They swarmed around the entrance to the movie theater. Stanchions bordered a real red carpet rolled up to the entrance. Police directed traffic, cars moving at a snail’s pace, peppered with frustrated motorists hitting horns.
Dad swore at sight of the mess and drove around the far edges of the mall parking lot, and around the ShopKo on the farthest east end of the structure, hoping to find a spot around back. A Ford truck with a stuttering muffler pulled out of a space on the farthest reaches of the back lot just as we drove up. Dad swung into the open spot, the first we’d seen, killed the engine and sighed.
“Hopefully just finding parking is the only stressful part of the night,” I said.
He nodded. He didn’t look like he bought into it though.
In order to meet local demand for the premiere, every single screen at the Royal Cinema would be showing Small Town Girl at 6:00 pm. Only those with a special pass would be admitted to the main theater where Maddy and Jack would sit. The post-premiere party would be held out at the Ashmond Country Club. Though invitations to the latter were hard to come by - and I’d rather skip seeing people try to look elegant while sipping champagne - several charities would benefit from the party proceeds.
Conveniently, The Wagon Wheel was open for lunch and then closed until dinner. It’d been ‘rented’ out for our purposes until 6 pm although we’d all be inside the theater well before the top of the hour.
Dad and I walked up to the restaurant back entrance. Dad knocked on the door. Nervous, I looked around, wondering what anyone would think seeing a silver-haired man in a suit and a girl in a green dress knocking on the back door of a restaurant that everyone knew wasn’t open to the public for another hour.
Dad took a step back as the door opened. One of the Lucentology security personnel glowered out at us. Other Sam. He ticked his head on his thick neck, taking in sight of both of us.
Inside the restaurant Aster and Nawzat stood side by side, talking intimately, soldiers in arms. The Wagon Wheel owner was easily recognizable. He was in all the ads for the restaurants. He sat at a table, seemingly gobsmacked to be sharing a booth with Jack Ford. Horace and a younger man, the spitting image of the owner’s thick neck and receding hairline, also shared the booth.
“Where’s Maddy?” I asked Dad like he had intel different from mine.
Dina approached us. She looked me up and down and smiled slightly like she couldn’t believe it possible I cleaned up even half this good.
“Madeline is in the rest room.”
It was like she read our minds. She’d been too far away to have heard me ask Dad. She must’ve just seen us looking around and interpreted our looks.
Dina leaned in closer to me and added, “She’s been in there for awhile.”
I took it as a cue. I looked at Dad and he nodded at me like I should definitely go and see how Maddy was doing.
The only movie star Eaton had ever produced stared at her reflection in the ladies room mirror. Her eyes were red and the tears she’d produced had worked in recognizable tracks the length of her face, cheeks to chin.
At sight of me, she wiped her nose, snuffled, and said, “Hey, Squirt.”
I raised my hand and wobbled it back and forth in greeting.
“Wow.” Maddy turned and looked at me. “Wow. Look at you in that.”
She walked up to me and grabbed my shoulders and then turned me around like a designer checking out her work on a model.
“I don’t have the legs to make that dress work. You definitely do.”
“Thanks.”
She laughed. “Did Herman see you in the dress?”
“Sherman?”
“Sorry.”
“No. It’s all right. And no,” I said. “He hasn’t seen me yet.” I held out my arm and waggled it. “He did give me this.”
“Nice. Sparkly.”
I dropped my hand and stepped closer to her.
“Are you all right?”
She smiled.
“You mean other than the crying? And missing Mom so much it feels like I’m all hollow inside?”
More tears threatened to fall, but she tipped her head back to keep them at bay.
“It’s so unfair, Lucy. It’s so unfair. She should still be here. Dad needs her. I need her. I mean that’s the thing. That’s the thing that I never tell you two. Not visiting you, it’s not because I don’t want to see you, but I have such a hard time dealing with her not being here. I mean we stopped at the cemetery, coming back from the scouting, and I was fine. I was. And then we got here and…”
She sighed.
