“But Michael—”
He’s already hung up, though, before Claire can say, “Wait—fly out where?” She clicks off the call and looks over at Shane, still sitting on the bed, a distant look on his face. “Michael found his actress,” she says. “He wants us all to fly off to see her.”
Shane doesn’t appear to have heard her. He is staring at some point on the wall behind her. She should never have said anything, should have allowed him to go on living in his little bubble.
“Look, I’m sorry, Shane,” she says. “You don’t have to go. I can find another translator. This business, it’s—”
But he interrupts her. “So you’re saying he pays me ten thousand dollars to get out of his contract . . .” Shane has the strangest look on his face; it’s oddly familiar to Claire. “And then he goes out and makes ten million?”
And now she knows where she recognizes that look from. It’s a look she sees every day, the look of someone doing the math, of someone seeing the angles.
“Then maybe my movie is worth more than ten thousand.”
Holy shit. The kid’s a natural.
“I mean, who wants to go pitch a dead movie idea for ten grand? But for fifty? Or eighty?” Shane breaks into a sly smile. “Sign me up.”
13
Dee Sees a Movie
April 1978
Seattle, Washington
She called him P.E. Steve, and he was at that very moment driving across town to pick her up for a date. Debra Moore-Bender had grown adept at deflecting the advances of her fellow teachers, but an attractive young widow was apparently too much for the sturdy Steve to abide, and for weeks he circled until he finally made his move—while they sat together at a desk outside a school dance, checking ASB cards beneath a banner that read: EVERLASTING LOVE. SPRING INTO ’78!
Debra gave him the usual excuse—she didn’t date other teachers—but Steve laughed this off. “What is that, like a lawyer-client thing? Because you know I teach phys ed, right? I’m not a real teacher, Debra.”
Her friend Mona had been urging Debra to date Steve ever since word of his divorce reached the teachers’ lounge—sweet Mona, whose own romantic life was a series of disasters but who somehow knew what was best for Debra. But what really convinced her was that P.E. Steve asked her to a movie. There was this movie she wanted to see— And now, minutes before he was to pick her up, Debra stood in the bathroom staring into the mirror and running a brush through her feathered blond hair, which ruffled and settled like water in a boat’s wake （Miss Farrah, some of the students called her, a name she pretended to dislike）。 She turned to the side. This new hair color was a mistake. She’d spent a decade fighting the awful vanity of her youth and she’d really hoped, at thirty-eight, to be one of those women who were comfortable with middle age, but she just wasn’t there yet. Each gray hair still seemed like a weevil in a flower bed.
She glanced at the hairbrush. How many millions of strokes through her hair, how many face washings and sit-ups, how much work had she done—all to hear those words: beautiful, pretty, foxy. At one time, Debra accepted her looks without self-consciousness; she didn’t need affirmation—no “Miss Farrah” or leering P.E. Steve or even awkward, sweet Mona （“If I looked like you, Debra, I’d masturbate all the time”）。 But now? Dee set the hairbrush down, staring at it like some kind of talisman. She remembered singing into a brush like that when she was a kid; she still felt like a kid, like a nervous, needy fifteen-year-old getting ready for a date.
Maybe nerves were natural. Her last relationship had ended a year ago: her son Pat’s guitar teacher, Bald Marv （Pat nicknamed the men in her life）。 She’d liked Bald Marv, thought he stood a chance. He was older, in his late forties, had two older daughters from a failed marriage and was keen on “blending the families”—although he was decidedly less keen after he and Debra returned home one night to find Pat already blending, in bed with Marv’s fifteen-year-old daughter, Janet.
During Marv’s eruption she’d thought about defending Pat—Why do boys always get blamed in these situations? After all, Marv’s daughter was two years older than him. But this was Pat, and he proudly confessed his elaborate plans like a cornered Bond villain. It had been all his idea, his vodka, his condom. Debra wasn’t surprised that Bald Marv ended it. And while she hated breakups—the disingenuous abstractions, this is just not where I want to be right now, as if the other person had nothing to do with it—at least Bald Marv stated the case plainly: “I love you, Dee, but I do not have the energy to deal with this shit between you and Pat.”