Chapter 16 Thanksgiving on the Island of Misfit Toys
Thanksgiving on the Island of Misfit Toys
We don’t usually say grace,” Blair said as they sat down for dinner the next night. She was so happy to have her daughter, her best friend, and her… Jack around the table. “But if anyone else wants to, that would be lovely.”
“Are you looking at me?” Jack asked in a way that suggested Blair was barking up the wrongest of trees.
“How about a toast?” Tiffany asked, raising a glass.
“Great idea.” Blair looked at Jack again. Why? Why was she doing this?
Jack looked at Blair, letting his expression speak for him.
“You’re the writer,” she said.
“You’re the host.”
“Oh, for God’s sake.” Esme lifted her glass—she had requested another reunion refresher from Jack. “To…” She trailed off and looked at Blair. “New beginnings?”
“Are you asking me?” Hmm. Maybe Esme wasn’t as upset about the divorce as Blair had been led to believe if she was toasting her mother’s new beginning.
“To new beginnings,” Esme said, this time decisively. She turned to Tiffany. “I just got some great advice that’s inspired me to declare a major and decide what I want to be when I grow up.”
Blair had to stifle a laugh. As Esme told Tiff about her plans, Jack caught Blair’s eye and smiled. He knew she’d been thinking Esme was toasting her, and he shared her amusement that she’d been so deluded.
Blair smiled back, but she had to order herself to keep the heart eyes in check. She had not been able to get Jack’s new book off her mind. And thinking about Jack’s new book made her giddy, a sensation she had heretofore associated with crushes.
She had a crush on Jack’s book. Ha.
But also, she felt honored to have been allowed to read it. She’d said You’re the writer just now, when she’d been trying to get him to say grace. She’d been kidding, but not. He was a writer. A once-in-a-generation talent if you asked her. And a lot of people did ask her about that kind of stuff.
“Oh my gosh, this stuffing is amazing,” Tiffany exclaimed, drawing Blair’s attention back to dinner. “You said it’s your grandmother’s recipe?”
“It is, but today I’m calling it twice-stuffed turkey. I was distracted and forgot to take the bag of giblets out of the cavity before I stuffed it. Luckily, I remembered before it went in the oven, so you’re not eating melted plastic, but I did have to unstuff and restuff the bird.”
“Why were you so distracted?” Esme asked.
“I was thinking about something I read last night.” She glanced at Jack, who whipped his gaze to hers. “I couldn’t—can’t—stop thinking about it.”
“Are you going to get it for Books with Blair?” Esme asked.
“I don’t think so.” Another laugh had to be stifled.
Esme turned to Jack. “You know the internet thinks you were insane for turning down my mom.”
“I do.”
“And dude, she might have made your book into a movie or a TV show.”
“He’s not interested in that,” Blair said, taking pity on Jack.
“Why?” Esme asked, her brow comically furrowed. Ah, the youth. They could not imagine a scenario in which a person would eschew screens.
Jack, to his credit, did not brush off Esme’s question. “It’s hard to explain. But I’m not really a TV or movie kind of person.”
“What does that even mean? Don’t you and my mom watch TV pretty much every night? You even passed the Blair Kellermoon viewing test.”
Blair didn’t miss Tiffany’s eyebrows lifting. Yeah, she might have been forgetting to mention how much time she was spending with Jack in the evenings. And the mornings.
“Historically I haven’t… It’s more…” Jack almost never left sentences unfinished like that.
He spoke in complete paragraphs. He texted in complete paragraphs.
He cleared his throat. “When it comes to being disinclined toward screen adaptations of my book, it’s more to do with having a vision of the narrative.
” Blair had to smile at that formal, perfectly composed sentence coming on the heels of all those flustered fragments.
“You could be a producer,” Esme said. “Have a say in the way it’s done.”
“No, it’s more that the narrative just isn’t visual.”
Esme gave Jack the same look she gave Blair when they went shopping and Blair did something as misguided as pick up a piece of clothing and tell Esme she would look good in it. “No offense, but that’s stupid.”
“Esme,” Blair said. “You don’t get a free pass for saying offensive things to people just because you tack on the phrase No offense.”
“It’s OK.” Jack turned to Esme. “You might be right.”
It was Blair’s turn to raise her eyebrows—and Tiffany’s went up again, too.
“It’s not that I don’t like movies,” Jack said. “I go to them occasionally. I think I like them better when they’re original screenplays, though, when they’ve been written for a visual medium. And obviously, I’ve been watching TV lately. But that’s a new thing.”
“Were any of your father’s books made into movies?” Tiffany asked.
