He freezes. “You have to go back already?”
“It’s a big movie. The biggest thing I’ve ever done. It might win an Oscar.” It’s not even cast yet, but here I am, saying it.
“Oscar, huh?” He drops my hand. “So, youarea big shot. I reckon you won’t have time for a pissant little town like Glass.”
His words cut me. “But I’ve been here. Helping. I made wreaths. Set up your tents.”
“Sure, right till you have to run back to the city. I can’t have a wife who takes off for LA every time she has a damn meeting.”
I take a step back. I’ve forgotten my most critical lessons. The men need to feel important. I can’t be bigger than they are. They don’t function well when they feel small. “I can do most of it from here, but sometimes I have to be there. Or New York.”
He grunts. “New York. A girl like you. From Alabama. In New York.”
“It’s just a city.”
“What if we have kids? You gonna leave them to jet off to some Hollywood party?”
“We don’t know that it will happen that way.” I can argue about how he shouldn’t diminish me, but in this, he’s right. I haven’t thought ahead to how trying to stay relevant in the business would affect having a family.
Maybe I do want more than a small-town bed-and-breakfast.
He scuffs his boot on the rough floor. “I reckon you can’t see the problem because you aren’t a family type. You don’t think about your community. You think about your job.”
Why is he pushing me like this? He barely knows me! Is he this thrown off to learn that I have a life outside Glass? That maybe I’m good at something other than ribbon wreaths?
My anger gets ahead of me, a very dangerous place for it to go. And I say it. I don’t want to. But my mouth is way out in front. “At least I have a job. A real one. One that pays for me to have a place to sleep that isn’t a mattress in a hidden room of an old house!”
He sniffs. “You’ve been snooping around.”
“I was putting away the items from the tea I worked foryour family.”
His expression is dark.
And that’s it.
I already know.
There will be no happily ever after in Glass, Wyoming.
The small-town life isn’t going to be for me.
Maybe my faith really is going to wither.
Or maybe some random actress pretending to be a fortune teller sent me on a dumb, pointless mission based on fear.
“Tell Grandmama that I will sadly have to turn down her kind offer for lunch,” I say. “It’s clearly time for me to go.”
For a moment, I think he’ll relent. He bites his lip and adjusts his ball cap nervously, like he knows he’s done the wrong thing.
Maybe this was just the dark moment, the part of every movie where dejection sets in, the sad music plays, and it seems impossible for the couple to be together. The tension before the big finish.
But the script is all garbled, a complicated mess that will have to be edited.
Randy gestures for the door. “Well, go on, then. Back to Hollywood.”
I’m tired of this. Tired of people telling me what I can and can’t do. Who I am. What I am. Desdemona. G-spot. Simon. Randy. My father.
I want my mother.