Because someone starts banging on the window. “Get out here,” Hudson calls. “They’re showingRocky Horror. Bea!They’re showing Rocky Horror.”
I smooth my hair, then Simon’s. “Did you know that’s his favorite movie ever?”
“I may have sought out that information.”
Hudson and Ryker and Lana and the boys join Simon and me, and we spend the next one and a half hours enjoyingRocky Horrorto its fullest. The cars aren’t jammed in as tight tonight, which clearly is so that we have room to dance in the late summer evening.
And after the show, when everyone else is leaving, Simon insists that all of us stay for a private showing of something else. He breaks blankets and popcorn tins out of the back of the SUV, and once all of us are settled—Simon and me, my brothers, his twins, and Lana—he gives a signal to his security man in the booth, and then something that’s clearly not a professional production flickers to life on the screen.
I squint.
It’s a stage.
Like—like a community theater stage.
A woman strides onto the stage as if she owns it, and my gasp is echoed by Ryker.
“Sweetheart?” a very,veryfamiliar voice echoes around the parking lot.
An achingly familiar voice that I haven’t heard in over ten years.
“Sweetheart, have you seen my bag?”
That’s my mom.
My mom, on the community theater’s stage.
The video is grainy—it was clearly never intended to be shown on a screen this size—butthat’s my mom.
And if I’m not mistaken—that’s my mom in the only show of hers I never saw.
“Simon,” I whisper.
He scoots closer to me. “Lana found the recording. My role was simply in providing a venue.”
“Your mom’s last show was my mom’s first show,” Lana tells me. “She got into theater later in life.”
“Of course I never put it away the same place twice. What would the point in that be?” my mom says on screen to her costar, prompting laughs from the audience.
And one laugh in particular—that’s my dad’s laugh.
Ryker and Hudson suck in matching breaths.
They know it too.
“Thank you,” I whisper to Simon.
“As I said, merely provided a venue.”
“Look, boys,” Lana says as someone else joins my mom on stage. “That’s your grandmother in the pink pants.”
Eddie and Charlie crack up.
“Pink pants,” Charlie crows.
“Shush and watch the movie,” Hudson says. His voice is thick, and I’m not surprised when a box of tissues appears.
Several boxes, in fact.
