Chapter 34. Molly
I’m getting better at recognizing my moments of self-sabotage. I’m proud of myself for course correcting.
Of courseI shouldn’t panic at the idea of Seth exploring jobs in Los Angeles. Nothing is set in stone, and it could be incredible if he moved here. We can’t be long-distance forever. I love our marathon phone calls and romantic trips to see each other, but there’s always an undercurrent of sadness: I always, always miss him. Even when we’re together, I know it’s temporary, and I miss him in advance.
I should not let my unease over Dezzie’s crisis ruin what should be a beautiful moment.
What she said on the phone about love is what my therapist would call “reactive.” An understandable point of view given the circumstances, but not one I should internalize.
Still, I woke up at 4:00 a.m., my body’s customary brooding hour, so rattled I never fell back asleep. Instead, I let my mind turn over all the ways Seth and I could fail each other, or hurt each other, or be mortally wounded and die. I know I’m catastrophizing. But catastrophizing is a means of preparation. A way to pre-break your own heart, before someone else does it for you.
In daylight, though, I’m better able to accept that anxiety is not reality. So I take Seth’s hand, lead him back to the car, and kiss him for all I’m worth. Kissing him always makes me feel so much better.
“Want me to drive?” he asks. I think he can tell that I’m wobbly.
“No, I’m good.”
We pull out, and I drive fast over the desert roads, which are nearly empty, given the holiday and the hour. It’s six o’clock by the time we get back to town, and I’m starving.
“Fancy moseying down to the saloon, partner?” I ask Seth.
“I could eat an entire jackrabbit.”
“I think jackrabbit would be gamey and tough.”
“Just how I like it.”
It’s usually hard to get a table at the saloon at night, but the town is sedate this close to Thanksgiving, and we’re seated right away. We proceed to order every fried thing on the menu—pickles, onion rings, wings—plus burgers.
Seth gets up to go to the bathroom and my fingers itch to text Alyssa about him potentially moving here. I’m excited and terrified and it would make me feel better to unpack it with her. But I don’t. Telling Alyssa would distract away from Dezzie’s crisis, and that doesn’t feel right. Plus, it’s not like this is happening immediately. There will be plenty of time to work through my feelings with my friends.
And anyway, maybe it’s healthier if I work through them with, you know, Seth.
“There’s a stuffed roadrunner in the men’s room over the urinals,” he informs me when he gets back. “I felt like it was checking out my dick.”
“Well, I’m sure he was impressed.”
“Yeah. My dick is way bigger than a roadrunner’s.”
“Do we have to speak of roadrunner dick? I’m trying to eat fried pickles here.”
“Oh, sure. What kind of dick do you want to talk about?”
I smile at him and wipe aioli off my mouth with the back of my hand. “The dick who didn’t tell me he’s considering moving to LA.”
“Excuse me!”
“I’m just kidding. I was thinking about it more. How do you think it would work? Would you move into my house?”
He looks delighted to be having this conversation.
“Maybe to start?” he says, like he hasn’t thought about this, though I’m sure he has a whole PowerPoint somewhere. “And then we could see how it feels and whether we need more space?”
“I wouldn’t want to give up my house,” I say quickly. My house, in my name, is my security. I learned that the hard way from my mom. “But maybe I could keep it as a rental. And we could buy a bigger place somewhere nearby. Hmm, but traffic. Where are the firms you’re talking to?”
“Downtown.”
“Oh, that’s only twenty minutes away if you time it right.”
He nods. “Yeah. I looked into it before I reached out to them. I know how you feel about going to the West Side.”
I’ve lived in Northeast LA the entire time I’ve been on the West Coast, and at this point anywhere west of Silver Lake feels like it might as well be in Patagonia.
“Did you tell your parents about this?” I ask.
“Only Dave.”
“Is he rabidly opposed?”
I know that Dave still doesn’t trust me, even if Seth won’t admit it.
“He thinks I should do what makes me happy. And you make me astonishingly happy.”
Astonishingly happy.Sometimes I am so in love with this man it makes me woozy.
We can do this, I think. You, Molly Marks, can do this.
“Will you have to retake the bar?” I ask.
“Yeah. But I’m really good at standardized tests, as you know.”
