The Lost Husband (9 page)

“Oh, well, you know,” Jean said. “Sunshine’s had a long road to travel.”

“What does that mean?”

“Just that she worked like heck to pull herself together.”

Another evasive set of answers from Jean. If I’d been asking my mother, I’d have had Sunshine’s life history by now, all the way down to her bra size. But my mom was a talker, and Jean, it appeared, was the opposite. My mom was a gossip, and Jean was a vault. I wondered if they’d been born so different, or if they’d just become that way in response to each other. Either way, I decided to tell Jean my worries about Sunshine. Because if my mother made things worse, maybe Jean could make things better.

I didn’t want to speak too plainly in front of the kids, so I said, nice and loud, “Has anybody seen Bob Dylan?”

“He’s behind the barn!” Tank answered.

“He’s digging a hole,” Abby added.

“Could y’all go get him for me?” I asked. “I need some dog kisses.”

The kids scooted out the back door and took off running, and it was only then that I realized they hadn’t eaten yet. I looked at the scrambled egg kebabs Jean was setting on the table for them—which were really just eggs with toothpicks sticking out like bristles. “Remind me to feed them when they get back,” I said.

We ate the kids’ breakfasts, and they were absolutely delicious.

“It’s the worms,” Jean explained.

I stopped chewing for a second to study her face.

“The worms the chickens eat,” she went on. “Factory chickens just eat grains. Farm chickens, on the other hand, run around eating all kinds of good things. Seeds. Bugs. Worms. Slugs.”

I winced a little at “slugs.”

“What’s the word for that?” Jean mused. “The pleasure that comes from eating delicious things?”

I’d never thought about it. “I don’t think there is one.”

“That can’t be right,” Jean said. “We must have at least one.”

I shook my head. “I don’t think so.”

“All the words in the English language,” Jean said, “and we left that one out.”

She squinted and thought for a second. “Mouth-pleasure,” she suggested, but we both wrinkled our noses and shook our heads.

“Too much,” I said.

“It needs to be a German word,” she suggested. “Like
fahrvergnügen
.”

“Or
schadenfreude
,” I added.

Jean nodded. “One of my favorites.”

“We need a German dictionary.”

“Nah,” Jean said. “I speak German.”

“You do?”

“Sure,” she said. “All the old farmers around here speak German. Just not the hippies.”

“I thought you were a hippie.”

“Well,” she said, “I started out German, but I converted.” Then her eyes drifted to the table as she thought. “ 
‘Mund’
is ‘mouth,’ and
‘vergnügen’
is ‘enjoyment.’ ”

“Mundvergnügen!”
I said.

“Or,” she went on, “ 
‘essen’
is ‘food’ and
‘freude’
is ‘pleasure.’ ”

“Essenfreude,”
I said. “I love them both.”

“Which is better?”

“I guess we’ll just have to get them both started,” I said, “and see which one catches on.”

I checked on the kids out the window. They’d climbed on the tire swings. It was almost time to take them to school, and they hadn’t even eaten. But I still wanted to ask about Sunshine.

“So,” I said to Jean, turning from the window, “Sunshine told me she could talk to the dead.”

“Oh, dear,” Jean said.

“And now she’s got me a little spooked,” I said.

“Understandable,” Jean said. Then, as if she’d made a decision, she said, “You know about Sunshine, right?”

“All I know about Sunshine,” I said, “is that she has promised never to contact my dead husband without my express permission.”

“Well,” Jean said, starting a new batch of eggs in the skillet, “she had kind of a tough childhood.”

“Tough how?”

Jean paused. “All this was in the tabloids, anyway,” she said. “So I’m not breaking any confidence.”

“The tabloids?”

“Sunshine is Amber McAllen.”

“Amber McAllen the actress?”

Jean nodded.

What she was telling me was impossible, I thought. For one thing, Amber McAllen had been very famous. World-famous. For another, Sunshine had to be at least ten years younger than me—but Amber McAllen and I were the exact same age.

