“The ahi is pretty good,” Sam finally said, her tone flat. “The California sea urchin rolls are okay. As for the house special fire rolls—those are the ones with the orange stuff dripped on top—unless you want your tongue to go radioactive, I'd stay away.”
Dina went right for the house special fire rolls, which were tuna wrapped in rice wrapped in seaweed with the ultrahot topping. She ate two, and chased them with half a glassful of Taittinger champagne.
“Fabulous,” she pronounced. “Not fabulous enough to move back here tomorrow, but still very fabulous. I've missed it. This place.” She put down her champagne glass to look at her daughter. “You.”
Sam bristled. She started to reach for the champagne bottle to pour herself a glass, but then realized she didn't need the calories. “What a crock. You haven't stayed in touch. You haven't even tried.”
“Samantha,” Dina said slowly, swirling her champagne in her glass, “I know this may be strange for you to hear, but just because I've been out of touch doesn't mean I haven't been thinking about you, following your life. Do you want to know how many Google hits you'll come up with if you search the words
Sam Sharpe
in quotes? Thirty-seven thousand, five hundred. A year ago? Sixteen thousand, three hundred. Nine years ago, when everyone used AltaVista? Three thousand. And I think I've read every one of the links.”
Sam raised her eyebrows. This was unexpected. Was her mom making this shit up?
Dina seemed to sense Sam's skepticism. She wiped her lips with a white cloth napkin. “When you were in fifth grade, Sam,” she continued, “there was an article about you and Camilla in
Los Angeles
magazine. It was about how savvy showbiz kids are. They put you two in a movie trivia contest against a pair of entertainment reporters. You and Cammie crushed them.”
“That's right,” Sam said slowly. She remembered that contest. She hadn't thought about that in years. There'd been some crazy talk afterward about putting her and Cammie on a TV game show, which, now that Sam thought about it, was pretty funny when you thought about the success of
Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader?
“You've always been smart,” Dina continued. “And you've always known what you want and how you feel.” She took another sip of champagne. “Which is why I think you know how you really feel about this wedding.”
Heat came to Sam's face. “I don't know what you're talking about,” she snapped.
Dina stepped over to the window and looked out at West Hollywood, peering between two newsprint sheets of Gisella's personal designs. “Some things change, Samantha. Some things don't. When you were a girl—this was in nursery school—and you were upset or agitated about something, you'd scuff your toes against the floor. Look at your shoes.”
Sam scuffed her black suede Jimmy Choo platform pumps against the floor just for something to do. The toes on both were a mess. It was better to focus on the shoes than on whether her mom was right. “You talk about what I did in nursery school like you're the doting mother who was always there,” she said hotly. “But you weren't. You were a missing-in-action joke.”
Her mother nodded, turning back from the window to face her daughter. “You're right. As a mother, I've been terrible.”
Sam folded her arms. “At least you're being honest.”
“Do you want to know why?” Dina asked.
Sam did want to know. Desperately. But she wasn't about to admit it to the woman who had abandoned her. She sipped her champagne and eyed her mother coolly over the rim of her crystal flute. “Does it matter?”
“Maybe not, but I'll tell you anyway,” Dina said. “It doesn't paint a very pretty portrait of me, but at least you'll know the truth.” She twirled the stem of the champagne flute between her fingers nervously. “When your dad and I got married, I was so in love with him, I couldn't see straight. He was a struggling actor. I was a struggling writer.”
“Can we fast-forward this?” Sam said. It came out more harshly than she intended, but these memories were painful to hear.
“Fine,” Dina agreed, fingering one of the buttons on her frumpy beige blouse. “The short version. Your dad got very successful very fast. Our lives were utterly changed by Hollywood in the fast lane. It wasn't a world where I felt comfortable. I didn't like it, and I didn't want it. In fact, I hated it.”
“Oh, I see. So it's all Dad's fault for getting successful.” As if hating Hollywood and money and success had given her mother the right to chuck it all. “That makes
so
much sense.”
Dina plunged on. “When we split up, I was running away from everything. Your father, Hollywood, a certain kind of lifestyle, and you,” she admitted. “I was going to reinvent myself in New York and pursue my writing. It was selfish and wrong, but I was young and stupid and probably much more self-centered than I want to admit even now.”
