How to End a Love Story(82)

She’s spent the last six hours obsessively cleaning her apartment, scrubbing the floors and checking through her closets and laundry, making sure they’re free from any trace of anything. She doesn’t think her mother will go through all her individual drawers looking for drugs under the vague pretense of missing a sweater like she did in high school, but Helen checks through them all herself just in case anyway (there’s nothing, of course), just as she did then. Her mother had always seemed so certain Helen was hiding something, that sometimes Helen herself wasn’t sure she wasn’t.

“Next time you fly, there’s an easier airport to pick you up from, in Burbank,” she tells them as her parents load their suitcases (twenty years old and “They work just fine!” despite a broken wheel and stuck handle) into her car. “LAX is kind of chaotic.”

“Next time, next time, what next time,” Mom grumbles, looking out the window at construction signs and closed-off traffic lanes. “You are only in LA a short while.”

Helen ignores the growing tension headache and drives them to a Radisson hotel nearby.

“A car will come and take you guys to set in the morning,” she says. “There should be a drive-on pass for you at the gate, but you can call me if you have any problems.”

“I don’t know any of the words you are saying,” Mom says. “My head hurts.”

“Are you hungry?” Helen asks. “We can go get food.”

“Yes, we should get food,” Dad agrees. “Unless you already ate.”

“I haven’t eaten yet.”

“You haven’t eaten?” Mom’s brows snap together. “It’s almost eight p.m.”

Helen wants to smash her own forehead into the steering wheel. “Let’s get food,” she says, and grips the wheel as she maneuvers them out of the hotel parking lot.

She takes them to In-N-Out and thinks about explaining the secret menu to them, but thinks better of it. When they sit down to share their meal, Mom unfolds herself happily, taking out napkins and packages of nuts she got on the plane from her purse.

“Thanks, Mom,” Helen says wearily.

“So,” Mom says, eating a plain french fry. “How are things?”

“They’re good,” Helen says automatically. “The first week of production went well. I was nervous at first, but everyone’s doing a really good job and the showrunner’s really happy.”

“I don’t understand why you don’t run your own show,” Dad says, biting into his burger.

“Because I’ve never done it before,” Helen explains for the millionth time. “But Suraya’s really great. It’s like we’re two brains in a pod.”

It’s a play on a familiar expression that’s almost certainly gone over their heads. Helen often wonders how much of her relationship with her parents has been lost in translation and how different things would be if they’d never moved to this country. But then maybe she wouldn’t have become a writer, or at least this kind of writer, telling these kinds of stories, with these specific people, at this specific time in her life, and she finds herself familiarly grateful that her parents made the decisions they made.

They go to her condo afterward (“just to have a look”) and Helen feels a small surge of pride when Dad looks out the window and says, “You have a nice view.”

Mom pats down each couch cushion to inspect its softness before she sits down, then bounces up and down slightly as if she’s testing wares at a mattress store.

“The studio pays for all of this?”

“Yep,” Helen says. “Until production’s over.”

“Very nice,” Mom says approvingly. “This is very nice.”

And it is nice, Helen thinks—letting her parents see her thrive on another coast.

See, she tries to silently communicate, you don’t have to worry about me. I’ll survive.

They stay for exactly one pot of tea, Dad quietly walking from room to room while Mom starts doing dishes even though Helen protests she has a dishwasher for that.

She had felt slightly itchy and nervous about having her parents in this space—imagining them moving within the scenes of her California life played slightly wrong in her brain, like a poorly done double exposure. But as she listens to Mom gossip idly about their old friends while toweling off plates and Dad flicks lights on and off in various rooms, she feels a sense of home wash over the condo, and finds she doesn’t mind it as much as she thought she would.

She walks them down to the lobby to wait for their Uber, because Mom insists it’s too late for Helen to drive them to the Radisson and back, and Helen’s grateful because it is getting late.

She waits until their car is out of sight before she calls Grant.

“How’d it go?” he asks, his voice low in a way where she can tell he’s lying in bed.

“Good,” she says. “They came to the condo, like I said they would. They liked it. They came dangerously close to saying they were proud of me out loud.”

Grant chuckles and she thinks, I would keep this feeling, if I could.





Twenty-Seven




Helen’s parents love visiting the set.

A production assistant sets up chairs (“What, just for us?”) at video village and Mike, the sound guy, gets them headsets so they can hear the production audio. Suraya introduces them to the cast and crew as the parents of the brain that created the brainchild of this show. “So really, it’s like they’re the grandparents of our show.”