Amy Trevino—Amy Fleming then—had earned a B.F.A. in dramatic writing from New York University, then dipped a toe briefly in the playwriting waters before withdrawing it. (The water, it turned out, was inhospitable, her skin thinner and more prone to goose bumps than she’d known.) She’d left New York allthose years ago with her sanity intact; she’d bowed out of the theater world and decided to live in Narragansett and marry a small-business owner she’d dated two summers in a row and have two un-famous children with normal lives and normal friends because that was the kind of life she wanted. In truth, that was the kind of life she thought most people should have.
And if a small part of her ever second-guessed that, ever bought tickets for a show at the Providence Performing Arts Center and read through the program and looked longingly at the playwright’s name and perhaps read his or her or their bio and wondered what might have happened if...
Well, that part was very, very small, even minuscule, and it was easy to tamp it down, because she loved her husband and her children and her job at the high school, and directing high school theater was every bit as rewarding as...
Okay, maybe notevery bit.That was a bridge too far. But it was almost always very rewarding. On the good days, of which there were many.
Some.
Enough.
Usually.
“It’s not a road! It’s just a...” Timothy paused, and she realized he couldn’t complete the metaphor.
“Come on, Timothy. You’re talking about having her compete with kids who’ve been acting since the cradle. Why would we set her up for disappointment like that? She’s not a child actor! I’m not a stage mom!”
“Just bring her down, Ame. I’ll talk her through it, let her know it’s a good experience to have under her belt no matter what. But honestly, I have a really good feeling about this.”
“Argh,” said Amy.
Once Sam got wind of the idea, there was no stopping her. Sam would have walked from Narragansett to Manhattan, on iceor over coals or through a tunnel full of crocodiles. She wanted to try.
Amy drove Sam down to the city for the audition, maneuvering her Honda Pilot carefully through Midtown, paying an exorbitant amount of money to park in a teeny tiny parking garage, leaving the keys reluctantly with a guy in a blue polo shirt who scarcely looked up from his phone when he took them. During the audition she sat in the hallway with the other moms. (Were they moms? Or were some of them professional child-audition handlers? She wasn’t sure; they all looked so intense, so thin and well-groomed, soshiny.) She checked in via email with the substitute teacher who was covering her English classes at the high school. The freshmen were taking their test onThe Odyssey,and anxiety was high.
Amy hated to missOdysseyday.
There was a minute—okay, perhaps a ten-minute stretch—when being in the hallway outside the audition studio, feeling the nervous energy coursing through the place as each potential Scout disappeared into the room and returned, listening to the music and tap-dancing sounds from another audition in a different studio, caused Amy’s Manhattan juices to flow again. For those few minutes she was no longer Amy Trevino of Narragansett, owner of a reusable coffee cup stamped with the wordsEnglish Teachers Get Lit, but Amy Fleming, New York University undergrad, wandering Bleecker Street in her boot-cut jeans and her platform clogs. She was remembering pieces of her former life—the carrot-ginger dressing at Dojo on West Fourth, the play she’d written sophomore year for her Fundamentals of Playwritingclass—when Sam emerged from the audition room, flushed, biting her lip the way she had when she’d won the third-grade spelling bee. (Her nemesis, Miley Finnegan, put twoS’s indisappear,rendering Sam victorious.)
That’s when Amy knew everything was about to change.
There were two callbacks, the second with the great Timothy Fleming himself, to test the chemistry, which of course was spot-on, and then a call from the casting director to Amy, offering Sam the part.
Timothy’s own agent, Barry “the Bastard” Goldman, wanted to sign Sam to his list—and he hardly ever signed children.
“She doesn’t need an agent,” Amy told Timothy. “This is a one-off. This is just an experience she’s going to have, and then she’s going to return to her regular life, and if she wants to pick up the theater thing in college, well, then she can be my guest.”
“There’s no obligation,” said Timothy. “But Barry is a hot ticket. If he wants Sam, you guys would be fools to turn him down. There are people who would literally give away an organ to sign their children with Barry.”
“Surely that’s not true,” said Amy dubiously. “An organ?”
“Maybe a lesser organ,” said Timothy. “A spleen or a spare kidney, one of the organs you can technically live without. But you catch my drift.”
Amy wanted Greg to feel the same concerns she felt, but Greg had stars in his eyes too. He was an HVAC guy, the son of a plumber, who was, in turn, also the son of a plumber. A kid of his on Broadway!
“Let’s just do it,” said Greg. “The play, the agent, the whole deal. Why not, right?”
“Why not indeed,” murmured Amy.
“It would be silly to turn it down,” said Timothy. “You’ve got nothing to lose.”
Just my daughter’s soul, Amy thought grimly.
Mockingbirdran for three months, from April to June. Amy’s school arranged for a long-term sub through the end of the year so that she could relocate to the city and see Sam to and from the theater for each performance. The reviews were stellar; in theTimesreview, the critic called Sam’s Scout “luminous” and “soulful.”
Two weeks after the show ended Barry the Bastard got Sam an audition for the part of the youngest sister inMy Three Daughters,a remake of the 1960s hitMy Three Sons,with a feminist twist.
Even starry-eyed Greg hesitated at this one.
