Follow the Dotted Line (3 page)

“Well, at least you have someone to keep you company. Right?”

“Harley is not company, Lil. He is an annoyance. And there is a real possibility I will kill him shortly.”

Lil knew immediately where this was going and tried to head it off. “I hear the sound of peeing, Mom, and it’s not in the toilet.”

Andy charged ahead, as if she hadn’t heard what Lil said. “Let’s do another script together, Lilly. We’ll have a great time. We can do it over the phone. On Skype. I’ll do all the typing.”

“Really. Mom. I don’t have the time.”

“I know I could get my mojo back if we just worked together—”

“Oh, there goes another jet stream. The boys have developed a herding instinct lately. I think I see the twins with diapers down behind the couch . . .”

“Lilly, I need—”

“Oops! Gotta run. Love you.”

Lil hung up, and Andy felt another little slap of futility hit her in the face. Her career really was over. Now her ex was dead and gone. And her leech of a nephew was upstairs in the guest bedroom glued to a novel about the End of Days.

Israelites in LA

If Andy had been insensitive about giving her kids a new last name, her sister had been downright idiotic about giving hers a first one. After only one date with a long-distance truck driver named Phil Davidson, Pam announced she had found the love of her life and was going to marry him. By the third date, she felt they were destined to have a son, and he would be called—Harley. And so it came to pass, both the wedding and the birth. All this might have seemed a little less laughable had Harley been big and beefy and liked motorcycles. But he wasn’t and he didn’t. The Harley Davidson now sharing her domicile was short and doughy. In addition, he appeared to be as dumb as a two-by-four. Even more disturbing was his ambition to become a preacher and establish his own Christian denomination.

Andy knocked on the door of her former guestroom where the future Reverend Harley Davidson currently resided.

“Come on in,” Harley said. He laid the paperback across his chest and smiled up at his aunt.

“How’s the book?” she asked.

“Just tremendous!” he said. “It’s the third one in the Left Behind series. I love it.”

She looked down at the dramatic lettering on the cover of the book,
The Rise of Antichrist
and instantly felt an affinity with the title character. “Shouldn’t you be reading the Bible or something?”

“This is better.”

“No doubt.”

“I mean, it’s fiction, so they make it very exciting,” he explained. “The real stuff, you know, like Exodus and Deuteronomy, is kind of boring.”

“I see.”

“In comparison, I mean.”

Andy pondered this and thought it her duty to encourage him to pay more attention to his studies.

“Well, I can’t imagine the Bible’s that boring,” she offered. “I’ve worked with a lot of Israelites in the film business, and they’re generally pretty good storytellers.”

“No kidding? You know some real Israelites here in LA?”

“In a manner of speaking.”

He looked at her in amazement. “We don’t have that many back in Omaha,” he said.

“I suppose you’d have to go looking. But I’m sure they’re there. Anyway, you want some lunch?”

He hesitated, scrunching up his chubby cheeks.

“What is it?” she asked.

“I’m kinda tired of burritos.”

“Okay. Why don’t I take you to In ‘n Out Burger?”

“Gosh, I love that place, Aunt Andy.”

“I do, too,” she said. “And I need to get out of the house. Put your cowboy boots on and meet me in the car.”

Valencia was built as a New Town in the 1960s, completely planned to accommodate a Southern California suburban lifestyle. It was one of the few places in Los Angeles County with actual bike lanes and where you could still get a parking spot at the mall. Andy discovered the little gem of a community when she decided to take up golf ten years ago. The public course was cheap and seldom crowded, plus people rarely scoffed if you shanked your tee shot on the first hole. The town had been annexed a few years back and was now part of the City of Santa Clarita, famous for almost nothing except the Six Flags theme park on Magic Mountain Parkway.

Harley and Andy sat outside at a round table with a red and white striped umbrella, eating their animal-style Double Doubles. As the adult in the unlikely pairing, Andy made a feeble attempt to bond.

“You like it here?” Andy asked.

“It’s only been three weeks,” Harley said. “But, yeah, I think so.”

“You miss your family?”

“Not really,” he answered. “Not as much as you miss yours.”

Andy looked at him suspiciously. “What are you talking about?”

“You call your kids all the time.”

“No, I don’t.”

