“Dear Lord,” I groan, straining to push the overflowing cart of stuff from Restaurant Depot out to the Volvo, while Grams quadruple-checks we got everything on her list.
“Oh, stop your whining.”
She swings open the trunk and I watch as she struggles to lift a fifty-pound bag of flour into it.
“All right, let’s not give ourselves a hernia on a Monday morning,” I say, before wrestling it from her determined grip and plunking it into the bottom of the trunk.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” she says, as proud as ever.
“You do this alone every week?” I ask, frowning as I watch her fight to throw the second bag into the trunk to prove her point.
“Always have, always will.”
“I’m sure Caroline or Harley could—”
She waves a dismissive hand in my direction. “You gonna blab or help me empty this cart?”
I clamp my mouth shut and get to work before she does it all herself.
As I finally slam the trunk shut and start to wheel the cart back, my phone buzzes in my back pocket.
“Hey, Lillian,” I say as her face appears on my screen in her familiar white desk chair, an abstract painting just over her shoulder.
“A few photos of you and Caroline popped up on my feed,” she says in lieu of a greeting.
“Yeah?” I slow to a stop in the middle of the parking lot. “Why do you sound unhappy about that? Isn’t it part of our whole scheme?” I feel a little weird about calling it that, even though that’s exactly what it is.
“Well, it’s a photo of the two of you at some kind of sporting event.” She whips over to her laptop to take another look. “What the hell is on your fa—anyway.” She reappears in frame, shaking her head and pushing a pair of thick black glasses up farther on her nose. “The two of you aren’t looking very smitten.”
I roll my eyes and start pushing the cart forward again, then send it ricocheting into the cart return. “Lillian, can you not?”
I swipe out of our FaceTime and go over to Instagram, double-checking that Caroline’s profile is still private and safe from prying eyes and trolling comments. I wonder if she’d accept my follow request now? My thumb hovers over the blue follow button for a few seconds before I swipe back to FaceTime.
“Look,” Lillian says as I come back to our call. “I just don’t want this all blowing up in your face when Bianchi sees right through your bullshit. You’re an actor, Arden. So act.”
“Lil, I got it, okay? Thanks.”
I hang up and let out a long breath, kicking up gray slush as I walk back to the car. I glance to the side to see a guy with a worn baseball cap looking at me intently, and I pull my hood up before sliding into the passenger seat.
“All good?” Grams asks.
I nod and press my forehead up against the cool glass of the window while she pulls out of the parking spot. As we drive, Lillian sends me the post from the basketball game this past weekend. In it, I’m holding Caroline’s hand, but both of us are looking away from each other.
I press the side button until the screen goes dark. If I was Bianchi and I saw that, I’d be thinking the same thing as Lillian too, but it’s total bullshit. Even if our relationship was real, does it mean that if we aren’t giving each other googly eyes every second, we’re not really together? Do I have to perform in my personal life every second too, just in case someone is out there taking a photo? I know the answer is yes, I’ve known for a long time, so why is it suddenly bothering me so much? That’s my reality right now, so if I need to pivot the plan so the public can snap and upload some cozy photos of Caroline and me, then that’s what I’ll do. I haven’t come this far to let a few lukewarm, invasive photos stand in the way of me and Bianchi’s movie.
It’s as simple as that.
I make eye contact with the baseball cap guy as Grams drives past, and sure enough, he snaps a photo. I’m not here to fix things with Caroline, even if it does feel good that she doesn’t totally hate me now. I’m here to pretend to date Caroline. And, like Lillian said, I’m an actress. I have to—we have to—make it believable. Because somone is always watching.
We drive the thirty minutes back to the diner on snow-covered roads, fresh flakes landing on the windshield faster than they can be swiped away. I’m so far inside my head that I don’t even hear Grams trying to talk to me until we’re back in Barnwich.
“… because I’m moving to Florida next month,” she says, and I look over at her with my jaw practically on the floor of the car. She throws her head back and laughs. “Just seeing if you’re listening.”
I shake my head at her.
“What’s eatin’ ya, kid?” Grams asks, turning down her Christmas hits crackling through the FM radio.
“Everything.” I let out a big sigh, not sure where to begin.
“Could you be a little more specific?” she asks, but I can only shrug as we turn into the diner parking lot. “Does it have anything to do with a certain strawberry-blond waitress?”
“I don’t even know, Grams. It’s just…” I think about when I first got here, how I came in all ready to act my way through these twelve days. I thought I could just jet back to LA when it was all over and forget again about all the pieces of my heart that I left in Barnwich. “It’s more complicated than I thought it was going to be,” I say finally as Grams stomps a little too heavily on the brakes outside the back door of the kitchen. She looks over at me, throwing the car into park at the same time.
“You thought showing up on your best friend’s doorstep unannounced and uninvited after four years of not speaking to her and then asking her to be your fake girlfriend, was going to be simple? That it wouldn’t dredge anything up?”
I cover my eyes as a chuckle escapes my lips. “Okay, well, when you put it like that…”
“Arden, why is it all so important to you? Why did you cut Caroline out of your life?”
I shake my head and let out an exasperated sigh. I can already tell by her tone that she thinks it’s all ridiculous, but she’s waiting for an answer, so I start thinking back to what started it all.
“In the beginning my agent, Lillian, thought it would be best for me to cut ties with Caroline to stay focused on work. And I mean… she was kinda right. If I had stayed connected with Caroline, it would’ve made it that much harder to stay out there long enough to get where I am now. This is what I’ve always wanted. It’s what I’ve spent the last four years working toward, even if I didn’t always know it, even if it’s lost me things along the way,” I tell Grams. “Anything worth doing takes sacrifice,” I add, remembering Lillian saying that to me during my first shoot, when she found me crying in my trailer on Caroline’s fifteenth birthday.
