“He talks to her all the time.” Kyle nodded, trying to match his father’s politely disinterested tone. Once again he was embroiled in the last thing he ever wanted to do again, as long as he lived, which was talk about Alison. But this whole sorry conversation was seemingly unstoppable.
“What I don’t understand is why all those shows have to be so violent,” his mother sighed, shaking her head with a quiet but decisive disapproval which Kyle had learned to dread in his childhood. “Everyone acts like there’s nothing you can do about it but I say turn it off! They’ll just keep putting that garbage on television unless we stop watching it. There didn’t used to be shows like this on all the channels. Now it seems like no matter when I turn it on, it’s all killing and shooting and sex. I’m sorry that Alison thought it was a good idea to get involved in something like that. I thought she had more sense than that, I really did.” Kyle’s mother had never forgiven Alison for breaking her son’s heart not once but four or five or six or seven times—who could keep count how long those two made each other miserable? She was a smart girl and pretty and she had had every chance in the world. But there was clearly something wrong with her character.
“Well, we don’t actually know if she’s shooting people or not, do we, Kyle?” his dad asked with a good-natured contrariness. “Maybe she’s getting shot.”
“She’s not shooting anybody or being shot either, as a matter of fact,” Kyle informed them, grinning at his father’s subversive levity. “She’s a witness.”
Before Van could react to the fact that Kyle did, actually, know rather a lot about the show, his father stepped in. “So that’s not so terrible,” he observed, decisive. “A witness is an honorable role to play. We are all witnesses to our Lord and his creation. And now Alison is getting paid for it, which is always a good thing for our young people. Let’s say grace.” He bowed his head, folded his hands, and eased elegantly into the prayer over the meal. “We thank you, Lord, for this beautiful food, prepared with loving hands by Susan and Margaret for our nourishment. Look kindly on us as we gather in your name, and keep an eye on your daughter Alison, who has run off to the big city to follow her dreams. Some of us think that may have been a mistake and that she will need your guidance there, as we need it here. Amen.”
There really was not much you could say to that. Dad started cutting his chicken with gusto and told Susan that it all looked terrific. Susan thanked him and said that she had gotten the recipe out of that church cookbook Mom had gotten from St. Bernard’s almost ten years ago now. Mom said something about how many good recipes she had found in that old thing, it was maybe the best cookbook in her kitchen. Van took a bite and told Susan it was so good, she’d heard about pecan-crusted chicken but she’d never had it before, she always thought of it as a Southern dish. Bill started to explain how in many ways Cincinnati really was a Southern city, sitting right there across the river from Kentucky, and how it was one of the first stops on the Underground Railroad. They had a lovely dinner, everyone went home early, and nobody watched Alison make her television debut.
five
“I’M SORRY, what was the question?” Alison asked, confused.
“DID SIMON DILLINGHAM INSTRUCT YOU TO LIE TO THE POLICE OFFICERS ABOUT WHAT YOU SAW OUTSIDE THE BODEGA THAT MORNING?” The ADA was really leaning on her. He was incensed.
“No, he didn’t,” Alison said, defiant. Tears were streaming down her face. “He didn’t tell me anything.”
“Permission to treat Miss Garrity as a hostile witness, Your Honor,” the ADA snapped suddenly.
“I’m hostile,” Alison snapped back. “You should look in the mirror.”
This brought cheers to the small gang of near strangers who were crowded on and around the bed in the corner of Lisa’s so-called loft, watching it all on the flat-screen TV screwed into the wall there. “I can’t believe you improvised that,” Lisa announced, with a tone that was not particularly admiring, in spite of the general approbation of the bed full of people.
“It just came out,” Alison admitted.
“You could have gotten fired.”
“No one was going to fire her over an improvised line,” one of the other actresses, Marnie, observed with a careless tone of dismissal. Some people thought Lisa was too bossy. Now that Alison had actually booked a television job and landed herself an agent, Alison was beginning to find Lisa a bit bossy too.
“They stopped the cameras!” Lisa announced, comically outraged.
“Were you there?” Marnie asked.
“I wasn’t there, I’m just telling you what she told me. It was not a good thing.”
“People laughed,” Alison said, trying to defend herself from, what she wasn’t entirely sure.
“The crew laughed,” Lisa reminded her. It was sounding as if Lisa had been there, when in fact she had just hung on the phone, disbelieving, while Alison gave her a blow-by-blow of the day, which had gone well—just as the other three days of shooting had gone well.
“I like crews, they’re the nicest people on those sets,” Marnie observed.