“I’d give up everything. I mean everything, and work some shitty job at the Orange Julius for the rest of my life if it meant she was alive. I’d trade anything for that. Anything.”
“She wouldn’t want you to do that.”
She nodded.
We both heard the door open. Aster walked in and said, “It’s almost 5:20.”
Maddy sighed. Looked at her reflection.
“I knew there was a reason I didn’t put on much make up today.”
Aster walked over to the counter. She set a small bag on the counter and unzipped it and started detailing the contents.
“Lipstick. Blush. Eyeliner.”
“You got a kitten in there?” asked Maddy.
Aster’s brow tensed. Silently castigating herself for not foreseeing Maddy’s need for a kitten.
“Next time bring a kitten.”
Aster looked up from under her brow with a lot more life in her face than I’d seen previously.
“I can always borrow the kitten Nawzat keeps for Horace.”
That did it. Maddy laughed. Full out tipped her head back and bellowed at the ceiling. Aster’s mouth pinched up in her version of a smile, something an old time school teacher or spinster librarian might model once a year, when no one was looking.
Battery fully charged, Maddy smiled at me. The Maddy McCall smile. The one we’d see minutes from now, on the red carpet, and then, on the big screen.
Chapter 25
Getting into the same Royal Cinema theater as Maddy and Jack for the premiere was like winning the lottery. The studio had distributed passes to TV and radio stations and the school had held a raffle, too.
The lucky few seemed so excited about sharing the cinema and spotting the celebrities most didn’t seem to notice the security personnel posted at the entrances, and those standing near the front row, watching each person wander down the aisle to find their seat.
I envisioned cameras arranged strategically inside the theater, someone in a black SUV nearby poised before a monitor, scanning faces as they walked into view and relaying the info through those wireless earbuds.
Maddy and Jack and Dad and Aster sat in the center row, Horace and his assistant Nawzat, too, with Trent on one end of the aisle, Dina on the other. I sat right behind Dina, the seat to my left open, waiting for Sherman to show up. He’d texted me a couple times saying he was en route and the last I’d heard from him he was trying to find parking. Keeping in mind the sheer luck that had freed up a spot for Dad and I, I simply texted Sherman ‘good luck’.
By the time the lights dimmed and people applauded, Sherman still hadn’t appeared. I felt my stomach spit acid, thinking of him at the entrance, his pass left back at the house, his explanations to an usher or one of the Lucentology guards, those placid, robotic faces, all of it playing like some silly character defining moment in – irony of ironies - a romantic comedy.
In Small Town Girl Maddy played Michelin Belle, a stressed out and manipulative executive, the kind who’d do anything to get ahead. The company she worked for was looking to partner with a Google-like tech firm and build a massive server farm in a dinky little town in Oregon. It just happened to be the same town where some of Michelin’s hick relatives lived, and where years ago a teenage Michelin had spent a summ
er and fallen in love with a boy. Once she went back home for school, the passion cooled, and the two lost touch.
Michelin tried to talk her boss out of handing off the assignment to her. The boss was from India. Part of the humor was supposed to play off of Michelin’s inability to understand everything the boss said – she had an app on her cell phone that would translate the words the accent hid. The rural audience ate that right up.
Incapable of persuading her boss, Michelin was coming to terms with her assignment, speaking via Bluetooth to her current super snobby boyfriend as he worked out at an exclusive Manhattan gym, running on a treadmill and checking out his abs in a mirror.
Staring out over the city skyline from her high-rise balcony Michelin said, “I don’t like small towns, Bailey. They’re creepy.”
And that was the exact moment the movie screen went black.
Even before the house lights were up, Dina had left her seat. She stood in the aisle, doing a visual sweep, a full 360, and it was not lost on me that her right hand was tucked inside her suit jacket. Probably exactly where a holstered gun would ride her ribcage.
