Oh, right. Food.
She snapped the laptop closed, popped up, and adjusted her eye patch before opening the door to a man who would never grace the cover of a Romance novel, not even in his prime thirty years ago. He wheeled the food into her room, she signed the bill, tipped him well, and closed the door.
She uncovered the plate and found cold French fries, a day-old bun, a possibly older burger, and garnish she suspected had been taken off another, discarded dinner.
Fantasy over. Reality had arrived.
Chapter Three
“The Stakes”
THE NEXT MORNING, AS SEWANEE DEBATED HER LIPSTICK COLOR FOR the panel, she found herself staring into the bathroom mirror, eye patch off. It didn’t matter how accustomed she’d become to it, she couldn’t help looking at it. Every time as if it were the first and every time hoping it were the last.
The space where her right eye had been was curtained with skin that looked as if it had been burned. It hadn’t. It was simply the effect of not enough skin to cover too much surface. The long, jagged scar that accompanied the drape went from the middle of her right eyebrow down over the highest point of her cheekbone. Like the mouth of a river, it dumped itself into the estuary of her cheek’s hollow.
She looked down again at the lipstick. Red. Definitely red. Be bold.
Her cell phone, resting on the counter next to her, rang.
She glanced at the caller ID: Seasons. Her grandmother’s assisted living facility. No matter how many times she had seen “Seasons” on her screen over the years, her stomach tightened. In recent months, the tightness had worsened in tandem with Blah’s mental state. “Hello?” she answered.
“Sewanee?” the familiar voice asked.
“Amanda. Is everything okay?”
“Well, we had a bit of an incident.”
Sewanee turned around, leaned against the counter. She imagined spark-pluggy, capable Amanda behind the desk in her tidy office, Christmas sweater probably over the back of her chair, frizzy gray-black hair pushed back by a reindeer-antlered headband. “What happened?”
“Sorry to bother you. We reached out to your father, but he hasn’t returned our call.”
Typical. “It’s fine, what’s going on?”
“Well,” she sighed, “BlahBlah left her room last night.” Even the caretakers had adopted her grandmother’s nickname. Barbara had never wanted to be called “grandma” or “nana” or any other “ancient-sounding familiarity.” But a young Sewanee couldn’t say Barbara. The best she could manage was BlahBlah. Sewanee’s father had thought it fit his loquacious mother perfectly, so it stuck. “One of our orderlies found her in the common room at two thirty this morning. She believed she was at a hotel in Tennessee getting ready for her debutante ball. She thought the orderly was her escort.”
Sewanee closed her eye. “How is she this morning?”
“She woke up having no memory of last night. Was her usual bubbly self at breakfast.”
“Okay,” Sewanee breathed, tipping her head back. “That’s good. Right?”
“Yes, but the thing is, we had to put her on lockdown for the rest of the night, for her own safety. Her circumstances have advanced, necessitating we evaluate future care requirements.”
“What–what does that mean?”
“We believe that, in the somewhat near future, we’ll need to transition her to our memory care side.”
Sewanee had seen the big, locked door. She recalled vividly the red-lettered sign above it: MEMORY UNIT. KEEP DOOR CLOSED AT ALL TIMES. It was off the hallway that led to the bar. Yes, Seasons had a bar. And a yoga room. The place was designed to look like a Hollywood back-lot version of 1950s Americana: the main hallway, Main Street; the salon boasted a barber shop pole; the little market had a soda fountain counter and jukebox. It unnerved Sewanee, the Disneyfication of dissolution. But it made Blah happy. And being located in Burbank, right across from Warner Bros. Studios and next to the Smoke House, it was full of Show Folk like her grandmother.
That was why Blah had chosen it after her sister, Bitsy, with whom she’d been living, had died.
While other assisted living facilities took their residents on field trips to the mall or a museum, Seasons’ field trips consisted of movie nights at Hollywood Forever Cemetery to watch classic films outside （“and to visit old friends,” her grandmother liked to joke）。 They went to sitcom and talk show tapings. They had a happy hour Friday night that was open to the public and Swan would be there for most of them, drinking a martini with Blah and her pals.