“Arden. You aren’t a kid anymore, and no one can force you to make these choices. You don’t have to live this life just because it’s what you wanted when you were fourteen.”
“That’s very wise, Grams, but I didn’t get to stay a kid for very long,” I reply.
“Your mom and dad… They didn’t—” Grams starts.
“Come on. The ice cream is going to melt,” I interrupt, reaching for the door handle. I don’t need to hear Grams pathetically attempt to defend my parents like she used to.
“This is important,” she says from behind me, but I pull the handle anyway and start to step out.
“Arden, sit down!” Grams raises her voice at me, something I’ve never heard her do in all the years I’ve been alive. “Now I know you went and got too big for your britches, but I’m still your grandmother, and when there are things I want to say to you, you will listen.” I hold her eyes as her chest rises and falls rapidly. “Please,” she adds, more softly.
I nod, feeling a wave of anxiety crash into me as I plop back into the seat and pull the door shut.
“Your parents never liked being stuck in one place. So when you got the opportunity, I thought it would make things better and that the best thing for you was to be with them. But it all happened so fast, and I thought you’d all come back a lot. So… I let them take you. Twelve hundred miles away from here. From your home. From me. It’s been the greatest mistake of my life.”
“Grams—” I start, surprised, wanting to tell her that none of it is her fault, but she holds up her hand to silence me.
“Let me finish.” She turns in her seat to face me better. “I wish I could say that I didn’t think your mom would ever fully abandon you, but I think maybe deep down… I did know. I just didn’t want to believe that I had failed so badly in raising her. Arden, I want to tell you… I’ve always wanted to tell you… that…” A soft sort of whimper escapes her quivering lips, making me so fucking angry at my parents for the first time in a long time. I reach over and take her hands, my thumb tracing circles over her skin, thin and blotchy from years of working in the kitchen. Her eyes are so filled with tears that I can hardly even see her pupils. “I’m sorry,” she finishes, and I immediately pull her into a hug so tight that I can barely breathe.
“I love you, Grams. But you aren’t the one who needs to apologize. I’m okay. I will be okay,” is all I reply, because if I were a grandma, that’s probably all I’d want to hear from my granddaughter right now. All this time, I didn’t come home because I’ve been too scared of what she might think about me, what she might say. And all she’s wanted is to give me an apology for guilt that’s not hers to carry. It makes me feel even worse than the first night I arrived, about all this time I’ve wasted, all the pain I’ve caused. Just like Mom and Dad.
Eventually, we both release our grip and straighten up in our seats, wiping a couple of tears out of our eyes. Once she gets herself back together, I decide to ask the question. The one I only let myself think about when I’m alone in my big empty house, the reason I try so hard not to be.
“Grams, am I like them? Like her?”
“No, sweetie.” She shakes her head fervently. “She was always restless. Never really content. It was like she was always searching for something, even when she was a little kid. She just never seems to find it.” She squints through the windshield.
“You think she rubbed off on me?” I ask, and she shakes her head again, a soft smile spreading across her face.
“In some ways, yes. The bravery. The ambition. But you’ve always been like a tree, Arden. Wherever you are, you stretch out your roots. You make your presence felt.” She looks over at me. “Callie is like a breeze, here one minute, gone the next, so quickly you’re not even sure she was there at all. But you? I think it pains you more than you let on to be uprooted. To be unsettled. And I know we all feel it when you’re gone.”
I meet my own gaze in the reflection of the window, thinking of hundreds of moments in the makeup chair, a person I hardly know looking back at me. And now, being back home… I don’t know. I almost feel like I can see myself instead of a stranger in my reflection.
“I can see that this role means something special to you, that it’s different from all the rest. I don’t expect you to give up on your dream, and I wouldn’t want you to. But you have an opportunity here to do things differently. You’re right. Anything worth doing should take sacrifice, but it shouldn’t take everything from you.”
I think of my fifteen-year-old self crumpled into a ball in my trailer, knowing exactly what Grams is getting at.
“All right, honey, get that ice cream in the freezer before it’s a gallon of garbage,” she says, patting my leg twice and then stepping out of the car.
We work together to unload the supplies, carrying them into the kitchen, and all the while I wonder why Lillian wouldn’t let me take a minute to call my best friend on her birthday. Like one phone call would’ve brought down my whole career.
My phone buzzes as I drop the last bag of flour onto the floor, but for once, it’s not her.
Hey it’s Austin. hot chocolate competition today at 5:30 at barnwich brews. everyone’s going to be there so if you need an idea for your fourth “date”… you should come :)
and i do mean EVERYONE in Barnwich
My mouth is already watering at the idea of pounding hot chocolate for an hour straight, and I think I could use a night of just hanging out with everyone.
Plus! Hot chocolate making screams kitschy holidate, and if everyone is going to be there, it could be a perfect opportunity for some more… romantic photos that I know I need if I’m going to get this part.
I’m about to say yes when another message comes in, a picture of Caroline, her hair half-up, half-down, chin resting on her hand while she writes away in her notebook, oblivious.
your girl is looking cute today btw
I tell him I’ll be there, then shake my head, smiling to myself as I pocket my phone and finish helping Grams unload. He’s not wrong. Maybe making some romantic photos look believable is going to be easier than I thought.