Over all the murmuring voices I head her say, “This is Dina. Nothing.” She said it so quiet most people couldn’t hear her. “Rocco, report.”
The crowd murmurs continued. I heard Maddy say something, the exact words lost, but her voice didn’t sound pleased. A man walking down the aisle on the other side of the theater caught Trent’s full-attention.
Trent moved so quick and swift I thought he was going to body tackle the man. Instead he held up and leaned down as the man, moving his hands urgently, whispered. Trent nodded. The man continued down the aisle towards the screen.
Trent whispered into his suits left cuff.
“BT?” said Dina. She sighed. She caught me looking right at her, but if there was a need on my part to calm down or oscillate up into full on panic, she didn’t provide clue one.
“Excuse me. Everyone. Sorry. Pardon this.”
The short man in the suit now stood down in front of the first row of seats, facing the audience.
“My name is Roy McKenna. I’m the manager of this Royal Cinema. I apologize for this interruption. And I don’t mean to alarm anyone. I really don’t, but a few minutes ago we received a bomb threat.”
There were gasps in the crowd. The gasps outnumbered by the number of people that tagged colorful nicknames to the character of the threat maker.
“As a precaution, we’re clearing out all the theaters. I know. I know. I’m so sorry. This was a special night. It was my great honor to host it, I mean, we all love Maddy, and again, this was a great honor, but…This is the best thing we can do to make sure everyone is safe. So if you could all form some lines,” he pivoted and pointed to the glowing green Exit signs book ending the screen, “your best bet are these exits here. Trust me. If you head for the lobby, it’s going take you all night to get out of the building. Already out there it’s-”
He blew out his cheeks and waved his hand weakly like forget it, those people were lost to us.
Outside, Dad checked on me before cutting through the crowd. Two SUVS waited in the narrow lane behind the theater and The Wagon Wheel. The front bumpers on the idling vehicles pointed opposite the flow of the foot traffic. Jack and Maddy had been escorted into them promptly. I’d come out the theater exit only a step or two behind them and the SUVs were already there, engines running, waiting to whisk the movie stars away from the bomb threat.
I moved across the lane and as far away from the movie theater as I could, and watched people stream out the theater and turn for the corner where they could head back towards the rest of the mall. No one seemed scared.
Dad backed away from the lead SUV. The second he was clear, the back door slammed shut, and the two vehicles pulled away. He joined me and we watched the two vehicles drive down and eventually turn left around the far end of the mall, out of sight.
Just about then the few remaining would be premiere attendees exited the theater. The doors slammed shut. Then two ushers shoved their respective doors open, looked at us, and let the doors close again.
In the relative quiet I heard my cell phone buzz inside my purse.
I answered it and heard: “Jesus Christ, are you ok?”
Sherman.
I told him we were fine. A moment later we saw him come stumbling around the same side of the theater that all those people had been vanishing around just minutes ago. He ran the few feet and was pale and breathing harshly. You’d think he hadn’t seen me in years rather than just a couple hours.
Reality settling in, he’d given up finding convenient parking and out of the car, sprinted several blocks, nearly getting run over in the process
Sweaty and breathless, he was trying to convince the idiot in the ticket booth that the pass in his hand was actually the right kind of pass to gain admittance when the ticket taker was drawn away from the window.
When the ticket taker reappeared he told Sherman about the bomb threat.
After that, dealing with the shock, Sherman waited outside the theater entrance, hoping to see me in the crowd as it oozed on out steadily.
When I didn’t show and didn’t show he finally wised up that there was a stream of people coming around the side of the theater.
The narrow lane behind the theater widened into the actual rear parking lot. The three of us walked towards Dad’s truck. Before the SUVs took off, Jack had told Dad he thought they might just go home. Maddy had been barely speaking, muffled by shock or rage.
We slow walked towards the truck, all a little quiet, thinking how awful this all was. How pissed and sad Maddy must feel.