“Yes, you do. And if you don’t call them, they call you. You people never leave each other alone.”

This kid was a master at pushing her into a defensive position. “I guess we’re big talkers,” she said, begrudgingly.

“Tell me about it,” said Harley. “It’s like everything you’re thinking comes right out your mouth.”

“Really!” Andy snorted, nearly choking on her grilled onion. She tried to glare at him, but she couldn’t get a bead on her target because he was slouched over a pool of ketchup, dipping his fries. “We’re all extroverts,” she finally said, by way of explanation. “Except Ian. He’s more of an introvert.”

“The guitar player in Nashville?”

“It’s a steel pedal, “Andy instructed him.

“He’s coming to LA this weekend, right? I mean his band is.”

“They’re playing at the Wiltern.”

“And he’s getting us tickets?”

“Right. For you, me, and Mitch and his girlfriend.”

The pudgy head bobbed up and down with approval. Then he observed solemnly, “I guess you can’t talk all that much if you’re supposed to be playing a guitar and singing. So maybe that’s a good job for him. I don’t think your other kids could, you know, restrain themselves that much.”

Andy tried the glare again, but he was either naturally adept at avoiding eye contact or self-taught. Whichever the case, she’d had about as much conversation as she could stomach. She started to gather up the leftover napkins.

“So who died?” he asked.

She stopped short, crumpled the napkins with a vehemence she generally reserved for representatives of her current cable company and sat back down. “Have you been eavesdropping on my phone conversations, Harley?”

“Nobody has to eavesdrop, Aunt Andy. You get so worked up I can hear you in Dolby Stereo.”

It was not difficult to understand why her sister had exiled the boy to California; the family gene pool had finally produced an unbearable combination of its worst two alleles—cluelessness and cheek. “I’m sorry if my voice bothers you, Harley,” she said, diplomatically. “It is my house, however.”

“I get that,” he said, oblivious to her irritation. “No problem. I just wondered who died.”

“My ex-husband. Mark. You wouldn’t remember him. We were divorced before you were born.”

“Oh, yeah. He’s the dad, right? For all your kids?”

“Yes.”

He tilted his round face slightly to the left and opened his eyes so that she really saw them for the first time. Blue. Creamy blue. His best feature by a mile, she mused.

Now Harley rolled his thin lips inward, as if he were contemplating something. “That’s gotta hurt a little, huh? I mean, you probably loved him once.”

“What?” she asked.

“I said you must feel pretty bad.”

It was an uncomfortably perceptive statement from a kid Andy judged to be psychologically below grade level. Because the truth was, she
did
feel bad. After all, she had been married to Mark Kornacky for 14 years, and they weren’t all miserable. Many of them were damned exciting. He was a man with a big personality who loved to be the center of attention. A guy with good friends and better stories. He could cook. He could sing. He could drink. He could whip up a party on a moment’s notice. People loved him. She loved him. For a while, anyway.

The two had met when he was starting his own production company in Studio City. He was filming a series of exotic-animal cooking shows, a repulsive—but highly popular—niche concept. She was a struggling writer, and he underpaid her for helping with the scripts. They shared the same middle class upbringing, had similar politics, and fit together in a quirky sort of way, like Sonny and Cher or Bert and Ernie. She could never quite find the right simile for their marriage, and maybe that was the problem.

Whatever the attraction, the partnership worked. Until they had children. That Mark Kornacky would be such a spectacular failure as a parent never occurred to her. That it would take child number three for her to begin to notice was her own spectacular failure. By the time baby number four was born, Andy knew it was time to stop. Sadly for everyone concerned, it would take another seven years of his drinking, cheating, and self-indulgent spending for her to take the kids and get out. After that, her ex-husband was rarely seen in the vicinity of his offspring, and they began referring to him as their ‘ex-father.’

“I
do
feel bad,” Andy finally confessed to the corn-fed minister-in-waiting.

“And your kids must feel bad, too, right?” Harley suggested.

“I’m sure they do. But their dad was more of a myth than an actual presence, so it’s always been hard to know how to feel about him.”

Harley nodded, seeming a little less clueless than he usually looked. “Well, maybe they’ll get a better feel for that when they see his will,” he said.

