“She told me that before.”
“Cat seems to be under a misguided impression,” he says with a soft laugh. “She seems to think that although Evan has indicated a desire to,” he pauses, clearly searching for the right word, “Tarantino you, I believe she said, that he believes you’re not interested in the part.” He tilts his chin upward. “I wonder where he’d get a peculiar idea like that?”
Leaning back in my desk chair, I begin to laugh. “What kind of silly girl would pass on a part in an Evan Beckman film?”
He studies me in a way that says he knows me too well for me to put anything over on him. “Perhaps a silly girl who worries far too much about what the world will see.”
“Perhaps,” I offer, wondering how fast I can shoo him out the door and call Evan to apologize for my hasty departure the other night at Mia Mia. “Or perhaps she’s a silly girl who still wants to read for that part.”
“Now that,” he says with a wink, “is my girl.”
***
My mother stands knee-deep in boxes, tape gun held expertly in her hands, when I arrive around lunchtime to help. Their moving van is due at seven a.m. the next day, and although there’s still much to pack—of course they’re boxing it all up themselves—she’s serene. Completely unruffled. When she opens her arms and embraces me, I know that this single personality trait is the one I’ll miss the most in the coming months: her ability to make the stormiest of situations feel placid. To bring tranquility to the chaos in my life, just like she has to this moving scene.
“Your father is playing golf,” she announces, shaking her head with a smile. “Can you believe that?”
“I still say it’s the real reason he stayed in L.A.,” I tease, and she settles atop a large sealed box.
With a wave around at the sea of packing materials and brown boxes, she laughs, “Welcome to my parlor, precious. Want some tea?”
“Sweet tea?”
She doesn’t always add the sugar and mint that makes her iced tea taste like home. This time she grins. “Of course.”
With our matching chilled glasses, we settle into a lunchtime visit; my mom regaling me with details about the move home—and me listening, a bittersweet smile pasted across my face. It will never feel the same in this town without my parents here in Santa Monica, yet I know I can never complete my healing if they stay. Why must growing up—finding freedom—always be so bittersweet?
While we talk, I catch my mother watching me occasionally, stealing sideways glances to assure herself that her only child really is all right.
“I’m fine, Mama,” I say finally, with a soft laugh to play off my words.
“What?” she denies, sipping her tea innocently. “I didn’t say a word!”
“You can go home without worrying,” I promise, smiling at her. “I am doing really great, Mom.”
“But see, until you’re a mother, you won’t truly understand,” she says tenderly. “You’re my baby girl. You’ll be my baby girl, even when you’re thirty-five. When you’re forty. When I’m eighty and on my deathbed, you will still be my baby. That’s my prerogative as the mama.”
My thoughts go to dear Andrea and how protective I felt of her—still feel of her, even now. She stirred some place inside me, a concealed chamber of my heart I hadn’t known I possessed until I met her. She unlocked motherhood within me.
My mother leans closer toward me. “What is it, Rebecca?” she asks, sensing my thoughts with the laser-keen accuracy of the one who carried me inside her womb for nine months.
“I’m just thinking of someone,” I explain, smiling. With all that Michael and Andrea have meant to me, I can’t believe I’ve never uttered a word about them to her.
“And?” she prompts.
“Oh, Mama, you’re going to get it out of me, aren’t you?” Somehow, with her leaving tomorrow, I need her to know everything about Michael. “Can we go sit on the patio?” I ask, knowing how much I’ll miss our Sunday afternoons out there, sipping her iced tea and playing gin. “I think I need some advice, Mom.”
***
My mother listens to the whole painful tale, from that first day at the studio to our courtship over the summer, then winding up in Malibu. I pour out my heart, crying some as I tell her about finding love and then losing it. What I had with Michael was as gorgeous and fickle as those roses my nana always grew, requiring an expert’s touch—and I am clearly no expert on love.
She asks few questions, raising her blonde eyebrows only a couple of times, especially when I explain that Michael’s dead lover Alex was a man.
“Oh, goodness,” she titters gently at that point in the story. “We won’t let that get out back home.”
I cut my eyes at her, laughing. “Mama!”