Her eyes flicked to Sam, then back to her flute, as if, Sam thought, holding her gaze was too painful. She brushed a speck of lint from her ugly trousers.
Sam watched a diminutive woman with a choppy bob start to clean up the material and pins and fabric tape that Gisella had discarded while fitting Sam's gown. Her gaze went back to her mother.
“If you're waiting for me to encourage you to continue, you'll be waiting a long time,” Sam said flatly.
Dina nodded. “Fair enough. After a while, when I hadn't spoken to you, it became harder and harder to reach out. We lived in different worlds. I told myself you were better off without me. And … I suppose I told myself that so many times that I even started to believe it.”
Silence. That was it? That was the big maternal confession? Sam tugged angrily at the hem of her black blouse. She didn't know what to say. To think that her mother had left because she simply didn't like the way her life had turned out? It was mind-boggling. It was …
It was the kind of thing Sam would do. Maybe not abandon a child, but Sam could
see
herself doing whatever it took to get away from a suffocating life.
“I don't expect you to forgive me, Sam,” Dina went on. “But I hope you'll give me a chance to get to you know again, at least. To be your friend.”
Sam didn't need a friend. But over the years, she'd needed a mother desperately. One part of her wanted to hurl her champagne flute against the three-quarter mirror, watch it shatter into a thousand shards, and tell her mother to go to hell. But another part of her wanted to bury her face in her mother's arms.
The needy part of her won out.
Sam didn't trust herself to speak. So she just nodded. Then her eyes landed on Dina's cheap brown flats. Target. Wal-Mart. Someplace like that. They made her laugh.
Dina's eyes looked a little hurt. “I was going for profound.”
“Look at your toes.”
Dina looked down. She was scuffing the toe of her right foot against the toe of her left foot. She smiled. “I guess it's genetic.”
Now Sam and her mother shared a smile. The
same
smile, Sam realized. Could it be that she and her mother were—gasp—sharing a
moment
?
“Hey, you two!”
Sam and Dina both turned. America's Best-Loved Action Star had just stepped into Gisella's studio. He wore faded jeans, an old white button-down dress shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and Adidas tennis shoes. But as he crossed the floor, dodging mannequins and racks of clothes, it was as if a tsunami of charisma preceded him, clearing the way. Sam had seen the Jackson Sharpe effect in action many times. That it would work on others was a given. That it still affected her was astonishing.
“How's the mother and daughter?” The charisma got more intense the closer he came.
“Eating and talking, not fitting,” Dina admitted. Her eyes shone, a dead giveaway that she was not immune to the Jackson charisma wave either, even if she'd divorced him years before.
Jackson cupped his hands in the direction of Gisella's office. “Hello! Madame Designer? Come out and do your thing for the mother of the bride who's against the wedding! And by the way, so is the father!”
Under ordinary circumstances, Sam would have been irritated. But her dad's voice was so good-natured, and she was so wrung out from her talk with her mother, that she couldn't muster up any annoyance.
“Thank you
so
much for your support,” she quipped, which made her mother and father both laugh.
Gisella came back out of her office. Sam and Jackson talked easily and ate more sushi as the designer measured Dina, then cut fabric and pinned it and measured some more, finally promising that she'd have Dina's gown ready the next morning. What would it look like? Gisella would only smile and say that Dina had to trust her. As for Jackson, he'd be wearing a tux by Ted Lapidus, his favorite designer.
“How'd you get here?” he asked Dina, when Gisella was finally finished.
“Cab,” she admitted.
“Sam, you've got the Hummer?”
“Yep.”
“Well, I've got the Jensen. How about we send my assistant, Kiki, to pick the Hummer up later, and I drive us all home?” Jackson took the keys from his pocket and tossed them lightly in the air.
There was every reason to say no. They were against the wedding. They weren't a real family. She'd wanted to go for a massage at the Century City Athletic Club, because Olga from Moldova was working this afternoon.
Sam said yes.
Thursday morning, 11:00 a.m.
