Page 89 of Love Scenes

First it’s Tyler,who wasn’t lying when she said she was close by. Then Melanie and Sarai. Then Powell. And eventually Mom and Guy roll up, Mom taking a clean five minutes to decompress from all the traffic they battled to get here.

The staff kicks all of us, except for Daya, out of Dad’s room and into the waiting area. It’s not every day an entire family rolls up for a scheduled appointment. We Porter-Davidson-Cicero-Fords spreadourselves out around the waiting room, killing time by telling stories and making each other laugh.

Tyler and I team up against Powell, ripping into him for leaving an earnest comment on Celine Dion’s YouTube page of all places.

“I don’t understand how you even found that!” he protests, cheeks red as raspberries.

Sarai springs up. “It was me,” she admits. “Your iPad was unlocked when I was over last week. I texted them.”

“You two finally corrupted her.” Powell sneers at me. Tyler and I are in stitches. “I hate all of you. Including you, sweet precious baby Sarai.”

Sarai beams. An official member of the Pick On Powell Club.

Daya comes out to give an update, which isn’t much at all. They’re being a little tight-lipped yet optimistic, she says, and they want Dad to come back for another appointment soon. Everyone here takes in this news with a hint of solemnity, processing for the second time this year that something really could happen to the golden boy of our family. The glue that’s pieced these strange fragmented groups together.

My whole life has been about movies. But real life doesn’t always end in periods or exclamation points. Real life throws out questions with no intention of ever answering them. My perfectly healthy, relatively young father got dealt an ellipsis with the heart attack, and there are a million ways that sentence gets finished. No matter where we end up, we will face it as a family. A big, strange, imperfect family, showing up when needed.

Mom finds me as we’re all leaving for the day. She links us up arm in arm to walk me to my car. “Any good parts coming your way since we wrapped?”

“I’m kind of into that period piece I went in for last week,” I tell her. “Shoots in England at the start of next year.”

“That would be fun. I love Europe in the winter.” She turns me toward her. “Have you talked to him?”

My defense mechanism rears up, chest puffing out, chin held high. “Who?”

Mom reacts with the fearsome look I became well acquainted with on set,the face of a woman so allergic to bullshit she can make it disappear through sheer willpower alone.

“No,” I admit. “I haven’t.”

“If that’s because of me, then why on earth have you chosen now of all times to listen to your mother?” She sweeps my hair—still blond, but darker now—out of my eyes.

“It wasn’t you. Joe and I were caught up in the whole ‘set-life costar make-believe’ thing,” I rattle off. “It wasn’t real.”

“Oh for fuck’s sake, Sloane. Look at who your parents are! Of course it’s real!”

I want to react, but there’s nothing to say.

“You should know this,” she tells me. “The first thing Joe ever did when he came in to read for the movie was apologize to all of us for how he treated you in Ireland. He did it so effortlessly, I really thought it must’ve been less of a deal than you’d made it, because in all my life, I’ve never seen a man bethathumbled that easily. He spoke very highly of you that day. Even told us all what he really remembered from that shoot was the music you used to play in your trailer. He said listening to it always made him think of you. American rock, he called it. I wanted to tell him it was white dad rock and your father didn’t let me play enough Joni Mitchell for you as a child, but I let it be.”

It’s so much to take in at once. My mind scrambles to reassemble my relationship with Joe, layering in what my mom’s justtold me with everything that happened during our shoot. All those visits to his trailer with classics playing. That night in his car, when he didn’t know Steely Dan.

He was doing all of that for me.

Mom softens. “Honey, that man is head over heels for you. And if we all have to listen to your sniveling ex sing about you smoking up a mirror every time we turn on the radio, then at least do us all the favor of going after someone who really cares for you this time around.”

She kisses me on the forehead, leaving me to unravel.

25

If you don’t stop right now, I’m going to sock you,” Tyler tells me, eyes on the road.

“I’m sorry,” I say again, the last refrain in my chorus of apologies.

She makes a fist.

“All right, all right. It’s just, maybe we should forget about this? Turn around. Pick up a pizza. Watch our old movies. You know?”

“No.”