The Rom-Commers(3)

Didn’t matter. Who cared?

This was Charlie Holy Shit Yates.

“Send it to me,” I said. There was nothing more to discuss. Would I uncreditedly rewrite Charlie Yates’s incomprehensibly terrible screenplay? Of course I would. I’d do it for no money. Hell, I’d pay him. I’d already mentally opened a new file in Final Draft and saved it as CHARLIE F@$%ING YATES.

“There’s a catch, though,” Logan said next.

“What’s that?”

“You have to come to LA.”

Now I started pacing the walkway again. “Come to LA?” I echoed, like that was something no one ever did.

“Not forever,” Logan said. “Just for the working period of the rewrite.”

How long did a rewrite even take? I’d never done a rewrite for someone else.

Logan read my mind. “Six weeks,” he declared next. “Possibly longer. This has to be an in-person thing.”

“But—” I started, so many objections in my mind, it was hard to choose. “What about Zoom? What about FaceTime? What about Slack? Google Meet? Hell—even Skype! There are a million virtual ways to do it.”

“He’s old-school,” Logan said.

“That’s no excuse.”

“And he’s got a massive ego.”

“He deserves that ego,” I said, shifting sides. “He’s earned it.”

“The point is, he’s Charlie Yates. He gets it the way he wants it. And he’s never going to just accept virtual corrections from some unproduced writer on the internet.”

“When you put it that way, I don’t sound very impressive.”

“I know.”

“So I have to come out there and—what?”

“Woo him.”

“Woo him?”

“Obviously not in the traditional sense of woo.”

“I can’t go to LA, Logan,” I said. “I can’t go anywhere. Remember my dad?”

But Logan wasn’t deterred. “What about Sylvie?” he asked.

Dammit. He had me. “What about her?”

“Didn’t she just graduate?”

“She did, but—”

“Wasn’t that the plan all along? To get Sylvie through college and then let her take a turn?”

“That was the plan,” I said, bracing myself against how right Logan was. “But she got a very prestigious summer internship with International Medical Aid—”

“Bullshit!” Logan shouted.

“Did you just shout ‘bullshit’ at me?”

“It’s her turn,” Logan said, mad at me now. “You’ve done everything for ten years—”

“Just under ten years,” I corrected.

“—and the plan, all along, was for her to come back to Texas after college and take over.”

“Yes, but that was before—”

“Call her,” Logan demanded. “Call her right now and tell her she’s coming home. You will never get another chance like this. This is the opportunity of your lifetime.”

“I don’t have to call her. She’s on her way in from the airport right now. Remember the pancakes?”

“Perfect timing,” Logan said then. “Tell her at dinner.”

But I just leaned down and rested my forehead against the metal handrail as a garbage truck rumbled by down below. “I don’t want to.”

“Be fair to yourself, Emma,” Logan cajoled.

Why were we even talking about this? I had things to do and no time for nonsense. “I’m not crushing Sylvie’s dreams, Logan. That’s not on my to-do list today.”

“But what about you?” Logan asked. “What about your dreams?”

At that, I stood up. “My dreams,” I said, like We’re done here, “got crushed a long time ago.”





Two

I DID NOT tell Sylvie at dinner.

It wasn’t just the first dinner we’d had together in the months since she’d gone back to college last January—it was her graduation party. A graduation that, of course, my dad and I had missed, since he couldn’t travel—and if he couldn’t travel, neither could I.

This wasn’t just dinner. This was a celebration. My glorious, brilliant baby sister had graduated summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from the highly picturesque Carleton College—which, if you didn’t know, is the Harvard of the Midwest—and she was now, among many other things, living proof that our family had overcome all of its tragedies and was thriving, at last. Officially.

We were celebrating, dammit.

I’d made a cake in the shape of a graduation cap and stuck sparkler candles in it. I’d festooned our kitchenette with gold streamers and sprinkled confetti on the table. I’d typed out little menus and rolled them up like diplomas.

I wasn’t ruining all that by moving to LA.

You had to maximize joy when it fluttered into your life. You had to honor it. And savor it. And not stomp it to death by reminding everyone of everything you’d lost.

Sylvie showed up in a cropped tee with her fairy-tale straight blond hair billowing, looking like the personification of youth and beauty and hope—and lugging five hundred duffel bags of dirty laundry. And I hugged her around the neck with genuine joy and jumped and squealed and kissed her cheeks. And my dad met us at the door with his walker and we sang “Happy Graduation to You” to the birthday song tune, my dad adding some one-handed percussion with a maraca. And then we ate stacks of pancakes and sausages and squirted canned whipped cream all over everything.