40. Anna
ANNA
My mother drives the Mercedes from Montana.
She calls me from the road every few hours. She has the top down.
She pulls up to the house on a Tuesday afternoon.
I'm on the terrace when I hear the gate open. I come down through the front door. She's looking up at the house with the expression of someone taking inventory of a situation she has opinions about.
I come outside.
She hands me the duffel bag.
“I don’t like driving with seventy-five thousand dollars of cash in my trunk.”
“Okay mom, I promise to never ask you to do that again.”
"Thank you. It’s very glass," she says. "You can see everything."
"That's the point."
"Everyone can see you too."
"That's the second point."
She looks at me. At my stomach. Something in her face moves.
She hugs me. Long and tight.
Zeke comes out and inserts himself into the hug without being invited.
"That's Zeke."
He barks at her.
"Zeke, stop it."
She reaches down and scratches his ears with the practiced efficiency of a woman who has been a dog person her whole life and doesn't make a big deal about it.
"Good dog," she says.
He decides she's acceptable.
Nina makes dinner.
My mother sits at the kitchen counter and watches her with the focused attention she brings to depositions.
"What are you making?" she says.
"Chicken," Nina says.
"How?"
Nina tells her.
My mother nods. They are two women who respect competence and recognize it in each other. By the time dinner is ready they have established some kind of unspoken agreement about how the kitchen works.
I stay out of it.
We eat on the terrace. The city below. The night warm and clear.
My mother asks me about the pregnancy. About the doctor. About my plans for the next few months. She asks the way she asks everything — directly, with a legal pad's worth of follow-up questions implied underneath each one.
I answer everything.
She listens.
At some point she looks out at the city.
"It's something," she says.
"It is."
"I can see why you stayed."
I look at her.
"For a while I couldn't," she says. "Understand it. All of it. Why you'd put yourself through—" She stops. "But sitting here I can see it."
"It took me a while too," I say.
She reaches over and puts her hand on mine.
We stay out there until the city goes to its version of quiet, which is never fully quiet but gets close enough.
Delia calls with a commercial audition. It's for a pregnant mom. She sends me the breakdown.
Real women. Real pregnancies. Looking for authentic, relatable, confident. Not perfect.
I go on the audition. My mother comes with me. It's easy.
We go to lunch after and I show her LA. I take her to The Cut, Wolfgang Puck's steakhouse in Beverly Hills. She loved it.
The Sentinel finished shooting in Morocco. There are a few scenes left to do in LA.
Luke arrives on Friday.
He comes through the front door with his bags and finds me and my mother at the kitchen counter going over something on her laptop — she's been helping me review a contract, because apparently Beth Simons cannot be in a house with an unreviewed contract without intervening.
He stops in the doorway.
My mother looks up from the laptop.
They look at each other.
"Luke," she says.
"Beth," he says.
He sets his bags down. Crosses the room. She extends her hand.
Luke hugs her. I can tell my mother is not comfortable with that. She stiffens.
He plants a good kiss on me. I needed it.
We sit on the couch and they talk. My mother's philosophy of trust but verify is in full effect.
Luke is polite. He doesn't tell her to fuck off.
She watched all of his movies in the past few weeks. She comments on how often he has his shirt off.
"Of your twenty-three movies you've had your shirt off in sixteen of them."
"You counted?"
"I did."
"Cool," Luke says.
"Let me help you unpack,” I say to end the discussion.
The week is good.
My mother and Luke find each other at six in the morning — both early risers, both people who treat the beginning of the day as something to be used. I come downstairs on the third morning to find them at the kitchen counter, coffee between them, talking about something I can't hear.
I sit.
"What?" I say.
“You probably won’t ever tell him this,” my mother says, looking at me instead of Luke, “but her father left me when I was pregnant with her.”
Her eyes fill before the sentence is finished.
“Mom,” I say.
She wipes under one eye with the side of her finger, angry at the tear for getting out.
“It’s all right,” she says.
Luke doesn’t move. He doesn’t try to fill the silence with something clever.
“I didn’t know,” he says.
“No,” my mother says.
She takes a breath and looks back at him.
“So it’s going to take me a while to get used to the idea of you taking care of my daughter. Not because I think you’re him. Because I know what it costs when a man says he’ll stay and doesn’t.”
Luke’s face changes.
“Is he still alive?” he asks.
“He passed away a few years ago.”
Luke nods once.
He walks to my mother and puts his arms around her.
For one second, she stays stiff.
Then she breaks.
And now my mother and I are both crying.
They watch football on Sunday. My mother cheers for the Broncos and has opinions about the game that she delivers without preamble. Luke has counter-opinions. Neither of them yields.
I sit with them and don't watch the game and watch them instead.
This is what it looks like. A family being figured out in real time.
My mother leaves on a Thursday we drive my mother to the airport.
She hugs Luke when she goes. A real hug, both arms. She doesn't say anything about it.
Neither does he.
"He's good," she says.
"Yeah, yeah, yeah.”
"Don't let him forget it."
Luke drives me to my commercial shoot.
He waits outside while they set up. When they're ready, he comes in and stands at the back of the room, out of the way, watching.
It's a simple spot. A kitchen. Morning light. Coffee. My hand on my stomach. One line to camera.
The director is a woman named Claire who shakes my hand and says she loved my self-tape and means it.
We shoot it in two hours.
On the last take Claire says quietly to her AD, "We’re good."
He has the car ready when I’m done changing.
The diner is exactly the same. Same booths. Same linoleum. Same smell of coffee and something on the griddle.
We slide into a booth in the back.
I go say hi to the manager.
A young woman comes over with menus. Early twenties. The particular look of someone who is here but somewhere else in her head at the same time.
She looks at me. Then at Luke.
Her eyes go wide for just a second before she pulls it back.
"Can I get you something to drink?" she says.
"Coffee," I say.
"Same," Luke says.
She goes to get it.
I look around the diner. The counter where I used to count my tips. The service station where Chloe found me between tables. The door I walked out of the day Luke came in and called my name across the floor.
The girl comes back with the coffee.
She sets it down carefully. Hesitates.
"Can I ask you something?"
"Sure," I say.
"I'm a huge fan. I'm an actress." She glances at Luke, then back at me. "I've been here two months and I just — do you have any advice?"
I look at her.
She's twenty-two maybe. The particular look of someone who moved here on a dream.
I know that look.
"Just know, you are more than enough."
"Thanks," she smiles.
"What can I get you?"
We order.
I wave Doug over.
He sits with us. He tells Luke why he hired me. “She was half an hour early for her interview and her resume was on the most beautiful paper stock I’d ever seen.”
“I had to represent.”
“And I remember thinking; this one is going places.”
He points to my belly. “Look at you now.”
“Look at me now,” I squeeze his hand.
We laugh.