Page 72 of The Rom-Commers

And then I’d wonder if I’d fallen asleep at the table or something. Because no writer ever thinks that what somebody else wrotemight be better.

Astonishing.

The routine just evolved. We’d work all morning, and then sometime in the early afternoon, when we were both losing steam, I’d walk to the neighborhood coffee shop—just two blocks away, if you knewwhere to go—for a change of scenery and a little me time, and he’d field meetings and phone calls from a roster of Hollywood people that read like the invite list to the Oscars.

For the most part, we were surprisingly companionable. For a guy who didn’t care at all about the project we were working on, he seemed to be enjoying himself quite well—enough to make me wonder if there might be an overlap in the separate-circle Venn diagram of our lives: the joy of messing around with words.

Maybe the project didn’t matter.

Maybe the act of writing was so fun he couldn’t help but enjoy himself.

I was enjoying myself, too, to be honest.

Being away from home was not as hard as I’d feared.

To no one’s surprise, Salvador never managed to find his own place, and he and Sylvie FaceTimed me in their pajamas first thing every morning with the Dad Report: daily sodium totals, updates on refills, visual proof of color and sticker charts faithfully filled in. Salvador was taking my dad to the gym down the street twice a week for weight training, and he’d perfected a low-sodium artisan bread. Salvador also played the guitar—which delighted my dad—so the three of them were having nightly after-dinner jam sessions with Sylvie on vocals and tambourine.

I was forced to admit, as the days went on and the good reports kept coming, that two people doing all that caretaking was probably better than just one. More fun, too, apparently. The three of them even ventured to the farmers market one Saturday, bought a whole basket of organic veggies, and made pasta primavera from scratch.

Sylvie sent a group selfie of them slurping linguine at our dining table.

Knowing that helped me worry less. A little. And the less I worried, the more I realized how good it felt not to be worried. It was astonishing how quickly I adjusted to my new life of luxury in Charlie Yates’s mansion. I was fine, they were fine—everybody was fine.

How hard is it to adjust to that?

The one thing I missed at first was cooking. Charlie was—how to put it?—not a foodie.

My second day there, I got the shock of a lifetime when I opened up his fridge—and there was nothing inside it but… luncheon meats.

Yep. Bags of shredded luncheon meats from the grocery deli.

I leaned against the open fridge door. “What’s going on in here?” I asked, when Charlie looked over.

“In the fridge?” he asked.

“There’s no food,” I said.

“There is,” Charlie said, walking a little closer. “There’s pastrami. And corned beef. And Black Forest ham.” He peered at the back. “And those are cocktail olives.”

“You don’t have anything else? That’s it?”

“There’s some beer in the door.”

“But…” I just kept staring at all that meat. “What do you do with it?”

“I just eat it,” Charlie said matter-of-factly, like that was a thing people did.

“Straight?” I asked. “Like, just… handfuls of meat?”

“Forkfuls,”Charlie corrected, like he was offended. “Though, I do mostly eat them right out of the bag, if I’m honest.”

“Charlie, this can’t be healthy for you.”

“It’s fine,” Charlie said. “The Maasai people of Kenya lived in perfect health for centuries on almost nothing but meat.”

“But notpastrami, right?”

“Fair enough.”

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