Chapter 6
I didn’t make it far. My head was buzzing so hard, my face felt numb and the first person I wanted to call—Max, natch—was no doubt sleeping or shooting.
And calling Mom... Well, that’d open a whole huge box of nope I didn’t want to deal with.
I might be an adult (allegedly) and responsible for my own self for ages now but Mom was always ready to throw hands for me, both metaphorically and actually.
Looping her in on this hellishness would only end in her and Rory having another shouting match and Mom trying to help by contacting every gossip site and account she could find to read them the riot act.
Which would be just awesome to be known as the struggling actor whose mommy is fighting his battles for him.
At least my nails looked nice, I thought, feet heavy on the sidewalk.
I’d made it the few blocks to Witte’s Teas, I realized, heading there without thinking.
It had become a favorite place over the summer and felt homey in ways even my favorite cafe in LA never did.
Unusually busy thanks to the tourist influx for the regatta, I managed to dip over and grab one of the very few tables in the shop, a tiny two-top with high bistro chairs tucked into the corner near the window facing Buttermilk Street.
Belinda Gleaves was behind the counter, her summer job stretching into fall now that she’d caved and decided to attend the local community college rather than her aspirational choices of Southern California or Loyola Marymount.
Somewhat glum and fully engulfed in her Jane Fonda circa Klute aesthetic—quite the transition from her Wes Anderson vibe she’d had going on over the summer—Belinda gave me an eyeroll from beneath her heavy fringe as she served an out of towner who couldn’t understand why the shop didn’t serve lattes and only tea.
“It’s a tea shop,” Belinda stressed, closing her eyes as the customer started in again on their litany about but why don’t you have...
I huffed quietly to myself, deciding to hang back until the line shortened and keep an ear out for messy customers.
I might not be an employee of the shop but I did like Belinda—she was a good kid, if very enthusiastic about being a playwright extraordinaire, and she’d been through a lot over the summer after discovering her mentor had been murdered and being briefly blamed for it.
Kinda felt like I owed her one (or a hundred really—getting taken into custody at a memorial service has to screw with your sense of self a little.) Opening my phone, I gave in to my invasive thoughts and pulled up Tea and Tinsel’s feed.
It felt like I was the center of attention there but to be fair, there were about a dozen other threads before I found the one Ms. Terhune had been looking at featuring my grainy face.
A dozen or so nothingburger pseudo scandals, most of them bearing the mark of PR flaks trying to get attention on their clients with ‘rumors’ of summer flings gone bad, mysterious outings with beautiful strangers, or so and so being short listed for a project with this or that famous director but shhh it’s a secret.
Still, seeing those sketchy pics of me and Tubbs, seeing the pot-stirring about his death.
.. I didn’t know whether to be angry or nauseated.
“Mind of I join you? Oh! Here, let me—”
“I got it, it’s okay,” I said quickly, bending to grab my fumbled phone as Pamela Sommers stood awkwardly beside the table. “Oh, um, no, I don’t mind, please join me.”
She smiled prettily and did a little hop to perch on the high seat.
She was a tiny thing, maybe five foot one if she stood ramrod straight, and while I wasn’t exactly the tallest of talls, I towered over her a decent amount even while sitting.
She tipped her face up to give me an assessing, almost sympathetic look.
“I saw that bullshit in the funny pages. It’s deplorable, what people will do trying to make a fast buck.
Sadly, that sort of thing,” she nodded at my phone, “has never changed. It just spreads faster now with all the digital crap.”
I nodded, eyes wide. Hearing Pamela Sommers—the Pamela Sommers—swear was doing weird things to my inner seven-year-old. “I’m sorry about Tubbs,” I said, repeating my condolences to her now, too. “I saw Ms. Terhune a bit ago and—”
“She’s taking it well, isn’t she?” Ms. Sommers mused, tapping her short, bare nails on the tabletop. “Very well. She and Gerald were too much alike for her to be sad about him, I think, at least in any way that’s common. She’s grieving him, though. In her way.”
Belinda appeared at the tableside, visibly harried.
The line had trickled down to nothing once latte guy had finally been convinced to try anything else and the next few customers understood how tea shops worked.
