“Your mom wasn’t into entertainment?”
“My mom was a model when she was sixteen until nineteen.”
“Why so short a time?”
“She was in a bad car accident one night. She ended up really messing up her hip. She walks with a slight limp even all this time later. But more than that, she got some scars. One big one on her thigh. And a smaller, but more egregious one—in the eyes of the fashion industry—on her face. Her career was over.”
“So she got married and made you instead.”
“Actually, my father was a one-night stand who didn’t want the burden of fatherhood. He was a singer-songwriter who wanted to be the next Bob Dylan.”
“Did he get there?”
“He fell into a bottle when his first album flopped. Seems like he stayed there a long time. But I saw him on social media recently. Doing some modern-day busking on a live video. Seems like he got sober.”
“Do you have any kind of relationship with him?”
“We’ve talked a handful of times over the years. But it was always awkward. Enough about my messed-up family. What about yours?”
“I was mostly raised by my ma. My father passed.”
“I’m sorry.”
“It was a long time ago. But my mom was left with five of us to raise.”
“Oh, wow. Five?”
“Two brothers, two sisters.”
“Where do you fall?”
“The baby. My two brothers, two sisters, then me.”
“Big age gaps?”
“No. We were one after another. My mom is a big fan of babies.”
“Which means she is looking for grandbabies…”
“She’s got a ton of them. But she wants some from me too.”
“That’s sweet, though.”
“Your mom doesn’t want grandchildren?”
“My mother would rather die than have someone call her ‘grandma.’ And she was forever telling me not to get pregnant because I was going to ruin my body.”
“Ruin,” Milo repeated, frowning. “Change, sure. But ruin is a terrible way to put it.”
“Well, she wanted it to sound terrible. Mostly because she and her third husband stole all my modeling money, so they didn’t want to lose that stream of income if I got knocked up.”
“Jesus, Monroe…”
“Roe. Just Roe.”
“Roe.” God, it sounded even better when he said that. “I like that.”
“Monroe London is a great stage name. But Roe Langston feels more like me.”
