JENNIE
Quincy sat in rocking chairs, on front porches freshly painted, and watched the train wreck of MinaLisa occur. It was beautiful in its disaster, a full explosion decorated with high-def photos, a hundred a week, all spelling out Hollywood Doom in spectacular fashion. I munched on pecan brittle and flipped through the pages of STAR, saw the argument of Lisa and Mina in their driveway, her face striking in its anger, his hands strong and powerful as he spread them in the air and shouted. I poured pancake batter and heard, from the living room TV, the moment that Lisa moved into a hotel and Mina took full control of their ginormous home. I watched Lisa's attorney, a handsome man, his features tight in concentration, discuss the intricacies of intellectual property, while painting my toes on our worn living room sofa.
I couldn't, from our tiny little cottage in the cotton field, understand why any woman would cheat on Lisa Manoban. How greedy could a woman be?
"They're talking about pushing filming back." Jimin stood on my front porch, his shoulder slumped against the door frame, his cell phone hanging limply from his hand. It'd been ten days since the head crack heard 'round Hollywood.
"What?" I swung the door open wider and waved him in.
"I had to drive all the way over here; my cell isn't working. Thank God I checked email."
"That storm last night," I murmured, helping his dramatic self to a chair before he went full queen and collapsed. "Cell service is always hell after a storm."
It wasn't exactly the storm's fault as much as it was Ned Beternum, who let his goats graze the field he leased to Verizon. Even though the cell giant had threatened legal action several times. Even though his goats loved to chew the juicy wires that magnetized the thing. Heavy rains typically flooded his west acreage, so Ned would move them into the higher field, giving us all weak service until Verizon flew someone in to fix things. We, as a town, didn't really care. We'd survived without cell phones for thousands of years, didn't much use them anyway. That was what home phones were for. And if you weren't home, that was what answering machines were for. No need to fix a system that wasn't broken. Who wanted to be available twenty-four hours a day?
"September," Jimin wheezed, his hand reaching out, and I grabbed my iced tea from the coffee table and passed it to him. "That's what they are saying now."
"September." I tried to see the reason for Jimin's agony. "That's good, right? Gives us an extra month."
"Yeah. Peachy. You'll have more free time to crack peanuts and crochet mittens." I hid a smile. "Delays in filming are bad, Jennie. Ominous. Expensive."
"Wait a minute." I frowned. "That's not what you said earlier." I adopted a deeper, yet feminine voice. "The Fortune Bottle isn't crashing, Jennie. Movies don't fall apart over this." I mimicked his dramatic hand gestures, and he stared at me, a grimace on his pretty little face.
"Was that supposed to be me?"
"Yes."
He finished a sip of tea and wiped at his brow with a monogrammed handkerchief. "Please don't ever do that again."
I snorted... but I swear it was ladylike. "Ditto."
He sipped more tea, and I sat on the couch, my bare feet tucked underneath my butt. There was a companionable silence as I relaxed back against the cloth, my eyes closing.
"At least they aren't talking about the girls."
I cracked an eye open. "What?"
"Lisa's fucking her way through half of Hollywood right now. I haven't seen that hit newsstands yet." The gossip was delivered in a hushed voice, Jimin's hands happily clapping as if he might be the next stop on the Lisa Manoban Penis Train.
