Good Riddance(62)

“Did you love it?” Jeremy asked.

Back and forth that conversation went—about how everyone had been bummed when Lin-Manuel Miranda left and when the actors playing Aaron Burr and King George III did, too . . . etcetera.

Kathi asked when he and—was it Tina?—were seeing the show.

“We already did. A couple of weeks ago.”

“Are we meeting her, too?” Kathi aed.

I sent my father a look that asked, Why so clueless? Jeremy stepped in with exactly the right subject changers. “Thanks, but Tina’s away—her mother’s not well, unfortunately—and I’ve got lines to learn.”

Empathy plus an acting career. What’s not to love about those two lumps of conversational sugar? Ever gracious, Kathi asked, in the correct order, “Is her mother seriously ill?” followed by “Lines? Are you in a play?”

Jeremy smiled, which I interpreted to mean It’s almost too easy. Then, gravely, he said, “It’s cancer. But the prognosis is good.”

I said, “Jeremy plays a teenager in Archie and Veronica Go to High School.”

Jeremy said, “Aka Riverdale.”

How had I not noticed that his braces were gone? I tapped my own front teeth. “All done with that?”

“Yup, all done, because Timmy couldn’t go off to college with braces on.”

“‘Off to college’ as in ‘off the show’?”

“No. Still on. Luckily, he got into the college right in Riverdale. Many of us will be enrolled there.”

“Would that be Riverdale U by any chance?” I asked.

“Good guess,” he said.

Next, Kathi was telling us that she once gave lessons to an actor playing a pianist—not really playing the piano because the music was dubbed, but she worked with him to make his hands move believably over the keyboard.

My father said, “It’s another thing I love about New York! Movies, television, actors, and celebrities in your midst. Filming things right on the street!”

“Tell them about Cleopatra,” said Kathi.

My dad said, “Cleopatra belongs to an opera singer, a real one. She’s been an understudy at the Met.”

“Cleopatra has?”

“No, Cleo’s her dog, an Afghan hound.”

I reminded Jeremy that my father was a professional dog walker.

Jeremy said, “I always thought a Manhattan dog walker would make a great character in a movie.”

“You write movies?” Kathi asked.

“So far just screenplays that go nowhere.”

How did I not know that? Months of pillow talk, yet he’d never told me he had screenwriting dreams? No wonder we were . . . nothing.

“I’m going to start watching your show,” said Kathi.

I stood up. “I have to check the rice,” I lied.

Before I’d taken two steps toward the kitchen, Jeremy asked, “Daff—before I don’t stay for dinner—did you want to tell your dad about that thing we discussed?”

No, I did not.

“The podcast?” he prompted.

And with only that, my father asked, “From the gal who put it together. Jennifer? I had coffee with her last month.”

“Geneva,” I nearly stuttered.

“Right—the woman who had us for Thanksgiving dinner.”

Did I bravely explore this revelation further? Ask the when/where/how of it? No, I excused myself, pleading rice again.

I heard Jeremy say, “I’ll see if Daphne needs any help,” and in seconds, he was next to me at the stove.

“You okay?” he asked.

“I’m in shock. How long has he known about the podcast! I’m afraid of what I’ll find out next.”

“Look, he came tonight. He seems happy. Wouldn’t you have heard immediately if he never wanted to talk to you again?” Jeremy switched off the burner under the tea kettle I didn’t need. “C’mon. This was why you invited him over, right? To tell all?”

“But in my own words: ‘Dad, there’s this podcast out there that puts your wife and your marriage in a terrible light.’”

“If you want me to, I could say there’s a Nielsen rating for podcasts, and—trust me—this one’s a stinker.”

“I thought you had to go learn some lines.”

“I do. All six of them. Leave this.”

I poured another shot of vodka into the pitcher of cosmos and refilled my glass. I returned to my guests, sat down, and said, as calmly as I could, “So what was your coffee with Geneva about?”

“That thing she’s doing—the radio show.”

The distress must have been registering on my face and possibly excreting from my pores because Kathi asked what was wrong. I said, “He’s so calm! I was scared to tell him about it. I thought he’d be furious and I’d get blamed because I let the stupid yearbook fall into her hands!”

“Furious?” my dad repeated. “Why?”

“It’s about . . . people. Alleged people. From Pickering . . . friends of Mom’s.”

“I know all that. She told me that she had hired actors to play the roles of people a small-town teacher might have known. She explained that it was an adaptation. That’s what Hollywood does: They take someone’s life and they turn it into a musical, or put in a car chase, or set it in space.”