Bombshell (Hollywood A-List #1)(70)

“When we get home you can call the hotel and see if they have it,” I said.

“So frustrating.” She kept looking at the bottomless pit of her purse. She didn’t know the meaning of frustrating. Frustrating was leaving it under my pillow in the hotel and feeling like a shit heel.

“So,” Dad looked at Cara in the rearview, rubbing the spot where his right pinkie used to be, “what are we calling you?”

I wanted to kick him. I knew he didn’t like the idea of me getting help with Nicole, but if he was going to be an * about me bringing Cara, I was going to kill him.

Cara didn’t seem to mind.

“Cara’s fine. Nicole calls me Miss Cara.”

Dad nodded. “Good. Children need to have respect. This first name business really puts me off.”

“What should I call you?” she asked.

“Grandpa!” Nicole chimed in.

“He’s your grandfather, sweetheart,” I said. “Not Miss Cara’s.”

“Milton’s fine,” Dad said. “My wife’s Ermine. Everyone calls her Erma.”

“Okay. Thank you.”

“You got any . . .” He waved his hand as if trying to clear the dust off the right word. “. . . whaddya call? You a vegetarian or anything?”

“Nope. I eat everything.”

Dad turned down our street and nodded as if she’d just told him everything he needed to know.

“Good. That works.”

Mom and my sister, Susan, waited on the porch with a passel of grandkids. We weren’t even all the way up the drive before they were banging on the car. Worse than paparazzi. Nicole freaked out, hiding in Cara’s armpit.

Once she got out and saw Grandma, she laughed and clapped. Dad picked her up and swung her around. Susan shook Cara’s hand. My brother slapped my back. Aunt Janie pinched my cheek and told me I was skinny. My old Uncle Walter, who was six three and 160 if he was an ounce, agreed with her, grabbing at my waist to feel the love handles that weren’t there. Nicole ran to the porch with her cousins, holding up her stack of pony trading cards. Cara tried to catch her, waving twinkling sneakers.

“Nicole! Put your shoes on!”

I grabbed her arm. “Leave her. If she doesn’t get dirty, we’re doing it wrong.”

“We?”

I didn’t have a chance to make up an explanation for a slip of the tongue. Buddy from next door, who ate his boogers every day at lunch until third grade, who knocked up and married Vicki Sommer before he left high school, tackled me. He smelled like motorcycle grease and sweat.

“You didn’t bring Paula?” he asked.

“Nah, I’m not here to work.”

In third grade, when Buddy worked on the seven and eight times tables he got a look on his face that was half twisted out and half relaxed fugue. It had meant things weren’t computing, and rather than work it out he usually just accepted a D and moved on. He got that look when I mentioned Paula’s absence, then shrugged and took his D.

“You have to see Margie.” He punched my arm. “Man, she’s gorgeous!”

Margie was his Harley. He’d been fixing her since he was seventeen. He never looked twisted and fugued with his hands in an engine.

“You been f*cking it?” I waved my hand in front of my nose. “You stink, bro!”

“Bradley James Sinclair!” Mom shouted. “You got a mouth like a cesspool.”

Buddy threw his arm around Mom. “I’m glad you’re back. Now she can get off my case. Come check Margie out. She roars and purrs.”

I didn’t look to my parents or my siblings, but to Cara, who was talking to my sister about I-didn’t-even-know-what.

“Hey,” I said, and she turned. “I’m going to go next door for a minute. You’ll be all right?”

“We’ll be fine. Have fun.”

I trotted over to Buddy’s garage to see his bike and glanced back at Cara talking with my sister on the way to the house I grew up in. I didn’t feel anything. Nothing.

Just at home.





CHAPTER 52


CARA


So. Many. People.

The oldest person I met looked as though she wasn’t a minute under 150, and the youngest had just been born a few weeks earlier. I caught as many names as I could and tried to keep an eye on Nicole, but I got pulled in a dozen different directions before being placed in front of a pile of carrots and a cutting board.

“Nanny?” his sister asked. I repeated her name to myself. Susan. An uncle or two came in for beers, but the uncles were indistinguishable from cousins. The gender rules seemed set in stone. All the women got dinner on the table, all the men sat outside. Everyone helped with the children.

“Nanny,” I replied.

“What kind of word is that?” She cleaved an onion, and it opened into two rocking half-spheres.

“Shorter than caretaker?”

“Leave her alone, Suze.” Brad’s mom, Erma, was in constant motion.

“I’m being interested.” Susan had her brother’s jawline, which was both disconcerting and striking on a woman.

“You’re talking without saying anything.”

Susan rolled her eyes and sliced a thin crescent of onion. “Seems all right’s all I’m saying. Taking care of kids? I don’t get paid.” She bit the edge off the onion slice, then munched it down to her fingertips.