Totally and Completely Fine(2)

“Come visit me on set,” Gabe had texted that morning. “We’ll have a good time.”

A good time. I’d forgotten what that was like.

Chapter 2

Then

The first time I met Spencer, I thought he was short, scrawny, and annoying.

He was my brother’s friend, and it was my job as the Very Cool Older Sister to not be impressed with anything—or anyone—Gabe brought home.

The introduction was brief, the two of them quickly escaping into the basement to play video games or hit each other in the arm or burp loudly, whatever it was that boys that age did. I was a year older, and much wiser, so I just stayed upstairs in my room reading.

After that, Spencer just slowly integrated into our lives.

He was at our house. All. The. Time.

Mostly with Gabe, but there were times when he even came over by himself.

“Don’t you have your own family?” I asked him one day after he drank the last Yoo-hoo in the fridge.

I had been saving it for when I got the latest Baby-sitters Club book from the library. Which was today.

He wiped away his chocolate mustache.

“No one’s home right now,” he said.

I knew I was supposed to feel sorry for him, but I was mostly annoyed about the Yoo-hoo.

“Well, Gabe’s not home either,” I said.

“I know,” he said. “Can we hang out?”

“No,” I said. “I’m busy.”

I expected him to be upset or to cry or pout. He didn’t. He just shrugged and went to sit on the front porch with our cat, Big Fat Fuzzy Guy （so named by Gabe）。

My bedroom overlooked the front porch, so when I tried to settle in to read—without my Yoo-hoo—my eyes couldn’t stop wandering to Spencer, who was sitting, drink in one hand, a cat under the other.

After a while it seemed so pathetic that I gave up and went downstairs.

“Just come inside,” I said. “We can play, like, cards or something.”

My dad had taught me how to play poker, so I ended up teaching Spencer. When Gabe came home an hour later from who knows where, I’d won two dollars off his friend. He thanked me and went downstairs with Gabe to play video games.

At some point, my mom gave him his own key and bought him his own Yoo-hoos and that was that.

Chapter 3

Now

To any casual observer, Lena probably looked like she was having a miserable time—sitting near the crafty table, arms crossed, expression blank—but as her mother, someone who was intimately aware of the subtleties of her moods, the fact that she wasn’t on her phone or openly scowling at me was a good sign indeed.

I shifted in my seat, my lower back still smarting from the plane ride over.

Gabe had offered to fly us first class, but I’d declined. His fame and money made a tricky tightrope to walk. I didn’t want Lena to take any of it for granted.

Then again, we lived in a house that Gabe had paid for. As did my mom. Then there was the bookstore/craft store, the Cozy, where my mom and I worked, our paychecks covered by Gabe. And my car. And Lena’s extremely robust college fund.

The truth was that first-class tickets from Montana to Philadelphia were nothing compared to what Gabe had already done for us. And it was all probably a fool’s errand—this haphazard privilege monitoring—but I was pretty sure that attempting to “succeed” at any aspect of parenting was a fool’s errand.

This time, I’d been rewarded for my effort with a daughter that ignored me completely, while I was seated in front of a bucking horse, judging from the way I was aggressively jostled every twenty minutes.

I’d get our tickets changed for the way back. I was too old for this shit. There was no virtue in suffering for the sake of suffering. Despite what my mother-in-law’s church taught.

After all, this was supposed to be a vacation of sorts.

An escape.

And what could be more unlike my real life—days filled with stocking yarn, sewing pockets into thrift store dresses, and making underappreciated dinners—than a week spent watching my brother film a movie?

It was certainly distracting.

And people who thought you couldn’t distract yourself from grief hadn’t yet learned the kind of emotional compartmentalization that I excelled at. Sometimes I thought I should teach a class: Separating from Human Emotion, or How to Grieve Without All the Mess. Or, How to Put On a Happy Face So Your Endless, Bond-Deep Sadness Doesn’t Ruin Everyone Else’s Day. Or, How to Avoid Thinking About Your Dead Husband by Teaching Yourself the Lost, Fairly Useless Art of Mending Socks.

It had taken three weeks to fix one hole on the bottom of a sock I’d probably gotten from Target, and it looked so ugly that I ended up putting it back at the bottom of my drawer where it had been living for the past year.

But I hadn’t thought about Spencer the entire time I’d been working on it.

Well.

Only a few times.

And I’d only cried once.

A day.

I was doing fine.

The set was both chaotic and regimented. There were people everywhere and though it seemed like some of them were doing absolutely nothing, everything still managed to get done.

The first time I’d gone to see Gabe working was when he’d gotten his big break, playing James Bond. He’d invited us—my mom, Spencer—before, but Lena had been so young and the last thing I’d wanted was to be the person holding a screaming baby on a multimillion-dollar film set. Instead, we waited until we had a screaming child running amok on a multimillion-dollar film set. She’d only ruined one take.