This Is What Happy Looks Like(32)

As he passed a hardware store with one of those old-fashioned mechanical horses out front, he noticed a sign in the window announcing the annual Fourth of July festival, and he paused to examine it more closely. Every year, it seemed, there was an all-day party in the town square, a concert and cookout followed by dancing and a fireworks display, and even now, Graham could almost picture it: the streets filled with people, kids running around with sparklers, the distant pop of firecrackers, and the swell of music in the air. It reminded him of the celebrations in his own hometown, and he was struck by the memory of all the parades he’d watched with his parents when he was younger, the three of them waving flags as the marching bands boomed past.

He was halfway down the block, heading in the direction of Ellie’s house, when it occurred to him that he’d still be in Henley then. The production wouldn’t be moving back to L.A. until a couple of days after the Fourth, and though Graham couldn’t remember the exact schedule at the moment—had, in fact, hardly even looked at it yet—he was sure they must have at least a little bit of time off during the holiday weekend.

Before he had a chance to think it through, he pulled his phone from his pocket and dialed his parents. As it rang, the possibilities of the weekend expanded in his mind, and he found himself smiling at the idea of it. His parents had only ever visited him once on set, and that was right at the beginning, during one of his first scenes, which had been shot in a studio in L.A. They’d been hopelessly out of place, the two of them standing off to the side in their cable-knit sweaters and glasses, his mom shivering from the low temperatures in the studio, his dad squinting against the glare of the lights. During a break, his mother had given him a kiss on the cheek and explained that she wasn’t feeling well, and Graham watched them walk out the door with a leaden feeling in his stomach, a sense that something had already been lost between them.

But this would be different. He could show them around, impress them with his knowledge of the production, let them see him in action in a place where they’d be more comfortable. He’d take them on a tour of the town, buy them dinner at the Lobster Pot, bring them to the festival so that they could watch the fireworks together, just like they had when he was younger. Maybe he’d go fishing with his dad. Maybe they could even meet Ellie.

When the answering machine picked up—the same recorded message that had been on there for years—he snapped back, clearing his throat. “Hey, guys,” he said, then hesitated. “It’s me. Just wanted to see if you had plans for the Fourth. If not, I was thinking maybe you could come out and visit the set. You’d love it here. It sort of reminds me of home. And it could be fun for you to spend the weekend. I’m in Maine, by the way. Can’t remember if you knew that. Anyway, let me know what you think…”

He trailed off, then hung up fast, already feeling less certain of his plan. His parents hardly ever traveled. When Graham was a kid, they took exactly one family vacation a year, driving two hours to an oceanside motel, where they’d stay exactly three days before returning home again, pink-cheeked and sun-drunk from their hours on the beach. It wasn’t that they weren’t curious about the world; it was just that it was all they could afford on two teachers’ salaries.

“We live in California,” they’d always say cheerily. “Our whole life is like a vacation.”

But the California that Graham had grown up in was very different from the one he lived in now. It was even different from the one where he’d gone to school, a twenty-minute drive from home that might as well have been twenty hours. Just before his freshman year, he’d managed to win a partial academic scholarship to a private school a few towns over, and his parents used the money his grandparents left him to make up for the rest. It was an amount that had seemed vast to Graham at the time, and he’d felt guilty about taking it when there were so many other things they could have done with it: make repairs on the house, replace their puttering car, pay off the bills that seemed to collect on his dad’s desk with alarming frequency.

Now, of course, Graham had enough money to do all of those things: he could buy his parents a brand-new home or a whole fleet of cars, send them on a trip around the world or pay down all their debt without even blinking. But the only thing they really wanted—the only thing they’d ever really wanted—was for him to go to college.

It wasn’t that they weren’t supportive of his acting, but they seemed to regard it as something to be tolerated, a stopover on the way to higher education rather than something that might shape the rest of his life. The only movies his dad ever watched were old black-and-white classics, and he didn’t consider anything made in the last few decades to count as art. When Graham took them to the premiere of his first movie, they clapped and smiled in all the right places, but he’d been acutely aware of how it all must have looked to them: the fight sequences strewn with high-octane special effects, the over-the-top dialogue, and, worst of all, the scene where he’d finally kissed the heroine, which had not until that moment struck him as unbearably cheesy.

Graham knew that even as they tiptoed around him, strangers in the foreign terrain of his new life, they were hoping he might come to his senses, get this whole acting thing out of his system. They had a habit of talking about his career as if it were a gap year of sorts, as if he were putting off college to run away for a season with the circus or spend a few months studying the mating habits of monkeys in Bali. But the truth was that Graham had no intention of going to college next year. Once he finished his high school equivalency with the help of his on-set tutor, that would be it for him.