I do know. He got a perfect SAT score. Still galls me to this day.
Suddenly, I’m excited. Genuinely happy for the first time since I heard Dezzie’s news.
“I’m really grateful you’re considering this,” I say.
He’s midsip of beer, and his eyes widen over his glass. He comes up for air with a froth mustache. “You are?”
“Yeah. I mean, we can’t keep commuting back and forth like this forever. And I know it would technically be easier for me to move to Chicago, since I can write from anywhere.”
“But you love it here. The more I see you in your zone, the more I know it wouldn’t make sense for you to leave. I want you to be somewhere you’re happy.”
“Maybe we can get Dezzie to move out here.”
His eyes are so bright and happy. It feels like we’re actually doing this.
We finish our meal and go home and make love.
Afterward, Seth lights a fire in the fire pit while I call Dezzie. She doesn’t pick up. She must be sleeping.
A very selfish part of me is glad. I want to be there for her, but I don’t want to diminish the loveliness of this night with sadness. I want to snuggle up with Seth under the stars.
And I do.
We go to bed early and sleep in ’til the luxuriant hour of 10:00 a.m. Seth’s arms are around me when I open my eyes. He didn’t get up to go running, which is unusual.
“You’re here,” I say happily.
He pulls me tight against him. “I’m here.”
We hold each other for a while, and then he goes to make breakfast. I look at my phone and see a text from Dezzie asking if I can talk.
I go outside to call her.
“Hey, love,” I say when she picks up. “How are you doing?”
Her voice is a croak as she tells me how poorly she slept, how much she misses Rob even though she hates him.
“Molls, I just want him to come back. Isn’t that sick?”
“Oh, sweets. It’s not sick. You still love him.”
“But I should despise him. I do despise him.”
“Two things can be true at once. They probably will be for a long time.”
Her mom comes and grabs her to help with cooking, and I promise to call her later.
Which is my cue to start cooking too.
I go to the kitchen, where Seth has left me coffee, a plate of bacon, and a muffin, like an angel. I munch on it and muse over what to do first. I need to pull the hens out of the brine and stuff them, shell beans, make garlic butter, braise the cranberries… I get lost for an hour in food prep, humming to myself, content.
In the living room, Seth is FaceTiming with his family, who are at Dave and Clara’s. I can hear the boys screaming through the phone all the way from the kitchen. I smile to myself as Seth giggles with them.
“Hold on,” he says. “I’m going to put Molly on.”
He walks in with his entire family peering out from his phone.
“Happy Thanksgiving, Molly!” they chorus.
“Happy Thanksgiving to you!”
“Doesn’t Molly look so cute stuffing apple slices up the butts of tiny chickens?” Seth asks.
“Molly would look gorgeous stuffing any butts,” his dad says.
I choke. “Is that a sex joke?” I mouth to Seth.
He makes a horrified face. “I think so,” he mouths back.
“Grandpa said butts!” Max screams.
“Lucky you,” Clara say dryly.
“All right, fam. I gotta help Molly with butt stuff,” Seth says, pinching my ass. “We miss you.”
“Love to you both!” Barb calls.
Seth hangs up, laughing. “Pure chaos over there.”
“Are you regretting not going?”
“Not even a little bit,” he says, wrapping his arms around me and kissing my neck. “Now, what can I do to help?”
I put him to work peeling and slicing potatoes for the gratin while I grate cheese and chop onions. Cooking elaborate meals with Seth is a joy. Maybe, I think, as I watch him squint at the potatoes to cut them as thin as possible, I really do want this.
Full-time.
Full stop.
Forever.
“Spuds chopped, chef,” Seth says, presenting me with a cutting board of potatoes sliced with such precision they’re nearly translucent.
“Beautiful work.”
“Is it weird that I’m sad we’re not making green bean casserole? Are you sure we don’t want green bean casserole?”
“I told you. No beige, cream-of-mushroom-soup-based foods are allowed.”
He sighs tragically. “Your loss, McMarkson. What else can I do?”
“We’re good for now.”
“Mind if I explore around the property? I’m a little antsy since I didn’t run.”
“Of course.”
I focus on assembling the layers of the gratin, adding dots of butter and sprinkles of flour and pepper and salt and thyme and Parmesan. It’s meditative, and I feel content.