I’d seen her many times before, of course. I’d seen her on the covers of
People
and
Redbook
and, famously, naked in a mud bikini on the pages of
Vanity Fair
. I’d seen all her movies—even the one about the pole-dancing vampire. She’d been just about everywhere in pop culture for about five years. She’d burst onto the scene at fourteen, starting out bright and plucky, celebrated everywhere for her come-hither innocence and great skin. And then, as she got a little older, she fell prey to the party scene and became a cautionary tale. After a period of ups and downs, she got fired from a Spielberg movie, went abruptly into rehab, and hadn’t been heard from again.

It’s rare that a movie star actually disappears in a quick way like that. Usually they follow a slower decline—struggling, relapsing, scrabbling for attention as it becomes harder to get. But Amber McAllen just quit. She quit making movies. She quit designing handbags. She quit endorsing fragrances and charities. She bought her way out of contracts. And in turn, as if all our feelings were hurt, she was decisively forgotten.

“That doesn’t make any sense,” I said. “What would Amber McAllen be doing here? And wearing goth fashions? And working at the feed store?”

“She’s from here,” Jean said. “Or, at least, her family is.”

I glanced out the window. Now the kids were just going to have to be late to school—which wouldn’t bother Abby much. She’d announced recently that school wasn’t “her thing” and she’d
rather stay home. She’d started begging every morning to work for Jean as a goat groomer instead of going to second grade.

“Why, babe?” I’d asked, wondering if I should worry about this new development. “You love school.”

Abby shrugged. “I just like animals better than people.”

Of course, she had to go to school. But—this morning at least—not right away.

Jean turned off the new batch of eggs and put the skillet lid on to keep them warm.

“I almost ran over Amber McAllen?” I said again, letting the idea sink in.

I didn’t know how long it had been since she’d done any acting. Five years, maybe? Long enough, though, that when I’d actually come face-to-face, or rather bumper-to-knee, with the woman who had starred in two of my favorite movies, I hadn’t even recognized her.

Of course, she’d changed a bit. She was no longer blond, but had dyed her hair obsidian black. She was no longer anorexically thin, but something akin to plump. All those things that movie stars do to make themselves so much more beautiful than the rest of us—starving, waxing, exfoliating, spray-tanning, Photoshopping—she was no longer doing. And so even though I trusted that Jean was absolutely telling me the truth, I still had trouble believing her.

“She doesn’t look like Amber McAllen,” I said.

“Looks aren’t everything,” Jean said, and then filled me in on the backstory. Things I knew—that everyone knew—about Amber McAllen’s mother swindling her and stealing her fortune until she had to break off all ties. After cutting her mother loose, she hit rock bottom in a very public way: vomiting all over herself at a club. Someone captured the whole thing on an iPhone and
then posted it to YouTube. This was followed by the Spielberg debacle. Then rehab. And then the inside story: Before she could return to L.A., her grandfather had dragged her kicking and screaming back to Atwater, insisted she start taking care of his horses, and got her into therapy—with Jean.

He expected her to run away, but she didn’t.

And so Jean and Amber had set to work. They analyzed what success was, and fame, glamour, power, and popularity. They examined her former life from every angle, studied her motivations, wrote poems, finger-painted, meditated. They defined what really mattered in life, what made a person feel loved and happy, and what made it all worth it—and decided that fame was the exact opposite of those things. They coped with the fact that all her money had been spent, lent, and stolen by her mother’s boyfriend. And now, at last, after taking back her childhood nickname and swearing off Hollywood forever, Sunshine was finally doing fine.

“She doesn’t look fine to me,” I said.

Jean’s voice was protective. “You didn’t see where she started.”

“And the ghosts thing?” I asked as I finally signaled the kids back in for breakfast.

Jean hesitated. It was clear she felt torn: wanting to help me, but not wanting to say too much. “Well,” she said at last, “it’s possible she’s trying to reach out more to the living than to the dead.”

