“Thank you, pumpkin.”
She tried to put it in my mouth again, but I turned away and gave her a stern look. I wanted to get back to work.
“Yes, thank you.” Paula smiled a mile wide from the screen. “You’re cute as a bug in a banana split. Is Cara there to help out?”
Nicole aimed the donut for my mouth again, making airplane sounds.
“Enough,” I barked. She started crying.
A little square at the bottom of the screen held the image of me with my daughter on my lap. Behind me, Cara stood in the door.
“Is she all right?” Cara asked. “I can take her.”
“Daddy doesn’t want my donut!” She held up the arc of crumb-dropping cake.
“Save it for me,” I said, wiping her tears away with my thumb.
“Cara, honey,” Paula said from the screen.
“I have her,” Cara said, getting her hands under Nicole’s arms, but I wouldn’t let go. If she was crying, I wanted to be the one to tell her it was all right. She was my job, and I needed to be the one to wipe her tears.
“Both of you are going to have to cool it!” I said to the other two adults in the room. Cara stood behind me, and Paula pressed her mouth closed while I spoke to Nicole.
“You.” I pointed at my daughter. “Sometimes you have to let Daddy work. Sometimes you have to save the donut for later.”
She sniffed and nodded. “Okay. Can we play the card game after?”
“Yes. Now go with Miss Cara.”
After a tiny pause she held her arms out to the woman behind me. Cara picked her up, and with the child on her hip she patted my shoulder.
Absently, I squeezed her hand before it slipped away. The door closed behind me, and I turned my attention to Paula.
“All right, we were on page eighty-seven?”
She didn’t answer. She didn’t move. Her face was full and round and expressionless.
“What?”
“Are you . . . I hate to have to ask this. It’s terribly impolite.”
“We’re past that, Paula.”
“Are you having physical relations with that woman?”
She smiled when she asked, as if she were on an interview show asking the president what happened with the intern. It took me a second to catch up to the fact that I’d squeezed Cara’s hand on the screen because it was almost as if Paula wasn’t there. But she was, and I’d been stupid.
“Are you on page eighty-seven or not?”
“I’m serious, Bradley.”
“I’m sure you have your own business to mind.”
“You don’t mean that,” she said. “I know you don’t. You tell me everything and if you try and distract me again, it’s as good as a split-tongued lie. And you . . . you can’t lie to me. I’ve given you everything so don’t. Just don’t you lie to me, Bradley Sinclair. I deserve better.”
I couldn’t see much detail on the crappy screen, but I could tell she was upset.
“It’s not about lying. I’m not ready to talk about it. I’m ready for page eighty-seven.”
A last-ditch, pathetic attempt to salvage the session and my friendship. But I’d pushed it off a cliff before I mentioned the page number. I’d carelessly touched Cara’s hand in front of Paula.
“You’re a liar,” she said. “I have a list as long as my arm.”
They say the truth hurts more than a lie.
This hurt bad. More than Paula’s uncharacteristic rudeness, her words hurt me. There wasn’t any subtext to them. They just went right for the throat, and I reflexively put up my defenses.
“Tell me why it matters,” I said. “It never did before so tell me why it matters now.”
She closed the script.
“You brought her home. To Redfield. She’s going to meet Buddy and Susan. She’s going to Warren’s drugstore. The creek. The high school. She’s going to see all of it. They’re going to know her.”
“Why is that a problem?”
I’d baited her now. Smooth move, asshole.
“I can’t tell you without opening my heart.”
She flipped the edges of the script absently, looking just off camera. Maybe looking at her own little square in the corner and wondering if she could see herself telling me the problem.
“You don’t have to,” I said, trying to protect her from herself. I knew what she was going to say, and I wanted to protect her from my response. She wasn’t going to like it.
She either didn’t hear me or didn’t believe me. Maybe she needed to get it off her chest.
“Those are our places, and I don’t want to share. You trot her out all over Redfield and you sully them.”
“I’m not understanding.” Maybe I expected something more straightforward.
“I don’t know what’s not to understand unless you’re thick as a brick. We have that place together. You and me. All them girls only know one part of you and the other was mine. You bring her into my town, and that just says something about you. It says you don’t care about propriety or what people say about us.”
“Us? Paula, there hasn’t been an us for years.”
Her face fell again. I thought she couldn’t look any more upset, more angry, more sad, all jumbled in a bunch of bright dots.
“Not to you. But I was the last one you were with there, and that was mine. I was the girl they talked about, now I’m being replaced by what? A nanny? How am I supposed to show my face at Warren’s come Christmas? All them feeling sorry?”
“Wait a minute—”
“You don’t know people. You don’t know what a star you are there. You don’t have any idea what they all think. Now I have to quit or the talk is going to burn my ears straight off.”
“Were you telling everyone we were together? That’s a lie.”
“They all asked when you were gonna wake up and marry me, and what was I supposed to say?”
“That you can do better.”
“That’s a lie.”
She could do a ton better than me, but instead of hanging my argument on her intrinsic value, which would have saved the friendship, I got more aggressive.
“And saying I was waiting to marry you isn’t a lie?”
“Don’t you talk to me about lies, Bradley Sinclair.”
Her arm moved and the screen flicked to black.
I shut the computer. I was shaking because she and a few others protected a lie I told every day.
I stood up to get away from the computer. I depended on her friendship and support, and she’d depended on me for hope. Having removed the hope from her life, I would have to live without the friendship and support.
CHAPTER 55
BRAD
Any fourth-grader will tell you lies are like snowballs rolling down a hill. But I was told early on that if I was honest about my dyslexia, no one would hire me. I’d be too much trouble. It was hard for me to manage on-the-fly script changes. I couldn’t read dialog without struggle.