“Don’t get used to this,” she grumbled, holding her phone open to a notes app.
“I just can’t stand being behind the counter right now.
What would you two like? Or are you here for the cannisters and bags or something? ”
Ms. Sommers startled, glancing around as if just realizing where we were. “Oh! Um, what do you recommend?”
“The Lady Grey is very good,” I suggested.
Ms. Sommers brightened. “I’ll try that, then.”
I gave my order to Belinda and she nodded, bopping off back to the counter with a grimace.
Ms. Sommers fussed with her purse for a moment, finally pulling out a flat tin of salve with an apologetic smile.
“My hands get so dry,” she said. “Do you mind?” When I shook my head, she popped open the tin and started applying the sweet-scented salve to the backs of her hands.
“It’s so strange, Gerald being dead,” she said, looping back to her original theme.
“It doesn’t feel real. I’ve known him most of my life.
Well. Knew him, I suppose. Now that he’s. .. he’s...”
I snatched a napkin from the small dispenser in the middle of the table, handing her one even as she waved me off and pulled a small cloth handkerchief from her bag.
“That’s right,” I said, scraping my memory for bits of gossip my mom and grandma had discussed over my head when we’d watched t.v.
ages ago. “You babysat Tubbs for a time, didn’t you? ”
Ms. Sommers’s smile twisted into something ugly, but it was just for a moment and then the small, polite grief was back, carefully curated to make her appear to her best advantage even while crying.
“That story really did get legs, didn’t it?
I wasn’t his babysitter. Well, not really.
I’d been hired for one of his father’s other shows—do you remember Violet Newman? ”
“That’s the one about the nurse who accidentally accepted a job in the Arctic Circle?”
She nodded happily. “It was on after MASH in some markets. Really did well. I was on a few episodes as a young runaway who’d followed her older brother to his remote job and developed appendicitis.”
“Ah, appendicitis... must’ve been sweeps week?”
She laughed as Belinda set our orders down in front of us, raising a meaningful brow at me until I held out my card for her to take back to the register and run .
“Appendicitis, pneumonia brought on by going out with wet hair, the ever-popular broken bone that’s miraculously healed by the next episode.
.. Tropes are tropes for a reason. The whole babysitting story came about because Gerald Senior brought little Gerry to the set one day and he was just in a right state, being a brat.
Junior, that is,” she giggled, shaking her head.
“Did not want to be there. I’d grown up with four younger brothers so I knew a trick or two!
Managed to get him to stop having a hissy fit and settle down for a few minutes.
That endeared me to Senior, apparently, and next thing you know, I’m a series regular on Late Night At the Airport Cafe. ”
“So the babysitting story—”
“Just made good copy,” she shrugged. “Gerald—our Gerald—was about eleven or twelve then and I was barely twenty, so it’s not like he was a baby in arms. Senior was already grooming him to take over the family business and I really don’t think Gerald wanted to do it,” she added, a note of bemusement in her tone.
“You know, I hadn’t really thought about it before the other day but.
.. I don’t think Gerald enjoyed being a producer at all.
It was always so hard for him. Not the schmoozing and glad-handing part.
The work of it. I thought he'd much rather everything just work on its own and he take the credit.” Her smile flickered before coming back in full, false force.
Uh... How do I respond to that? “Um.”
She smiled, patting my hand. “Sorry. That’s just strange, isn’t it? Dumping that on you. My mind is all over the place this week. Worse than usual,” she added with a small, forced laugh. “When we left for Augusta, Gerald was fine. Just a few hours later and he’s... he’s...”
It was my turn to act sympathetic. I made the appropriate noises, offered her another napkin when she started to cry and nodded again when she brandished the hankie.
Finally, she sniffed and took a sip of her tea.
“Oh, that is good. I don’t think I’ve ever had Lady Grey before.
In all honesty, I haven’t been much of a tea drinker, not since my mother died back in sixty-one.
She drank gallons of the stuff. Stewed it, though.
Could never stand the taste and after she passed, I never made myself a cup.
” She paused for another sip. “Maybe I’ve been missing out. ”
“So did you just pop into the shop to say hi then?” I asked, unable to stop the sass from coming out. “Since you’re not a tea kind of person...”