I wasn’t sure exactly what Jean meant, but it made me feel better. Maybe Sunshine just wanted to be friends. Or maybe she just wanted attention. Either way, after that conversation, and witnessing how much Jean liked her, I gave in to the notion that I’d probably wind up liking her, too.

Chapter 7
 

The next week, as I trudged up from a long afternoon in the barn, caked with goat dust, Jean met me in the yard to say she’d invited some people to dinner that night.

“People” turned out to be Sunshine, her grandpa, and O’Connor, who Jean informed me was “always hungry.” The words had barely touched the air when an old Mercedes station wagon grumbled over the cattle guard and through the gate, then clattered along the dirt driveway and squeaked to a stop next to Jean and me.

Jean barely had time to shrug at me before Sunshine jumped out.

Sunshine’s grandpa, it turned out, was the white-haired fellow who had saved her in the crosswalk that first day. He took off his hat to greet me, gave me a bear hug, and introduced himself as “Russ McAllen, attorney at law.”

That first day his hair had floated around his head in tufts, but now it was politely combed down. In the crosswalk he’d been
wearing jeans, but now he was all ironed and buttoned down in khakis and a plaid collared shirt.

He said, “How’s the minivan?”

I didn’t quite follow, and I replied, “Good, I think,” more as a question than an answer.

“No new dents?” he asked, and I realized he was asking if I’d killed anybody with it since he’d seen me last. I would have assured him that all the townsfolk were unharmed, but before I could speak, he was poking a finger into my rib cage with a tickle so unexpected and jolly that it made me laugh.

“It’s nice to see you again,” he said, putting an arm around my shoulder as we headed toward the house. “I’m glad you’re here.”

“Isn’t that the town motto?”

He gave me a squeeze. “Learn it and live it,” he said. “Makes a great tattoo.”

He held a bouquet of flowers, and I pointed at them. “Nice,” I said.

“I don’t know much,” Russ said. “But I do know women.”

Sunshine was dressed all in black, with a baby blue ribbon in her hair. Now that I knew who she was, I couldn’t help but stare.

It seemed like a long distance from million-dollar movie sets to Jean’s farmyard. If Amber McAllen had been standing next to me, I’d have felt irrationally giddy to be meeting her. But I’d already met her as Sunshine. I tried to superimpose a
People
cover on top of the girl in black lipstick standing beside me, but I just couldn’t make it fit.

Sunshine didn’t act like a star, either. The kids were out front, kneeling by some rosemary bushes and building a fairy city out of rocks and sticks—something Jean had suggested—and as soon as Sunshine noticed them, she walked right over.

“Whatcha doing?” I heard her ask.

“Fairy city,” Abby said, as if no other words were needed.

“I love fairies!” Sunshine said, and then, not even bothering with introductions, got down in the dirt with them, crisscross applesauce, taking directions from Abby almost as well as Tank did.

Russ and I watched for a minute, and it hit me that Sunshine wasn’t pretending to have fun with the fairies the way most grown-ups do with kid things. She was
actually
having fun with the fairies.

“She never really got to finish her childhood,” Russ said after a minute.

“I get that,” I said. And I really did.

Dinner was 100 percent kebabs. It was a chilly February night, so we ate in the kitchen because the oven made it the warmest room in the house.

O’Connor showed up just as we started eating, his face a little red from the cold. Jean handed him a bottle of beer without asking, and as he tilted his head back to take a swig, I watched him. When I caught myself staring, I turned my eyes away and kept them averted for much of the meal.

Conversation at the table was lively. Sunshine and the kids disappeared under the table after eating and played happily there for a good while, which left the remaining grown-ups time to relax and visit more than usual.

I couldn’t contain my curiosity about Russ, who was totally hot in a Wilford Brimley way, and who was clearly smitten with Jean. I kept watching him watch her, and I couldn’t help but note that he was a man in serious love.