifties, her mouth stretched into a smile, her fingers wiggling in a wave. He tried not to grimace and rolled down the window.
“You must be Cole Masten.” The woman smiled, a relaxed, natural gesture that was nothing like the forced politeness of her daughter. And that was who this no doubt was. Summer Jenkins’s mother. Their similarities lay in the lines of their features, the light hazel of their eyes, the golden brown of their hair. This woman’s was cut shorter and curled. Cole liked it better long, better for twisting up in his hand and pulling. Better for… he shifted in his seat and reached for the handle. Opened the door and stood, feeling better as he looked down at her instead of up.
“How’d you know?” He smiled politely, feigning humility. Fans liked that—the aw shucks I’m nobody shtick.
She held up a cell phone, a flip one, one with actual buttons instead of a touch screen. “My daughter left me a voicemail.” She tilted her blonde coiffed head as if it helped her to remember. “She said, ‘Don’t come home. Cole Masten is here.’” She opened her purse and dropped in the phone. “Nothing to make a mother come home quicker than to tell her to stay away.”
There was a moment of silence, and he shifted into a new position against the side of the car. So, she lived with her mother. That was something you didn’t see in LA.
The woman eyed him, her gaze shifting over his clothes, and he wondered if any evidence from last night was present. “How do you know Summer?” the question was a polite one, voiced in light tones, but there was a trap in the words, a danger in the vowels.
He spoke cautiously. “I just met her today.” The woman said nothing, and his mouth moved in a search to fill the silence. “A few hours ago. I came here to meet Ben.”
“Do you work on the movies also?” Her hand wrapped around the strap of her purse, and she pulled it higher up on her shoulder.
He studied her. Tried to see a joke in her question. “Yes. I’m an actor.” An Academy Award winning actor. An actor Time Magazine just put on their cover. She smiled as if it was a cute little job. “That’s nice. I’m Francis Jenkins. Summer’s mother.” She let go of the purse’s strap and stuck out her hand.
“Cole.” He shook her hand, and her grip was firm and strong. Funny. He’d always imagined Southern women to be meek and mild, to avoid eye contact and to yield to their male counterparts. Between Summer and her mother, that image was being reworked.
“Why are you out here, in Ben’s car?”
He tucked his hands into the front pockets of his pants. “Giving him and Summer a chance to talk. She may have kicked me out of the house.” He grinned sheepishly, and the woman laughed.
“You’ll forgive my daughter. She’s intent on leaving me grandchildless. You were probably too tempting to that goal.” She winked, and it was his turn to laugh. This woman was nothing like his mother. Nothing like Nadia’s mother—a stuffy blue-blood who showed prize Greyhounds and fluently spoke three languages. He felt the slip of her hand through his arm, and she gripped it tightly. “Be a dear and help me inside.”
“Yes, ma’am.” He tried the Southern moniker on for size, and the woman laughed again.
“An actor, you say? We need to work on your Southern drawl.”
They climbed the steps, the front door swinging open before their feet hit the top. Summer paused, her face surprised. “Mama. You’re home early. And I see you ignored my voicemail.”
“Oh, you called?” the woman said mildly. “I must have missed that.”
Cole bit the inside of his cheek to hold back a smile, the older woman squeezing his arm before she released it. Summer kissed her mother on the cheek and waited until she passed inside, Ben’s greeting to Francis faint through the screen door. When Summer looked to Cole, her eyes held him in place, his body leaning against the porch’s railing just so his legs wouldn’t go weak. The front door fully shut and then it was just them and the setting sun and the whistling crickets.
“Did Ben talk to you about the part?” He shouldn’t have started with that; he should have made small talk about the weather, or politics.
She nodded. “He did.”
“And?” God, this was stupid. Any other blonde in LA would be on her knees unzipping his jeans for this role.
“And I’m curious about the compensation.”
