“Moderately not-awful,” I said. “But only moderately.”
“And the SAT tutoring?”
“About as thrilling as you’d expect.”
“Just be grateful we didn’t make you get a job this summer,” she said. “A few hours of studying won’t kill you. Is George a good tutor?”
“Yeah, he’s fine.” I came over and sat down on the edge of their bed. “Speaking of George, I wanted to ask you something. Could we go to Tahiti for your anniversary party?”
“Tahiti? We were leaning toward Hawaii.”
“But I’ve always wanted to go to Tahiti. Plus . . . you know . . . Gauguin.”
My mother laughed. With no makeup on and her hair a little rumpled, she looked the way I liked her best: like my mom. When she was all glammed up for going out with lots of eye makeup and curled hair, she looked Hollywood-wife generic. “So it would be educational? Is that what you’re telling me?”
“Totally. I’d read up on Gauguin before we went and become a total expert on him, I swear.”
“How can I say no to that?”
“Cool.” I slid off the bed and stood up. “I’ll tell George.”
I may have sounded a tiny bit smug when I told George that he should start looking at resorts in Tahiti.
His eyes narrowed. “Just because you want to go there?”
“I convinced Mom. I always get my way, you know.”
“Yeah,” he said. “I see that. Kind of like Veruca Salt.”
“Don’t be a bad loser.”
Except he didn’t lose. Somehow, once he had done the research and presented all the options to my mother and Luke, and the final decision was made, they went with Hawaii after all.
I complained, but Mom said it just made more sense, because we only had four days, and Hawaii was a lot closer. “Only four days?” I repeated. I’d been picturing a real end-of-summer blowout, days and days of beaches and walks and lazy meals and long naps in hammocks before having to get back to fall semester and college applications and all that stuff. But now Mom said the show was taping and Luke couldn’t take more time off than that.
Luke’s schedule ruled our household and was the one thing impervious to my coaxing and begging, so there wasn’t much I could do about it except whine to George later that we’d be spending more time flying than actually lying on a beach.
“Yeah, it’s rough,” he said. “You don’t get to go on a tropical vacation for as long as you’d hoped. Complain about it to everyone you meet and bask in the sympathy.”
He was coming with us—my mother told him they’d pay for his airfare so long as he shared a hotel room with his brother, who was already coming as Luke’s guest. She claimed she needed George to deal with the logistics once we were there, which seemed more kind than true. When I pressed her about it, she admitted she just wanted to give him a vacation. “I felt bad that he was spending all this time looking at pictures of Hawaii and not getting to go. He’s never been. A trip like that would have meant so much to me at his age.”
“You know, Heather’s never been to Hawaii either—”
“Forget it,” she said. “I have reached the limits of my generosity.”
Jonathan’s fiancée was coming as his plus one, and Luke was flying my grandmother out, which would be a big help with Jacob. Luke didn’t talk to his own family anymore; they’d ignored and ostracized him when he was struggling, and then came running with their hands out when he got rich and famous. He sent them money but never saw them.
We saw my grandmother a ton, though. She came to visit whenever she had time off from work. Mom had tried to convince her to move out to LA to live with us (or at least near us), but she said she didn’t want to be dependent on anyone, which was also why she wouldn’t let them buy her a nicer apartment in Philadelphia. Mom sent her a lot of gifts and bought her first-class airplane tickets, but other than that, Grandma took care of herself.
Luke had also invited a couple of his closest friends to join us. Carl Miller used to be his business manager and was now CFO of his production company. And of course Michael Marquand was coming—he and Luke were like brothers.
Mom said she didn’t need to invite any friends because Grandma and I were her best friends, which was probably true. Most of the people she’d met in Hollywood saw her more as Luke Weston’s wife than a person in her own right, and she’d been too busy working and taking care of me to make a lot of friends back in Philadelphia.
Luke got first-class tickets for the family. Jonathan, George, and Jonathan’s fiancée, Izzy, were on our flight, but in coach. Luke and Mom sat together on the flight out, and so did Grandma and Jacob, who happily watched movies the entire way—I’m not convinced he even knew we had left the house.
I was across the aisle from Grandma and next to a businessman who never once made eye contact with me and who quickly popped two pills, drank three cocktails, donned headphones and an eye mask, and fell asleep. I guess he didn’t want the fancy lunch with the real silverware and all.
I did. I loved first class. We never flew at all when I was a kid; we had nowhere to go and we couldn’t have afforded it anyway. The first time I got on a plane was the summer that Mom and Luke got married, and even though it was fun to go up into the sky, I didn’t like much else about flying coach. Then Luke got rich and we all started flying first class together, and it was totally different—you could watch your own movies on a personal screen and the food was good and the flight attendants waited on you hand and foot. It felt like vacation.
Like me, Grandma hadn’t flown until Luke came into our lives, but she wasn’t a convert the way I was. “It’s a necessary evil,” she said to me, leaning across the aisle at one point. “I do it because I have to, but I don’t trust it. There’s gravity. Things fall down.”