I wondered about what would happen when we had to face the uncomfortable reality of the age difference between us. But when it happens, when Lucy inadvertently points it out, it feels like nothing. A difference, yes, but just like any other. Like me from Los Angeles, Dane from New York, Lucy and Cole from the Midwest.
“Are you calling us old?” Dane asks gruffly, but the darkness in his voice isn’t anger as he leans over to her, bracketing her against the couch.
We don’t finish the game. I’m pretty sure Dane and I would have won.
One night, Dane makes pelmeni for us. He’s made it for Cole and me a few times before, shown us how to fill and pinch the dough. But now that Lucy sits at the breakfast bar with us, he’s sharing the story as well.
“My baba and deda—my father’s parents—were immigrants. They came from Serbia,” Dane explains, as he fills and pinches each little dumpling. We all sit and make dumplings, listening. “They saved, scrimped every penny, and were able to buy a laundromat when my father started high school. He worked there as a teenager, burning his hands on the chemicals and carrying pounds of laundry on his bike for delivery.”
“That sounds hard,” Lucy murmurs, her hands slower at making the dumplings than ours since we’ve done it before.
Dane smiles mischievously, “Right—be glad he’s not here to respond to that.” Dropping his voice, Dane says in a light Russian accent, “Hard? You have no idea what hard is.”
Lucy laughs, shaking her head and shifting on her stool, “He still had an accent? Even though he grew up here?”
“It’s very faint,” Dane says, shrugging and dropping more pelmeni into the bowl. “He’ll play it up or smother it, depending on who he’s with.”
“Too bad you don’t have an accent,” Lucy jokes, waggling her eyebrows.
Dane rolls his eyes, goes on. Explaining his Irish heritage on his mother’s side, how his father, Aleksander, invested in real estate in the city. How hard he worked to avoid involving himself with the mob. The story flows easily from Dane, and I imagine his father telling it.
I’ve only met Aleksander a few times myself, but I can imagine the old man talking himself up. Describing himself as having gone from a laundry boy to a millionaire, more flowery than the way Dane explains it.
The look on Lucy’s face says she knows something about the relationship between Dane and his father.
Later, when we’re swimming, Cole brings up his sister. Dane and I share a look, but Lucy doesn’t realize how unusual that is.
It seems we all want to share with her, because when she and I are the first into bed later—Dane and Cole still getting ready—she says, “So, you grew up in L.A., right?”
Instantly, my stomach sours. I quirk an eyebrow, trying not to let it show how much I don’t want to talk about this. “I did.”
“Did you meet a lot of movie stars?”
The sour feeling intensifies. “My mom was a bit of a starlet, actually.”
Lucy’s eyes pop, “That explains the looks.”
I grin, unable to resist the urge to flirt. “You think I’m good-looking?”
She giggles and punches me lightly on the arm. “So, did you, like, grow up on movie sets? With your mom?”
The moment stretches. I watch her, lying on her side, face cradled against her cheek, breathing deeply, her eyes on me.
“No,” I say, finally, and the story comes out.
Normally, I don’t like to talk about this with anyone, but there’s something about Lucy. She makes me want to share parts of myself I don’t usually share.
Dane and Cole know this story, pieced together from bits and pieces over the years. Details shared over a few too many glasses of whiskey. The obvious conclusion when I’m a wreck on my mother’s birthday every year.
Susan Hawthorne was a starlet. As a teenager, she was in a handful of up-and-coming films. She played the first girl killedin a summer slasher movie, then the scheming daughter of a small-town cop in a murder mystery. Her biggest role, and the one people usually recognize her from, was as the lead in a coming-of-age romcom. She played oppositeBrad Pitt, for fuck’s sake.
But she wanted to be more serious than slashers and romcoms. My mother wanted to be arealactress, which is why she started talking to my father.
My father. A—married—director and producer who took a liking to her, and promised she would get a role in his next WWII piece, a way for her to pivot into a more serious career.
He wanted her. And she gave in, because she wanted a successful career more than anything. Then she was pregnant, and getting hush money from him, and that’s how I came into the world—a paid-for secret.
My early memories are mostly good. Back then, my mother was optimistic that she just had to get me old enough to go to school, not to need her all the time, and she would be able to return to Hollywood. She thought she might pick up the mantle of stardom right where she left it.