The compensation. That was unexpected. He coughed back a laugh. The porch floorboards were weak, the house tiny, the truck parked under the tree had rust spots eating through its side. Her whole life could be bought with one bottle of wine from his cellar. He scratched at his neck and met her eyes. They flashed at him, and he composed himself, dropping the grin. “What would you like for compensation?”
“I don’t know.” She crossed her arms in front of her chest, and he mourned the loss of view. “I don’t know what is fair. That’s why I’m asking you.”
“And you trust me to be fair,” he said slowly. Los Angeles would chew up and spit out this girl before she even found her way to an agent’s door. Don’t trust anyone. That was the first rule of Hollywood. He learned that from his first agent, when he was modeling, and the first go-see came up. “Don’t trust anyone,” Martine Swint had snarled, leaning over her desk and pointing one long red fingertip in his direction. “People in Hollywood will build you up just so that they can rob you blind. You gotta be an asshole to not be assholed. Don’t ever forget that.” And he never had.
“I’m asking you for your honest opinion about what a major role in a movie of this size, for someone with my experience, is worth.” She raised her chin.
He took the asshole route. Losing Minka was manna to The Fortune Bottle’s budget, and this slice of Southern Belle was the gift that just kept giving. “A hundred thousand. Your name has negative box office weight; we’ll have to spend a fortune just to get you camera ready, and the filming will take three, four months of your life. That’s being a bit generous, but hey,” he flashed the smile that fixed everything, “I like you, Summer. I think you’d be a good fit.”
She didn’t move, didn’t blink, just stared at him, her eyes narrowing slightly. She had freckles, a light smattering of them across her nose and cheeks. He hadn’t seen freckles in years. Freckles were avoided by sunscreen, concealed by makeup, or lasered off by a plastic surgeon, the records of which would be eventually leaked to the press and made out into something more.
He shifted and she still stared. Maybe he could give her one-fifty. Hell, he could give her five hundred thousand. That was what she was really worth; that was really the minimum for a film this size, with their budget. But if they could get her cheap, then he could pad the film budget, have an allowance for the overages that always came. This was strange, her saying nothing. Maybe it was a Southern thing. California girls wouldn’t shut up—their mouths moved like a biting teeth toy wound all the way up.
“Don’t do that.”
“What?” He straightened off the porch railing.
“That smile thing. It’s creepy.”
He stopped smiling. “Ten million Americans would disagree with you.”
“Then ten million Americans are idiots.”
He said nothing, but decided, right then, that he didn’t much care for this girl. As Ida, her attitude would be perfect—the secretary known for standing up to Coca-Cola executives. But personally, he had enough shit to deal with. A diva as a costar wasn’t something he needed. “Are you interested or not?”
“I’m not.”
His foot stopped halfway back in its step off the top step. “You’re not,” he repeated.
“It’s not enough money. I’m worth more.”
“The toe of your shoe is held together with duct tape,” he pointed out, and she smiled. Smiled. A sweet, sunny smile that was betrayed completely by her eyes, golden knives which could cut through a weaker man’s gut and drag his entrails out for the buzzards.
“How much money I have is not indicative of my worth. If it was, then I would be the lesser individual on this porch.”
“You’re saying you’re not the lesser individual.” That I am. Of all the insults hurled at him, his worth had never been insulted. Then again, in Hollywood, worth was dollars and cents and power. Here, in this conversation, on this porch, they seemed to be talking about something else.
“Out of the two of us, only one of us is being an ass right now.”
“So you don’t want the role.”
“Not for that amount.”
He stepped back, turning away from her and taking the steps off the porch.
“Goodbye, Mr. Masten,” she called from the porch, and he turned his head to watch her, her shoulder leaning against one of the porch posts, her arms still crossed over her chest. “That’s what we say, in the South, when one person leaves. It’s called a valediction.”
“What is it called when one person makes a huge mistake?” he called out, opening the driver’s door to the Taurus.
“Easy,” she said, pushing off the post and stepping to the front door. “That’s called life.”