She nods. “Yeah. I probably would get flattened by a moped.” A pause, and then, “Sorry they interrupted us.” And then, more quietly, “I mean, sorry not sorry.” (What doesthatmean? wonders Timothy. Who made up all these new terms, and who sanctioned them?) “Price of fame, I guess.” Sam says this self-deprecatingly, with a little shrug of the shoulders, and something about that incenses Timothy.
“Okay, you know what, Sam?” he says, unable to hold his thoughts inside any longer, knowing that if he says any more after this he’s rending the fabric of the evening, perhaps beyond repair. But he can’t help himself. “I admit it. I do find myself in a bad mood all of a sudden.”
Sam draws her eyebrows together and purses her lips. She looks so much like Amy when she does this! “Butwhy?” she asks.
“It’s your idea of fame. You, and everyone else your age. Those girls who came up to you, they should know you from your work inMockingbird,your role inMy Three Daughters! Not for what you did in some group home.”
“Xanadu? You’re talking aboutXanadu?”
“Yes. I’m talking about Xanadu.” He has trouble saying the word without derision or irony, but mostly he manages.
“It wasn’t agroup home!It was a collab house!” Sam sighs and folds her arms.
“I don’t know what that is.”
“It’s a house for artistic collaboration. A house that makes it easy to produce and distribute content, because you’re living with like-minded individuals who share the same goals. It’s not, like, a halfway house.”
Timothy can feel his left eyebrow rise dramatically, as though a director has just asked him to look skeptically at the other actor in the scene. (This is one of histhings,that he can raise one eyebrow while leaving the other one where it sits. Some have said that his left eyebrow was the real star ofThe Devil in Here.)“What kind of content? Plays? Movies? Television scripts?”
Sam hesitates, then he sees her gather herself, take control. “Well, no. Videos. TikToks.”
He rolls his eyes so far back he fears he might have sprained one of them. “For what reason?”
“For a lot of different reasons. Sometimes for entertainment, sometimes for companies.”
“Commercials?” He tries to keep the disdain out of his voice—commercials have kept many an actor very well afloat in the lean times, himself included—but it creeps in anyway.
“Well, yeah. Sort of. But not like TV commercials. Product endorsements.”
Timothy shakes his head. He casts a glance across the sweep of lawn, and back toward the bar, from which the sounds of lively, happy, Friday-night people reach them, and then Sam says, “You know what? I think I will walk. Thank you very much for dinner, it was delicious, but I need to clear my head.”
He doesn’t actually think she’ll walk away, but there she goes, starting down the long driveway, partially lit, that slopes down from the parking lot. Amy would string him like a side of beef if he let Sam walk home from here in the dark.
“Sam!” He follows her. Normally she’d be quicker, having youth and fitness and self-righteousness on her side, but her platform sandals slow her progress, and he catches up to her about halfway down the driveway. “Sam! Stop. Let’s finish this conversation. I think this is important.”
She turns and unleashes on him what can only be properly described as a sneer. (Is this what it’s like to father a teenager? GoodLord, he is not equipped.) “Great,” she says. “I’d love to. I’d love for you to throw shade on my worksome more.”
(What itthrowing shade? He supposes he can figure this one out from context clues.)
Sam is looking away from him, toward the ocean, and even in the waning light he can pick up on the stubborn set of her shoulders, and, because of the bun in her hair, the tension in the back of her neck. God! Again she reminds him so much of her mother, and he feels the same twin sensations he feels with Amy: the desire to shake her out of her stubbornness while at the same time standing in admiration of it. Say what you want about the Trevino women, they do not back down.
“I’ll go back for the car. You stay right here. But please stay off the road.”
She has more to say though. “How would you know about any of it? I’m sure you’ve never watched any of my TikToks. You have no idea what they’re like, or what I’ve been doing, or what kind of influence I have, or anything. You’re stuck in the past, in something I did when I was twelve.”
“You’re right,” he says unapologetically. “You’re right, Sam. I’ve never watched a TikTok, yours or anyone else’s, and I don’t plan to.”
“So you don’t know what you’re talking about. Admit it.”
Suddenly it all bubbles up inside him—his frustration with Sam, his sadness about Gertie not wanting to dine with him, the proximity to his childhood home, and the inevitable, irrefutable fact of his own aging—and yes, probably, the two martinis. It bubbles up, and then it comes out, in these words, and in a tone and at a level that maybe later he’ll regret but that right now he simply can’t control:
“Here’s what I know, Sam! Here’s what I know. I know that you have a gigantic—what have I heard you call it?—aplatform,with thousands of people who are interested in what you have to say—”
“Hundreds of thousands,” corrects Sam.
“Okay, hundreds of thousands. Even better. Worse. Whatever. So you’ve got all these people, multiply those girls at the restaurant by however many girls there are like that in the country—”
“The world,” she says. “My followers are international.”
