I nod. “His library. All alphabetized by author and then title. Leo once got so mad at him that he pulled every single book down into a huge heap in the middle of the rug.” I laugh. “I think he blamed it on our dog, Bitsy.”
Amanda smiles but I’m surprised that she doesn’t laugh in the way that Tatum would at the memory of Leo and his impishness. Tatum would howl at the notion that my dad actually pretended to believe it was Bitsy, a thirty-pound poodle, his way of acknowledging that he could be a bit of a hard-ass on Leo, on me too. He was tough, my father, but he was also soft in unexpected ways, unexpected moments.
“Well, I remember that your dad had, like, two shelves of books on Reagan, biographies, presidential, historical stuff ... I don’t know.” She cocks her head. “Maybe Reagan is his thing. Maybe it doesn’t have to be yours?”
I inhale sharply when she says this: that it is so obvious, this script, thisthingI’ve been chasing for half, no, more of my career. That it was nothing other than textbook psychology, some kid who was running around trying to impress his dad, whom he could no longer impress. I blink too quickly, wondering if I’m about to have some sort of emotional collapse right here in a Standard luxury room with a view of the pool.
“Oh, I didn’t mean to upset you.” She rises, naked, and moves to hug me.
“No, no.” I wipe my cheeks. “You’re right. I mean, you’re probably right. I don’t know how I didn’t see this.” I unwrap her arms from my neck, push her away too quickly, find that I can’t meet her eyes.
“Ben.”
“I should go, really. If it’s not going to beReagan, it should be something else. I have a quiet day. I shouldn’t waste it.”
“I wasn’t being critical.”
“I know.” I exhale. “I know.” I kiss her. “But Tatum will be home soon. I need to be there.”
“Oh,” she says flatly, and tries to wiggle her hands down my pants. “But what if you weren’t?”
“I’ll call you later,” I say, stepping back and out the door.
I don’t know if I will—call her—I keep meaning to end it, after all—but I promise that I will anyway.
Later, when Joey is asleep by six o’clock because they went to bed at midnight down at Legoland, and Tatum is reading a script on the couch, and I’m scrolling through my Twitter feed (and ostensibly rubbing her feet, but she keeps wiggling her toes to remind me to keep going), I say:
“Do you think I should keep trying on theReaganscript?”
It’s a test, I know. It’s actually more of a trap.
She rests the script in her lap, wrinkles her brow. “What brings this on?”
“I’m just thinking that maybe if it hasn’t come together after all these years, maybe I should give it a rest.”
She narrows her eyes, assesses, really takes me in. “I think you underestimate yourself.”
I snort. “Well, then this town is right there with me.”
“Ben ...” It comes out as more of a sigh.
“Why didn’t you tell me after so many years that this was really my dad’s thing? That it was all some Freudian shit that I was chasing, like some textbook Psych 101 bullshit, and that no matter how good the script was, it wouldn’t be good enough?”
She yanks her head back. “I ... I never said that because I never saw it that way.”
“Give me a break, Tatum.”
“And even if I had, would you have listened to me? Maybe a while ago, but now? You would have just been pissed, told me I didn’t believe in you enough, thatIwas underestimatingyou.”
I start to say something snide, but stop myself. She’s right, of course. I’d have blamed her for not being supportive enough.
I remove her feet from my lap, rise, and pad to the kitchen before she can read my body language, which is tense, taut, ready for a fight.
“Do I think you should writeReagan, even if, yeah, maybe it was at first something you wanted to do for your dad?” she calls to me.
I open the fridge door, find nothing of interest, close it too loudly. I turn and find her standing right behind me.
“Jesus!”