“I looked for Nick,” I told Sherman. “When we got here I looked for him. I didn’t see him anywhere.”
“I didn’t see him either. I mean I didn’t think to look for him, but…He’s such an asshole.”
“Who’s this?” asked Dad.
“Nick Verney. You know. Tyler’s little brother?”
Dad made a face like a full decade on he still hadn’t quite got the taste of Tyler’s exploits out of his mouth.
“You said he took that post down,” I said.
“He did,” said Sherman.
“Maybe he did it so there wouldn’t be a trail. Evidence.”
“You mean brag about it, but then try and not brag about it right before you do it?”
I nodded. “Something like that.”
Dad’s phone rang. He stopped and pulled it out of his suit jacket.
While he talked – it sounded like he might be talking to Jack – Sherman leaned in near me and whispered, “I know this probably isn’t the best time, but can I tell you how nice you look?”
I blushed.
“You should wear dresses more often, Lucy McCall.”
“I don’t know about that.” The compliment and the resulting blush had stirred up nerves. I played with my hair, incapable of looking at him. I did think to waggle my wrist and the bracelet at him.
“It’s probably just this.” I pointed at my face. “It averts attention from this.” He started to protest.
Dad hung up and put his phone back in the suit jacket.
“They went to the after party,” he said.
“The what?” asked Sherman.
“The post-premiere party. At the country club.”
Dad looked downcast.
“Did Jack say how Maddy was?”
“No,” said Dad. “Not well is my guess.”
The plan was Dad would drive Sherman to his car, parked 4 blocks away from the mall. From there Sherman and I would drive to the country club.
Sitting on the seat in between Dad and Sherman while Sherman gave directions, I wondered what would happen to Nick if Dina got a hold of him. If Maddy got a hold of him. I knew I could bloody his nose. That hesitation even a jerk like Nick Vern
ey would have about hitting a girl would totally give me the opening I needed.
He’d done it. He’d phoned the threat. There wasn’t a doubt in my mind, and I hoped when karma came looking for him, and found him, it was in a foul, foul mood.
Chapter 26
Prior to full-blown movie stardom, but after Maddy became kind of semi-famous, Mom and Dad were invited to join the Ashmond Country Club. They actually went to a dinner for prospective members, just to see what the experience was like.
Mom had said the women were blue-haired plastic surgery survivors meaner than a one-eyed alley cat with an anal fissure. Dad was the only man there that didn’t make her want to “sew it up and forget I had one to begin with”.
Mom.
Once she got on a roll, she could kind of take your breath away.
Too worried about Maddy in the aftermath of the bomb threat I didn’t drink in all the country club opulence, at least not in grand detail. Tall hedges sectioned the parking lot into three rows. Dad parked near the parking lot entrance. Sherman parked just a few spaces closer to the main building than Dad. Walking towards the entrance, Dad told Sherman he ought to park closer to the exit, like Dad had. Avoid the rush come the end of the night. He didn’t push it once Sherman’s teenager’s indifference became evident.
Those familiar black SUVs were parked near the entrance to the main building, probably for the purpose of loading up the celebrities quickly for getaways.
Walking towards the main doors the smell of recently mown grass floated on the air. The sun was setting in the west, to our right, and the outer fringe of golf course, the grass and trees, were painted a slight golden cast. Copper statuary lining the steps acquired a molten quality under the light from the sun slipping low on the horizon.
Indoors were the expected posh highlights. Chandelier, check. A lot of windows in ornate frames, check. Golf course and swimming pool visible out back, check.
The man in the tux checking invitations in the foyer looked down his nose at Sherman – outfit in a grey suit jacket, black t-shirt, and no tie. The man’s facial spasms mimicking those of a snobby waiter in some Hollywood movie where high class and no class clash for 90 minutes.
The country club was pretty empty, but we were pretty early. Food was still being set up on tables and the brass band hadn’t arrived, but their seating arrangement was in place.