Massonville 2006
Randa yanked her brush through the mass of curls that had replaced her once sleek hair, thanks to the Georgia humidity. She needed an appointment with her wizard of a hairdresser for a straightening treatment. She also needed to have her head examined.
“You could have told Katie you wouldn't do this breakfast without her,” Susie said. She was sitting on the bed, watching Randa get ready.
After dropping her bombshell about moving to Georgia, Katie had mooned around for another twenty-four hours, most of it spent with R.B. He'd told her someone named Tassie Rain had left the opera house to them. It seemed that this woman was an adopted daughter of some member of the Venable family—a nugget that thrilled both Susie and Katie because, as Susie put it, “At least we know something.”
Then Katie had announced that she was flying north to wrap up her life in New York. When Randa had pointed out that they had a meeting scheduled with Mike Killian to discuss the sale of the opera house, Katie had smiled sweetly and said, “It'll be better if you break the news to him without me. I think he's into you.” Before Randa could protest that insane statement, Katie had wondered off to pack.
So now Randa was going to have breakfast with the man. And she was going to look like an idiot. She tugged painfully at her hair. To make matters worse, Susie had labeled Katie and her lunacy “totally right-brained,” a term of high praise that seemed to have replaced “cool” in the kid's vocabulary.
“Actually I'd rather go without Katie,” Randa said between yanks. “She'd probably start babbling about finding the stories she's destined to tell, and I'd have to kill her.” She began working on the other side of her head.
“I think you're glad she's going to keep the opera house from being torn down,” Susie said. “I think that's why you're taking the meeting for her.”
“I'm going because we made an appointment, and I believe in keeping my commitments.”
Could I sound a little more boring?
“We owe Mr. Killian an explanation,” she added.
Add prissy to boring. No wonder Susie thinks Katie's the right-brained one.
“Mom, you could have stopped this whole thing from happening. All you had to do was tell Katie she had to buy you out now, without selling her co-op first. You know she can't.”
“I didn't need her to buy me out now. It might even be better for me tax-wise if I waited, and …”
Susie didn't exactly roll her eyes, but she came close. For the first time, Randa wondered at what age adolescence officially began.
“If I hadn't said Katie could wait to pay me, she'd have found some really stupid way to finance it,” Randa added.
“Why would you care?”
Good question.
“I hate to watch anyone lose money.”
“And you like Katie.”
“I don't know her.”
“You like what you know, Mom.”
Two days ago her child would have been right. That was part of the reason why Randa was pulling the hair out of her head—literally. She had liked Katie. There had even been moments in the past three days when she'd thought what a pity it was that they lived on opposite coasts. But then Katie had started talking like the spoiled geniuses Randa had spent her career keeping out of bankruptcy court.
“Maybe Katie needs to be here to write,” Susie offered.
“You don't need to be any specific place to write. We know people who do it from Los Angeles, for God's sake.”
“I thought you liked Los Angeles.”
“I live in Los Angeles; I have to like it. Ouch!” she added as she gave her hair a vicious tug.
“If you give me the brush, I could do that,” Susie said.
“I'm fine, thanks.”
It was a lie. But what had made her so upset—okay furious—wasn't Katie or Mike Killian, or Susie, or the Venable Opera House. Ever since Katie had announced her nutball intentions, Randa had started dreaming about her father. She knew she was dreaming about him, even though she couldn't remember any of the details, because she woke up in the morning feeling sad and lonely, the way she had after he'd died.
Nothing she could do was going to make her hair lie flat. She grabbed a scarf and tied the mass of curls off her face. She was due to meet Mike Killian downstairs in the hotel coffee shop in fifteen minutes and no way was she going to be late.
“I like your hair,” Susie said. “It's … kind of hot.”
“I look like an unmade bed.”
“That's what I meant,” said her child, who was definitely growing up. “You go, Mom.”
Originally, the get-together with Mike Killian was supposed to take place in his lawyer's office. But since Katie had decided to keep the opera house, and no one was going to need legal advice, Randa figured she might as well give Mike Killian the news on her own turf—relatively speaking. So she'd invited him to have breakfast with her at the hotel.
Although, she figured she probably could have saved herself the effort. Katie had told R.B. about her plans, and he had undoubtedly passed the news along to the rest of his family, one of whom would leak it to the May-berry rumor mill. It was a sure bet that Mike Killian already knew what was up, Randa thought. The sure bet turned out to be a nonstarter.
“You're kidding,” Mike said after they'd done the greeting ritual and ordered breakfast.
“No. Katie has decided she wants to keep the opera house.”
“And you're going to let her?”
Why does everyone assume I'm her keeper?
“She's an adult,” Randa informed him.
“She doesn't have the sense God gave a goose! Her kind never did.”
“What ‘kind’ is that?”
