“Have it your way,” Simon says, magnanimous, and settles back in the seat, his eyes closed. He can probably get in another nap or two before they reach Phoenix. It could be worse.
“I haven’t had an accident either,” Charlie says after a minute. “Not since I was seventeen, at least. And I know you’re gonna bring up that thing where I backed into the director’s car, but that was on purpose, so it doesn’t count.”
This was the same director Charlie dumped the coffee on. Charlie rammed his old truck into the guy’s Tesla. The cops had shown up on set. So had Lian, who’d missed a week’s worth of drama because one of her kids had gotten her appendix out.
“He called Alex feisty and told Samara to stop being so aggressive,” Simon says. “And he helpfully reminded me at least ten times that Jonathan Hale is not A Gay and so I should butch it up. I didn’t shed any tears over his stupid car.”
“Really?” Charlie drums his fingers on the steering wheel.
“Has it somehow escaped your attention that I’m an extremely petty man?”
“No. I mean—you aren’t...”
Charlie is apparently trying to be nice again, and Simon decides that it’s time for some positive reinforcement. “I very much am. It’s a feature.” He takes a deep breath. “It shouldn’t have gotten to that point. I knew he was toxic—”
“Abusive.”
Simon swallows, because Charlie’s right. He tries not to think about what role his silence played in the entire mess. “It’s just that it wasn’t as bad as things onTree of the Gods.”
“What the fuck, Simon? It’s not, like, an abuse contest.”
“No, fuck you, I mean that I think I was maybe a little desensitizedto, uh, hostile workplaces. I was so gladOut Therewasn’t a total shitshow, and I didn’t see how bad things were that week. Or I didn’t want to.” The truth is that Simon knew he couldn’t handle another situation likeTree of the Gods.He would have quit, left town, and let his middle brother set him up with some non-job at his investment bank.
“Alex said that was probably what happened.”
It makes Simon a little queasy, both at the idea that Charlie and Alex have talked about this, and the implication that Alex had to make excuses for Simon. There’s also, in the tightness of Charlie’s jaw and the dryness of his voice, the suggestion that Charlie didn’t agree with Alex—that Charlie thought Simon didn’t object to anything that director said.
“I thought you were the problem,” Simon says, becausehonestly. He isn’t going to pretend that Charlie was a saint. “When I agreed to do the show, Lian said it wouldn’t be likeTree of the Gods, and all I could see was that she let you—you know.”
“Show up blitzed? Nearly fuck everything up for all of us?”
Really, it was the trailer-punching that set Simon’s alarms off. The coffee incident and rumors of bar fights didn’t help. But that isn’t the point.
This is where a better person would apologize—for misjudging Charlie or for being so in his head that he couldn’t see what was happening around him.
“It was a long time ago,” Simon says, which is obvious and meaningless and dumb. But Charlie just hums in a way that doesn’t sound overtly hostile so maybe he understands what Simon’s trying to say.
The landscape shifts to reds and browns, set into relief by scrubby bushes on the side of the road and the bright blue of the sky. There are no more billboards for casinos and furniture outlets, no more palm trees. The highway dwindles to two lanes, stretching out across a terrain that Simon only knows from that week they needed to shoot a space desert on location and the time he picked Jamie up at Coachella. Except for the cellphone towers, it looks like a faded old postcard. Greetings from the wrong side of Joshua Tree.
“It’s like this for the next three hours,” Charlie says.
“How often do you do this drive?”
Charlie’s quiet for a moment, drumming his fingers on the steering wheel. A muscle in his jaw ticks. “Not as often as I’d like.”
Simon’s phone buzzes, which means Jamie’s up. He’s sent a picture of Edie refusing to look at her breakfast, her head pointed away from the bowl, her nose in the air.
“Edie is on a hunger strike,” Simon says, mostly because three hours of silence is not okay and dogs are a safe topic.
“Will she be all right?” Charlie asks. Simon has the impression that he’ll turn the car around if Simon says so.
“She gets like this whenever I travel. She’ll eat, but first she needs to make sure Jamie knows he isn’t her real dad.”
“Is that normal? Alex’s dog doesn’t do that.”
Simon tells himself that Charlie isn’t accusing him of animal abuse or implying that Edie is a psychopath. “Alex’s dog is a hundred-pound lab mix who was raised by a normal, well-adjusted person. Edie is an overbred dachshund who was raised by me. They are not the same.” Also, Alex’s dog has, at most, one functioningbrain cell, but Simon doesn’t mention this in case Charlie won’t recognize it as a compliment.
“Edie is perfect just the way she is,” Charlie says.
