Laurie was a year into college then, but she was home on break and she went to all three shows. When he got home the first night, Ryan knocked on the door of her room. He thanked her for coming. “I’m your sister,” she said. “Of course I’m going to come, dummy. Did you have fun?”
He looked at her with such utter seriousness that she almost thought something might be wrong. But nothing was. He said, “Laurie, they screamed.”
“I know,” she said. “I was there.”
“Not the people in the show,” he said. “The audience. They screamed.”
She nodded. “I know.”
His eyes widened. “It was the best thing that’s ever happened to me.”
To say he never looked back would cover only part of it. He never looked up, down, over, under, anywhere except at stages to leap onto. He played Tony in West Side Story and one of the jurors in Twelve Angry Men before he graduated, and in college, he studied Shakespeare and Pinter and Beckett, and he played Torvald in A Doll’s House and Herod in Jesus Christ Superstar （in which he wore red satin pajamas）。 He played Ado Andy in a cross-cast production of Oklahoma! directed by his roommate. Their mother used to say, “Point him at anything where people clap for you, and off he goes.”
New York had not gone well at first. He was broke, working several jobs that were not acting, living in a series of roach-filled apartments with weird roommates, and constantly flirting with abandoning acting and becoming an English teacher （the irony was not lost on people who had first seen him in Bye Bye Birdie）。 But then he was cast on one of the Law & Orders, playing a waiter who isn’t a murderer, and then he was cast on another one of the Law & Orders, playing a bartender who is a murderer. It got a little bit easier. A series of ads for a bank put some money in his pocket. He played a congressional aide in two episodes of Halls of Power, a raucous political soap that had run for seven seasons and killed off half its original cast.
By the time Laurie FaceTimed him from Dot’s house, he’d done a decent amount of recent theater work and completed a short run in an off-Broadway play. He was between jobs, and his wife was part of a Broadway costume department for the first time. When he answered the call, Laurie was sitting at Dot’s dining room table in front of her laptop, and he was sitting on the sofa in his apartment, looking at his phone. “Hey,” she said, smiling as the video connection stabilized.
“Hey, Laur,” he said. “How’s it going up there?”
She shrugged. “The same.”
“I heard you saw Nick.”
“For heaven’s sake, where did you hear that? Who is talking about this?”
“I heard it from Mom, and I think Scott had a text from one of Nick’s cousins.”
“There are way too many people in this town for a town with so few people in it. How are you?”
“I’m good, I’m good.” Just then, Lisa crossed behind him, carrying a garbage bag toward their front door. “You need me to take that, babe?” he asked.
“No, thank you,” she said. “Hi, Laurie,” she called out as she disappeared from view. “I’m making a glamorous trip to the trash chute, back in a minute.”
“Tell me how it goes,” Laurie called back. “Are you working?” she asked Ryan.
He nodded. “Not this second, but in a couple of weeks I’m doing something, and I’m up for a few new things that might pan out. One small TV thing on a show you don’t watch.”
“Well, then,” she said. “You’re free over the next couple weeks, possibly?”
He raised his eyebrows. “Do you need something?”
She was getting pretty good at the short version: Found a duck, might be important, guy ripped me off and stole it, I’m trying to get it back. She gave it to him in as few words as she could manage, and by the time she was done, Lisa was back and sat on the couch next to Ryan, waving. “I’m back!”
“I was just telling my brother I might need to borrow him for a little while.”
“For what?”
Found a duck, might be important, guy ripped me off and stole it, I’m trying to get it back. “So,” Laurie finished, “I have a plan to get it back, I think. I think. And Nick’s helping me, and June’s helping me. Daisy, who works at his store. Possibly other people. But I could use your particular genius.”
“What do I have to do?”
“Well,” she said, “it’s a little bit hard to explain. I’m trying to figure out a way to get hold of the duck…through various methods. It’s kind of a complicated thing. It’s just, he has this thing, or his guy has it, and I’m trying to get it, and—”