A
nna's father looked pale under his tan. “Scared the hell out of you, huh, sweetheart?”
Actually, there weren't any words for how scared she'd been. The mental tug-of-war that had been her relationship with her dad ever since she'd moved west had been based on the assumption that he would always be there. She was too young to think about the mortality of her parents. And yet it happened all the time; people dying young, in an accident, or just out of nowhere. It had almost happened to her in a plane crash, just a few days ago.
She shuddered, not wanting to share any of her morbid thoughts with her dad. Instead she smiled. “You could say that.”
He laughed, gingerly touching the bandage that circled his head. “Scared the hell out of myself.”
It was two days after Jonathan had been rushed to Cedars-Sinai for emergency brain surgery. Anna was happy to find her father had been moved to a luxury private room on the fourth floor and was in the midst of making a rapid recovery. She hadn't talked to Dr. Miller—she was scheduled to stop in sometime during the next half hour—but from her conversation with her father, the way his eyes followed her around the room as she moved, his lucidity, and even his sense of humor, she'd have been surprised if his subdural hematoma had any severe aftereffects.
There was a plush dove gray easy chair to the left of his hospital bed—a bed that looked more like it had been imported from a French château than the kind of bed Anna was used to seeing in a hospital. Anna plopped into it. Her dad's breakfast had just been served, and clearly he already had an appetite, because he was forking scrambled eggs with capers and creamed cheese into his mouth with gusto. Cedars-Sinai was the preferred hospital of Hollywood's rich, famous, and infamous, and had recently been experimenting with the idea of luxury hospital accommodations and care for their many patients to whom money was no object.
Jonathan's present suite—Anna couldn't bring herself to call it a hospital room, because it was much closer to a luxury hotel room than to typical hospital accommodations—was one of these experiments. Painted in soft sky blue, with framed photographs on the walls that Anna recognized as having been taken by Ansel Adams and Alfred Stieglitz, a wall-mounted fifty-inch HD flat-screen television monitor, a state-of-the art sound system with an eight-gig iPod on the nightstand plus connections for the patient's own iPod, high-speed wireless Internet, a small refrigerator fully stocked by the hospital's dietician, and the aforesaid bed, easy chair, and matching couch, and soft lighting that could be adjusted by the same remote that worked the electronics, it was a place to be sick in style.
“Want some of this?” her father offered, gesturing to the tray of food. “It's damn good.”
“I'm not that hungry.” Something about this was still making Anna anxious.
“Are you sure this is from tennis?”
“Of course I'm sure! I was playing doubles at the Riviera Country Club with a couple of Sony execs in from Tokyo. I was at the net, and one of these Sony guys lost his grip on his racquet while he was hitting an overhead; the racquet caught me on the side of the head. I didn't think a thing of it at the time, just thought I had a bump.”
Anna shivered. It was so, so random. Her dad was lucky that he had been at home when the symptoms had hit. What if he'd been driving? He could have crashed and killed himself. Or what if he hadn't been Jonathan Percy, but had just been your average Los Angeleno who didn't have full-time household help to call for an ambulance? The thought made her weak in the knees because it was so real. She could so easily have been at a funeral this morning instead of in her father's plush hospital room.
“But you're having a complete physical and everything?” Anna asked, because she still needed reassurance. “Just in case those headaches—”
“Anna. I'm fine. Really.” He took a sip of melon juice. “So what have you been doing since yesterday?” He pushed a button on the remote; a moment later a young woman with jet black hair in a shaggy bob, clad in a fitted navy Armani blazer, and sporting a name tag that read
BETH WILLIAMS, GUEST SERVICES
, as if this were a hotel rather than a hospital, came in to remove the breakfast tray.
“Besides worrying about you?” Anna asked, after the young woman left. “I had a fitting for my bridesmaid dress for Sam's wedding last night; the rehearsal dinner is tonight and the wedding is tomorrow.”
Jonathan shook his head. “Better her than you.”
Anna actually agreed with that sentiment. She couldn't see herself marrying for a long, long time. But Sam, on the other hand, seemed so happy. And Anna only wanted the best for her friend, so …
“There's a time for weddings and a time to stay single,” her father went on. “Don't rush.”