He shot her a glance and then looked away. “You're a businesswoman; she's not. That's all I was saying.”
I don't think so.
“You said ‘her kind.’ How do you even know what kind she is?” she asked.
“She's not exactly realistic—is she?”
That wasn't what you meant either.
Their waitress appeared. Mike had skipped the all-you-can-eat breakfast buffet and had opted for cereal and fresh fruit. She'd done the same, but neither of them was exactly digging in.
“So your friend really thinks she's going to save that old place,” Mike said.
“She's not my friend—Okay that came out wrong. It's not that I don't like her. I don't know her well enough not to like her—and that sounded wrong too. What I'm trying to say is—”
“You're connected to a stranger and no one can tell you how or why, and you're sick of the whole damn thing,” he filled in. “You want to go back home where you belong, but this woman you don't know is messing up the works.”
That was exactly the way she'd been feeling. But she didn't like the way it sounded.
“I may not agree with what Katie is doing, but she has the right to try.”
“You don't believe that, Los Angeles. You know if this wasn't so stupid it would be funny.”
She'd been telling Susie that for three days. But who the hell did he think he was?
“I don't hear you laughing,” she said.
“You will when I buy that old rattrap. I'll have to wait until Miss Harder figures out whatever pie-in-the-sky she's got planned for it isn't going to work out. And that there's not a restaurant between here and Atlanta where she can find decent Thai fusion. But I'll get it.”
The idea was making him way too happy. “What do you have against the opera house?”
“Me? Nothing.”
“You're salivating at the thought of tearing it down. I've never seen anyone want to destroy something so much.”
“That's crazy.”
“My thought exactly.”
He drew in a deep breath. “Okay you want to hear it? That theater was closed down before I was born, but when I was growing up, all you ever heard around here was about how the Venable Opera House made Massonville so special. Why, back in the good old days it was written up in The New York Times! Bullshit snobs from all over the country had heard of us. I never could find anyone who'd gone to see any of the plays—but by God we were proud of it. Well, we had plenty to be proud of without it.”
“So this is a populist move on your part.”
“It's practical. The prime real estate that building sits on is going to waste. You may not like the condos I build, but people want to live in them. They're clean, and they're new, and don't kid yourself—most of your fellow Americans will pick that over charm any day of the week. I'm going to give people jobs. And when my condos are built, I'm going to sell them to taxpayers, which means there will be money for a whole lot of things like roads and sewers. That may not be as sexy as an old theater, but it will be a hell of a lot more help to the folks who actually live here.”
He sat back, a man who had made his point. That was when Randa remembered a scene from her past—and she knew it was connected to the dream she'd been having. She was five years old and she was in her father's dressing room at the Shakespeare festival in Stratford, Connecticut, watching him get ready to go on as Rosencrantz in Hamlet. It was the only speaking part he had all season—the rest of the time he was doing walk-ons—but she saw how carefully and proudly he did his makeup and put on his costume. When he was finished, he turned to Randa and said, “Hamlet was written in 1601. Can you imagine that, baby, 1601!”
Mike was still leaning back in his chair, looking pleased with himself.
“Some things are worth saving,” she said slowly.
I can't believe I'm doing this said a voice inside her head.
“If they're useful,” Mike said.
“Come on, Los Angeles, you're smarter than that. And saner.”
“My father was an actor.”
I really can't believe I'm doing this! said the voice.
“He wasn't successful, and he had too many problems to be a good father to me,” Randa continued. “That was wrong.”
Somebody shoot me, begged the voice.
But Randa kept on talking. “Wanting to be an actor, caring about it, that wasn't wrong. It wasn't practical, or smart; maybe it wasn't even sane. But how much that's practical and sane and smart hangs around for centuries?”
“Excuse me, what are we talking about?” Mike asked.
“Shakespeare wrote Hamlet four hundred years ago. Right now, somewhere on this planet, there's a bunch of actors trying to figure out if Hamlet had a thing for his mother, and just how much of a blowhard Polonius really was. Somewhere, in some language, someone is on a stage saying ‘To be or not to be.’ That play is still here.” He was staring at her now. “My spreadsheets won't be around in four hundred years. No one will give a damn about how much money I saved for my clients, or how fabulous my new carpet is. They're not going to give a damn about how much profit you made with your condos. So you want to talk about what's really useful? I'll put my money on Hamlet, and the Sistine Chapel ceiling, and Beethoven's Fifth. That stuff has lasted for a reason.”
Randa had been leaning so far forward she could have eaten the freshly sliced melon off his plate. She straightened up and waited for him to start laughing. Instead he looked at her for a moment, and she thought just maybe there was something a little gentle in his eyes. Then he poured some milk over his cereal and said, “So I guess this means you'll be moving to Massonville too.”
“That's not what I said!”
“Yeah, it is, Los Angeles.”
Oh. My. God.