“No,” said Jack. “He would never.”
He would never, and Jack would never. Blair was aware, in a way that maybe Jack himself was not, that Arthur Branksome’s legacy was a burden for his son.
“He’d rather be poor?” Esme asked.
“He’s not poor, but essentially, yes.” Jack paused. “Well, he might be poor, but he has very low living expenses.”
“What does that mean?” Tiffany asked. “Like, he’s a survivalist?”
“Not expressly, but you’re not that far off the mark.
He lives in a cabin that is partly off-grid.
He fishes and hunts. He has a big garden in the summer and does a lot of canning and preserving.
He arranges his writing schedule and deadlines so as not to interfere with harvest season.
He lives like a survivalist, but he doesn’t subscribe to any conspiracy theories.
” He paused. “My point is, he basically has no expenses, so he’s not particularly financially motivated.
So he wasn’t ever interested in being involved in film projects. ”
“Yeah, but he wouldn’t have had to be involved,” Esme said, and Blair was aware that she should shut this down, but it was getting interesting.
“There’s a spectrum of author involvement.
He could have just taken the money and run.
With a good producer like my mom, you often get a better movie without the author hanging around mucking things up. ”
Esme had been paying attention over the years.
“I know you said he isn’t financially motivated,” Esme said, “but who doesn’t want a chunk of option cash?”
“I suspect,” Tiffany said, eyeing Jack with an expression Blair couldn’t read, and there wasn’t much about Tiffany that Blair couldn’t read, “that the problem was that even if he took the money and ran, his name would still be attached to a film version of one of his books. He wouldn’t have wanted to give up control, but he wouldn’t have wanted to be involved, which of course is the only thing that would have given him some control. ”
“That’s exactly right.” Jack’s brow furrowed. “I think.”
“All right,” Blair said. Time to put Jack out of his misery. “I’m as full as a tick on a hound dog, but can I interest anyone else in pumpkin chiffon pie?”
“Let me help with the cleanup,” Tiffany said when Blair started clearing the table after dessert. Blair had only been intending to take stuff to the kitchen—out of sight, out of mind, right? That was the hope, anyway. And this way, she could tackle it all once everyone was gone.
She hoped this dinner hadn’t been a mistake.
Blair was fully aware that the reason she’d been so lonely lately was that she was avoiding people. She hadn’t wanted anyone to see the state she was in.
But they’d had the loveliest dinner. Her daughter, her best friend, and her… grumpy lodger, Jack. Who was also, somehow, a close friend?
He was, right?
Anyway, it felt like she’d had dinner with three of her favorite people—the only one missing was Cal.
As she’d told Jack once, the cure to loneliness was people.
But the other side of that was that when you had your people around, they saw you.
She was getting the bone-tingly feeling that kitchen cleanup often triggered. Letting people help with cleanup would mean letting them load unscraped dishes into the dishwasher. Letting them use the same sponge for the counters and the dishes.
She tried to deflect Tiff’s offer to help. “I’m fine. I wasn’t even going to worry about the cleanup until tomorrow.”
Could everyone tell she was lying?
“I didn’t bring anything,” Tiffany said. “The least I can do is clean up.”
The cyclone was coming. Her vision was getting a little blurry, and she was getting that compressed-lungs feeling, like she couldn’t get a full breath in. She tried anyway, silently counting her inhalations and exhalations, even though she knew it was futile.
“Come on, I am very skilled at dishwasher loading,” Tiff said.
“Blair likes to do things her way,” Jack said.
Jack’s tone was, on the surface of things, unremarkable. Perhaps a touch teasing. But Blair wasn’t far enough gone that she couldn’t hear… something under the surface.
Blair had never told Jack about the cyclone. He had never witnessed it. But did he know about it anyway?
Why would Jack know about the cyclone? He wasn’t inside her head.
He did manage to write the most carefully observed characters.
But they were fictional. Products of his imagination. Blair was a real person in control of her own life.
And speaking of, she needed to do a better job… what? Hiding? Because that’s what she was doing, right?
No. She was just managing her business, emphasis on her business.
“Hey, Esme,” Jack said, “you want to come to the pool house and work on your résumé?” And to Tiffany: “You should come, too, and see my collection of junk my crow army has brought me.”
“A girl doesn’t say no to an invitation like that,” Tiff said.
There was no reason Jack was inviting everyone else to the pool house other than that he was rescuing her. Jack didn’t like people and wouldn’t normally welcome them into his private space.
He knew.
What could she do, though, but be grateful? What could she do but turn tail and head to her bedroom to wait out the storm?