Page 4 of Lucky Star

Chapter Three

Cameron

“Knock, knock.” I stepped into the foyer of my parents’ farmhouse in rural Ohio. I hadn’t given them notice that I was coming so I expected some level of surprise once they realized I was here. What I hadn’t anticipated was my niece throwing a frying pan at me before running into the kitchen screaming “Call 911! There’s an intruder in the house!” at the top of her lungs.

Nor had I expected to come face to face with my dad and his trusty .22 caliber rifle aimed squarely at my chest. Once he saw I the intruder in question, Dad took his finger off the trigger, dropped the gun to his side, and ran a hand through his hair with a loud sigh.

“Good lord, you scared the crap out of us.” He looked down at the floor, taking in the pan and its scattered contents—scrambled eggs, from the looks of it—and shook his head ruefully. Craning his neck, he called back toward the kitchen, “It’s okay Gloria; it’s just your Uncle Cameron. Now get back out here and welcome him properly.”

A small, pinched face peeked out from around the door jamb. “Uncle Cameron? Is that really you?”

“Hey, Gloria.” I lifted a hand in greeting as I held back my laughter. Her attack-by-frying-pan had caught me unaware, but now that her screaming had stopped—and I no longer had a gun pointed at my chest—I could see humor in the situation. “Sorry to have frightened you.”

Gloria stepped out from behind the door and stood alongside my dad. Clasping his much larger hand with her tiny one, she peered up at me through dubious eyes and commanded me not to do it again. “I wouldn’t want to have to hit you with it the next time,” she said, scooping up the skillet.

Even before my sister Daphne and my brother-in-law John had died in a freak car accident two years ago leaving my parents to raise their only child, I’d thought Gloria was a strange kid. She looked like an eight-year-old little girl, and her voice sounded like one too, but since she’d learned to talk she’d reminded me of a tiny replica of my great-grandmother, god rest her soul. Today, Gloria wore a strand of pearls draped around her little neck and a pillbox hat that had been Grandma Edith’s.

Dad raised his eyebrows in silent question, and I flicked my eyes toward Gloria and then the other room, an unspoken signal we should speak without her eavesdropping. It wasn’t just Gloria’s attire and mannerisms that skewed little old lady. She was also a raging gossip.

“Gloria, you clean this mess and then go collect the eggs from the chicken coop. When you’re done with that, you can make a sandwich and watch Matlock.”

“Matlock?” I mouthed, but my dad just rolled his eyes and mouthed back, “Don’t ask.”

Once Gloria had gone outside, humming the theme to Golden Girls as she left, my dad turned to me. “Is something wrong? It’s not like you to show up unannounced. Not that we aren’t happy to see you, mind.”

We ambled into the living room at the front of the house, and I took a seat in my favorite chair. Dad settled into his own, and I glanced around for signs of my mom’s presence in the house. I didn’t hear her puttering around upstairs or the radio going in the kitchen.

“Is mom home?”

“No,” he answered, looking down at his watch. “But she should be back any minute. She ran down to the garden center to pick up some Sluggo. You know we prefer the garden to be one hundred percent organic, but those bastards are doing a number on her tomato and zucchini plants this year. She’s reached the end of her rope.” He rested his arms over his stomach, drawing my eyes to the paunch he’d developed since I’d last seen him seven months before.

At sixty-eight, my dad was in excellent shape for his age, his body stronger than men half his age, but that slightly rounded belly indicated he was starting to slow down, maybe not getting as much exercise as he had before. Not that I begrudged him taking it easy. From the time I was a baby until I’d moved out at eighteen, he’d been one of the hardest working men I knew. And he’d continued working that hard even after I’d left home. From my earliest memory, he’d left the house before dawn and returned home only minutes before my mom set the table for dinner. From sun up to sun down he toiled the earth and raised our animals, all to rebuild the Scott family business.

There’d been a time—before I’d been born, and he’d taken over from my grandfather—that the farm had been in danger of going under. But by sheer force of will and determination, he and my mom had managed to hold things together. Today, markets all over Ohio and Northern Kentucky clamored for our free-range meat and organic produce. I would have said the man was invincible, but the signs of aging I saw in him now made me reconsider that stance.

Broaching the subject as diplomatically as I could, I asked, “How much help do you have around the farm these days?”

He laughed. “Why, you thinking of giving up Hollywood to come home?”

When I’d told my parents I’d decided to move to New York for a year instead of starting my freshman year at Ohio State, they’d supported my decision. And when I’d returned at twenty with a hefty bank account but worn out from the hectic pace of being a runway model, they’d welcomed me home with open arms. After a summer spent working the farm, I’d given community college a try before being re-discovered by a Hollywood agent after I’d signed up as extra in a comic book movie that had been filmed in Cleveland.

Through all the ups and downs of my career, he’d never pressured me to give up, to come home and take up the family business.

And yet, it was something I was considering. If things didn’t start looking up soon, it might be my only option. Instead of admitting that, however, I chuckled and said it’d happen when our pigs learned to fly.

“It’s not a bad life, you know?” he asked, his voice turning serious.

“I know, Dad. I’ve still got options out in L.A.”

He was silent for a few beats and then answered my earlier question. “We’ve got seasonal help for the animals. But your mother and I, we’re not as young as we used to be.” He patted his paunch with a wry twist of his lips. “I’m working on a deal with the community college to hire some of their ag students at reduced pay for credit toward their courses.”

I was about to ask how that would work when my mom sailed into the room and asked breezily, “Who’s not as young as they used to be?” Leaning down to place a kiss on my dad’s cheek, she turned to me and beamed. “I’m still considered a spring chicken, aren’t I, Cameron?”

Meeting her in the middle of the room, I pulled her into a tight embrace and swung her in a circle. “It’s good to see you, Mom.”

With all of the soul-searching I’d been doing lately, I’d thought long and hard about what I wanted for my future. I didn’t know if it lay in California or back here in Ohio, but I definitely wanted to spend more time with my family.

And I wanted a marriage just like my parents had.

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