“Huh?” Andy grunted, dimly.

“You know, his last will and testament. Often absent parents make up for their emotional negligence through their estate.”

Emotional negligence? Where on earth did a mind like Harley Davidson’s have to go to find that many syllables? She was tempted to ask to meet his ventriloquist but was afraid he wouldn’t get the joke—and then was terrified he might.

“Aunt Andy?” he prompted.

“I’m thinking,” she finally said.

“About what?”

“About why nobody thought to mention a will, especially Tilda.”

“
I
thought to mention it,” Harley pointed out.

“Yes, that’s the other thing I’m thinking,” she said, standing up and pulling the keys out of her purse. “Harley, I don’t get you. I don’t get you at all.”

Elvis Impersonators

Located on the corner of Wilshire Boulevard and Western Avenue, the Wiltern Theater passes for what is an historic building in the City of Angels. That is, it was built in the 1930s. Originally home to vaudeville acts, the Art Deco structure is named for what was once the busiest intersection in the world, just the kind of thing Angelinos would find it necessary to brag about. It seats nearly 2000 people, and Harley Davidson had never seen or imagined anything like it.

“Whoa,” he murmured, prayer-like, as Andy, Mitch, and his girlfriend, Melissa—the family called her ‘The Impresario’—all took their seats. “I guess Ian’s pretty famous. I mean, if he plays here.”

“The band’s pretty famous,” Andy told him. “Ian is just one of the musicians and back-up singers.”

“You know it’s a girl band,” added The Impresario, who was dressed in elegant black spiderweb tights, a leather skirt, and cowboy boots. Harley knew cowboy boots, and he’d never seen a pair like hers in Omaha. “The critics are calling them the pioneers of a new genre.”

“What’s a genre?’ Harley asked.

“A style. Or category,” said Andy.

Harley gnawed on this for a moment. “Oh. You mean the ‘Girls with Grits’ style?”

“No, that’s the name of the band,” The Impresario corrected. “Their record label calls their style
Country Candy
.”

“Oh,” repeated Harley, very slowly. “I get it.”

Mitch looked at his junior cousin and smirked. “No, you don’t, Harley.”

Harley looked back at the older man quizzically and opened his creamy blue eyes so they were fully visible. “Yes, I do. It’s country music, only it’s sweet, right?” Harley observed.

“Exactly,” pronounced The Impresario. “Pay no attention to the jackass seated next to you.” She elbowed Mitch, who winced.

“Okay, I’ll behave, I promise,” Mitch said, a little embarrassed. “I’m sorry, Harley. Melissa’s right, I shouldn’t have said that.”

This wasn’t the first time Andy had witnessed Melissa discipline the incredibly successful knucklehead into which her oldest child had grown. She liked this woman, despite the startling streak of white that ran through her jet-black hair and the studded, fingerless gloves that were, evidently, her signature apparel. The girl was gorgeous, Andy had to give her that. And she was accomplished, in a La-La Land sort of way. She was a talent agent for aspiring comics and, in her free time, she manufactured monogrammed leather steering wheel covers for the Aston Martin dealership in Beverly Hills. On any given day, Melissa de Toro was hustling enough money to afford a two-bedroom apartment near the beach in Santa Monica. For the majority of people in Los Angeles, it didn’t get any better than that.

The house lights in the expansive theater dimmed, and the crowd quieted. After the perfect dramatic pause, stage lights electrified, and the band swarmed out from stage left and stage right, taking their places. There was Ian, the shortest and undoubtedly the sweetest of Andy’s brood, wearing a western hat and tight jeans, seating himself at his pedal steel guitar and beaming, as if he had reached nirvana.

In the privacy of the theater’s darkness, Andy smiled to herself. Her son looked so happy. In fact, both of her sons looked happy tonight, she thought. It occurred to her that all four of her children were currently happier than she had any right to expect, given their unsteady upbringing. She had done so much wrong, and yet they’d each turned out so right—so right for themselves and, therefore, so right for her. God, I wonder what I could do to mess up all this bliss, she thought with the predictable panic that always showed up when things were going too smoothly between herself and her children. Then she metaphorically gave herself a sharp slap to obliterate her stinking thinking and willed herself to slide gratefully into the warm, soapy music.