“No.” I extend my hand. “Nice to meet you, Mina.”
She curls her face into something like a constipated smile, then removes a vial from her purse and eyeballs my brother.
“Be right back,” he says. “Don’t move. I’ll never find you again.”
“Leo ...” I feel the blood flush my cheeks. Too much booze I can ignore, I can even indulge in; drugs are a more dangerous territory for a mostly buttoned-up me.
“Don’t be a prude, man. It’s coke. Big fucking deal.”
“Since when do you do coke?”
He shrugs. “I don’t. No time like the present.”
“Come on,” I say. “Let’s get a drink. Don’t start with this shit.”
“Just a line or two.”
“How the fuck do you know what just a line or two is or will do?”
He shrugs again. “I’m not a kid anymore, Ben. I get to make my own choices.” He brushes past me, then turns. “Don’t look at me like that.”
“Like what?” I ask.
“Like Dad,” he says. “Right now, you look exactly fucking like Dad. So don’t.”
I want to say a million things, like:He wasn’t perfect, but he actually knew a thing or two, and if I could look or act even fractionally like him, it would be a blessing,or,Don’t shit on his grave by being an asshole tonight and snorting away his memory,or,Come on, Leo, I love you, man.
But I say none of this. I’m not my dad, and even if I were anything close, he mostly parented with tough love that I don’t have in me at eleven p.m. at a Hollywood party in Toronto where everyone is singing of my genius. Leo detects this momentary weakness and salutes me, and then disappears into a crowd of people who aren’t too different from me: along for the ride, unsure where they’re going, unsure of where they’ll land when the carousel stops but willing to take the chance anyway.
28
TATUM
SEPTEMBER 2012
The road trip seemed like a good idea when I proposed it.Let’s drive to Texas like we did years ago! Bring Joey! It will be the perfect way to spend Labor Day weekend, the last gasp of vacation before I have to report to work.
I was due in Austin the first week of September, not ideal timing because Joey was starting a new school for pre-K, and I’d have to fly to LA for the morning drop-off, then fly right back to Texas to make the day on set. But the Oscar win had given me all sorts of clout, and when the studio told me I could direct the little project I’d agreed to star in—nothing big, just a fifteen-million-dollar gimme aboutRoe v. Wadethat won’t generate a huge box office but will generate some critical praise (if I direct it correctly, as I intend to, of course)—I wasn’t about to turn it down because I’d be jetting back and forth for day one of school.
I’ve forgotten how hot it is, in these canyons through Arizona, how boring hours on end trapped in the back seat can be for a four-year old. Ben is driving because I am returning e-mails on my phone, when Joey starts whining again that he’s hungry. I hand him a granola bar, which he throws on the floor. I hand him a ziplock bag of Cheerios, which he whips open and dumps on the floor. I pass him an apple juice, which seems to placate him for a hot second, and then he squeezes the box and turns the straw into a fountain, which sprays Ben on the back of his neck. He’s been going through this phase—we call it the terrible fours—where he pushes our buttons to see whom he can set off first. It’s always Ben, who tells me I try to be too much of Joey’s friend, while he’s left playing the heavy, the bad cop, the enforcer, which just makes Joey press his buttons all over again.
“Jesus Christ!” Ben barks, swerving momentarily across the yellow line of the mostly deserted highway.
I place a hand on his leg, try to calm him. He’s been this way for the full year and ensuing months since Leo died: like a live grenade that, if touched the wrong way, could detonate without warning.
“I want French fries!” Joey shrieks. “French fries!”
I type “McDonald’s” into the map on my phone, but service is terrible, and my in-box tells me that e-mails from the past hour have not gone through. Locating a McDonald’s isn’t happening for the foreseeable future.
“We’ll find you McDonald’s, Jojo,” I say. “But you have to hang in there.”
Ben sighs audibly, as if he can’t believe I’m placating this shit. I shouldn’t be. Probably. But we’re in the middle of nowhere, and the kid wants McDonald’s, so this doesn’t feel like the hill (or mountain canyon) I want to die on.
“How long?” Joey crosses his arms. With his angry red cheeks brought on by repeatedly lowering the window, gasping at the whoosh of heat, then raising it again, he looks just like my father used to when he’d come home drunk.
“I don’t know, buddy, but try to go to sleep. That will make it go by faster.”
He narrows his eyes at me, suspicious. Like time can’t go by faster than time can go by. He’s not wrong. Like Ben and I wouldn’t will this horrific year to fast-forward until his grief has abated, until we’ve recalibrated and found our way back to normal.