I put it in the oven. That’s the last of my prep, so I decide to call my mom.
“Hello, darling daughter!” she trills into the phone. “I’m hosting lunch for Bruce’s family and we have a houseful at the moment. Can I call you back in a few hours?”
“You little scamp! You didn’t tell me you were meeting his family!”
She giggles. “Surprise!”
She finally introduced me to her boyfriend when I was in Florida for Jon and Kevin’s wedding. He’s a soft-spoken retired financial advisor with kind eyes who dotes on my mother and told me about all her latest sales achievements with so much pride and excitement I wonder how she ever fell for my dad.
Look at us. The Marks women, in healthy relationships with men we love.
“Okay, Mom,” I say. “Let me know how it goes. Love you.”
Just as I end the call, I get an incoming one from my father.
Well that’s out of character. He usually doesn’t even text on Thanksgiving, let alone phone me. Things have been polite, if a bit strained, since the scene at the airport, which we’ve tacitly agreed to pretend never happened. When I saw him in LA we stuck mostly to business—him not asking about Seth, me not inquiring about Celeste.
I did not try to hug him.
But he’s had surprisingly detailed notes on my drafts of the screenplay, and I can’t help but take a certain satisfaction in his close attention to my work. Apparently, it took a script to get me a seat at the table when it comes to receiving his respect. I wish simply being his daughter would have conferred that privilege. But he is who he is.
“Hi, Dad,” I say. “Happy Thanksgiving.”
“Thanks, toots. Same to you.”
“What are you doing to celebrate?” I ask.
“We sailed down to Key West. We’re not turkey people.”
I’m not sure if he means Celeste or Savannah, so I just say, “No, me neither. I’m making Cornish game hens.”
“Will you be serving it with Kathy’s artery-clogging gratin?”
I breathe through this dig at my mother. “And a shitload of wine.”
We can at least agree on wine.
“Well, listen, toots,” he says. “I wanted to give you a quick update on Busted.”
Ah. That would explain why he deigned to call. Trust Roger Marks to materialize with demands at the rudest time possible. At least I can stop worrying about it.
“Hold on, let me grab my notebook,” I say, brushing flour off my hands.
“No need,” he says. “I’ll make it quick.”
I get a bad feeling. When it comes to his vaunted work, he’s never quick. “Okay. What’s up?”
“Scott has decided to go in a different direction.”
I relax. Just more revisions. I don’t mind. Editing is my favorite part of writing.
“No worries,” I say. “Should we set up a call to discuss it, or will he send notes?”
“Top-line is he thinks your version is too feminine. So you can stand down.”
“Stand down?”
There’s a very, very long pause.
“Lion Remnick is going to take over from here.”
Lion Remnick is a leading writer of superhero movies, car chase movies, and other movies in which things frequently explode. He’s not even a hack. He’s good at it. He’s the kind of person whose success I compare with my own, and come up short.
It’s not shocking for a script to change hands midway through development. It’s happened to me plenty of times before.
But this script is for my father.
“Wait, is this Scott’s decision?” I ask, my voice shaking. “You’re an executive producer. He can’t just fire me if you don’t agree with him.”
“I do agree with him,” he says flatly. “In fact, if you must know, I’ve had misgivings since the previous draft, and Lion became available unexpectedly, so—”
“So you brought on someone else behind my back? Because I’m too feminine? Isn’t that why you hired me in the first place? To write a woman who wasn’t just a stick figure with botched boobs?”
“Look, Molly, it’s show business. I shouldn’t have to tell you it doesn’t always work out.” The implication being, of course, that nothing of mine has worked out in a while. Not that he would be impressed with another rom-com even if it had.
“Are you serious, Dad?” I yell into my phone.
“You’ll still get paid your fee, of course,” he says calmly. Like this is about money.
“I don’t care about my fee. I care that my own father is firing me on Thanksgiving.”
“It’s not personal, Molly,” he says with a long-suffering sigh. “I have to do what’s right for the franchise.”
I shake my head at my own reflection in the kitchen window, because I need someone to join me in marveling at how offensive this is.
“Okay, it might not be personal to you. But does it occur to you that it’s personal to me? Do I register to you as a human being at all?”
“We can talk about this later, when you’ve calmed down.”
