Drew opts not to share his opinion of the reality show. At least she’s not watching The Bachelor.
“What’s going on with you?” Belinda asks. “You seem distracted.”
“No, ma’am. I’m right here with you.”
“Me and the girls finally finished listening to season five of your podcast,” his mother says. “I was surprised to hear you say that your next series is going to be about Ruby Reyes. You always said you’d never go there.”
“That was before they decided to let her out.”
“I’ve been reading all the controversy about her parole.” Belinda shakes her head. “The way it’s being written, Ruby is coming across like another one of Charles Baxter’s victims. Which is a damn insult to his actual victims.”
“I fully agree.”
“But at the same time, who really knows what went on?” his mother muses. “He was the bank president. The power balance was completely off. If Ruby had wanted to say no, would she have been able to?”
“She didn’t want to say no, because she was the one who pursued him.”
Belinda looks at him with knowing eyes. “Is that the objective journalist in you talking, or the very biased friend of Joey’s?”
“Just stating the facts.” Drew swallows what he has in his mouth. “Don’t get me wrong, I feel bad for all of Baxter’s victims, including his own daughter. But I will never agree that Ruby Reyes was one of them.”
“Joey was such a sweet girl. Remember that time you and Simone brought her to Thanksgiving? She took a huge helping of Monica’s cranberry sauce, when your sister forgot to put sugar in it. Poor thing didn’t know it wasn’t supposed to taste like that.”
“She ate the whole thing, too.” The memory makes Drew smile. “She didn’t want to be rude.”
“You still have all those articles from the Buffalo papers Uncle Nate used to mail you?”
“I kept everything. Been reading them all again to prepare for the podcast. It’s been a real mindfu—” Drew clears his throat. His mother abhors bad language. “It’s been a trip, reading back how different the conversation was about Ruby back then, compared to now.”
“You know, if your daddy and I were living in the time of #MeToo, he probably never would have asked me out,” Belinda says. “And you and your sisters might never have existed.”
They fall into a comfortable silence as she turns her attention back to the TV.
Drew ponders what his mother just said. His parents met at Belinda’s first job, where she was the social studies teacher and he was the principal. She was twenty-five, Carl Malcolm thirty-nine. They were married six years, long enough to have three children, until his dad died of a heart attack at the age of forty-five. Drew, the baby of the family, was only two.
His mother cackles as she eats, thoroughly entertained by the two blond women arguing on TV. Drew picks through his sisters’ abysmal magazine selection before settling on the Jimmy Peralta issue of People he didn’t get to read earlier. A much younger version of the actor’s face takes up the whole cover, and the headline reads:
Jimmy Peralta, 1950–2018
His Life,
His Loves,
His Legacy.
“Shame about him, huh?” Belinda’s show has ended, and she glances over before turning the channel to CNN. “I loved The Prince of Poughkeepsie.”
Drew, who was more of a Fresh Prince of Bel-Air fan, can only remember watching a handful of episodes of Jimmy Peralta’s sitcom, which was about a family-owned bakery in—where else?—Poughkeepsie, New York. The premise was funny, if extremely far-fetched: on the day his divorce is final, a single dad has a one-night stand with a mysterious European woman he meets at the bar his friends drag him to. Six months later, she shows up at the bakery, pregnant. It turns out she’s an actual princess from a tiny country （never specified）， who’s been disowned by her entire family for being pregnant out of wedlock （gasp）， and by an American to boot （yikes）。 With nowhere else to go, she marries Jimmy （whose name is Jimmy on the show, too） to stay in the US, and starts working at the bakery with his intrusive, meddling family （because what else would they be）。 Hilarity ensues.
He skims through the generous six-page feature. Jimmy Peralta was accomplished, there’s no doubt about that, and Drew is reminded of all the movies the stand-up comic turned actor had been in. He’d won Emmys and a Golden Globe, and he even snagged an Academy Award nomination. But he had his demons, too. Four divorces, three trips to rehab, and two overdoses; the last one nearly killed him.