The suggestion that I’m being irrationally emotional makes me feel irrationally emotional.
I’m not done with this conversation. I am sick to death of being rejected by this man. And for once, I don’t want to make a joke or flee the conversation or numb out with Xanax and wine. Maybe it’s Seth’s fault—his insistence on communication. Maybe it’s Rob’s fault—I’ve had enough shitty men for one weekend. But I want to air my fury. I want to let my father know he’s not off the hook for hurting me.
“No, wait,” I say. “I have a question for you.”
He sighs. “And what’s that?”
“Why didn’t you take care of me?”
“What—”
“When you left.”
“Excuse me? Where is this coming from, Molly?”
“I suppose it’s coming from two decades of biting my fucking tongue while getting hurt over and over.”
“Don’t be dramatic,” he snaps. “I know the divorce wasn’t easy on any of us, but—”
“You left me with Mom. Who you knew was losing her mind and could barely take care of herself, let alone your thirteen-year-old. And you just left me to deal with it.”
“If I recall, you didn’t want to see me.”
“Yeah, I was a kid and you broke my heart. It was on you to fix it. And you didn’t even try to get partial custody.”
I’m not sure I’ve ever admitted to myself how much that devastated me.
“The situation was more complicated than that, as I’m sure you can imagine now that you’re an adult,” he says.
But I can’t. If I had a child, I’d put on steel-toed boots and chain mail to fight for them. I’d salt the fucking earth.
“Seeing your kid is not that complicated,” I say. “You abandoned me. You never have my back. Not even with your preposterous movie.”
“I’m not abandoning you. This was a professional arrangement with the attendant uncertainties that entails, and if you’re not enough of an adult to handle it, it just proves we’re making the right decision.”
“The ‘attendant uncertainties’? My God, you’re such a dick.”
“That’s enough,” my father yells. “Happy Thanksgiving, Molly. I’m hanging up.”
The line goes dead.
I throw the phone on the counter, hardly able to breathe.
I hate him. I hate him so much. I hate that his love is conditional. That he doesn’t give a shit about me. That he always fucking leaves.
But then, is that surprising? They all fucking leave.
The phone starts buzzing.
Unbelievably, my first thought is that it must be my father calling back to apologize, because hanging up on me is brutal even for him.
But, of course, it’s not.
It’s Dezzie.
I don’t want to answer it. I want to lie down on the cold kitchen floor and cry.
But she needs me, and I love her, so I pick up.
“Hey, my love,” I say, trying not to betray how upset I am. “How are you?”
“Horrible,” she says in a thick, hoarse voice. I can’t tell if she’s been drinking or crying or both.
“Mad,” she goes on. “Mad, bad, sad.”
“I’m sorry,” I say. “Did you have lunch with your family?”
“Yeah. They’re being sweet. Which almost makes it worse. I don’t want pity.”
“I know exactly what you mean,” I say, thinking of Seth. I don’t want his sympathy about what just happened with my father. He already had his hackles up about me working for him. I can’t stand to think of the look in his eyes when he finds out he was right to be wary. He’ll be apoplectic. My pain is too raw to handle his anger too.
I’ve felt enough feelings this weekend to last me the rest of my life.
“Don’t ever get married, Molly,” Dezzie slurs. “Promise me. Make me a blood oath.”
I think of my father, pulling out of the driveway in his shiny BMW, leaving me sobbing and my mom catatonic. I think of Rob, fucking some woman while trying to get his wife pregnant.
And I think of my boyfriend, who abets men just like them. My boyfriend, who spends every day of his life helping people turn on each other, abandon their promises. My boyfriend, who is perfect until, inevitably, he’s not.
The reality of this makes my heart pound in my chest. It makes me want to sob.
I’ve been trying so hard to believe that what I feel for Seth won’t end in my emotional slaughter.
But it’s pretty hard not to see today’s bitter truth: the more you trust, the more you stand to lose.
“Don’t worry, Dezzie,” I say. “Refraining from marriage should not be a problem.”
“Good. Because I don’t ever want you to feel like this. I don’t want anyone to.”
“Me neither, my friend.”
She yawns. “I had too much wine. I think I need to pass out.”
“Okay. Take a nap. I’ll call you tonight.”