Follow the Dotted Line (38 page)

He swiveled his stool away from her and put his elbows on the bar. “I didn’t tell any of you to feel guilty. What you feel is your problem, not mine.”

It was an acutely defensive statement, self-serving and mean. Still it stung, probably because he was right. He’d never asked, nor really wanted, them to feel anything toward him. He just wanted to get away.

“You really ought to come see your children,” she told him one last time. “They all showed up to see you off. Every one of them. And every one of their children.”

He shook his head.

“Will you at least call them? To tell them you’re still above ground and breathing?”

“I don’t think so,” he said, remaining with his back to her. “You tell them for me, Andrea. Okay?” He raised his glass to the emptiness in front of him. “Enjoy my funeral.”

She wanted to be angry. Livid. Seething with indignation over his cowardly petulance. But that wasn’t remotely how she felt. Not this time. Not anymore. What she felt was relief, a lightness of liability that made her smile at his mock toast.

“We will,” she responded, without the least bit of rancor. “We will celebrate your life and death and unapologetic return. But mostly, I think we’ll all just sit around and take the load off, Mark. It’s about time.”

When Andy called Santa Monica from the Puerto Vallarta airport two hours later to report the final results of her investigation, all four of her children were together in the sunroom playing Texas Holdem. Mitch put the call on speaker.

Before Andy had a chance to tell them what she’d learned, Sam grabbed the phone from her older brother and said, in a voice that sounded more curious than concerned, “He’s not dead, is he?”

“What?”

“I said, he’s not dead, is he, Mom?”
 Andy staggered a little, rhetorically speaking. She hadn’t expected to cut to the chase so soon. “No. He’s not. How did you know?”

“We didn’t,” Sam explained. “Just a lucky guess.”

“A lucky guess?”

“The truth is, we’ve been waiting around for you to call,” Mitch said. “And you know how we are. We sort of made a little wager.”

“Oh, okay.” This wasn’t going at all the way she had imagined. The kids seemed so, well, perfectly okay. “Sounds like you’re all taking this in stride.”

Lil’s voice suddenly popped up. “Want to know who won and who lost?”

“Ah, no. Not really,” Andy said, still trying to get her emotional bearings. “I’m not sure it’s all that funny, though.”

She could hear someone moving closer to the phone. “Nobody’s laughing, Mom,” Ian assured her. “Really. It was just a probability thing.”

“A probability thing?”

“Yeah, we were speculating on the chances he’d screw this funeral up,” Mitch chimed in. “Kind of like he did all those birthdays. And weddings.”

“Oh,” Andy stammered. “Right. I see.” And she did see. At least she was beginning to get a clearer view out her myopic little window to the world. Mark had not been that far off in his assessment of his children. They
had
moved on. She was the one who’d insisted on doing all the unnecessary heavy lifting. “Well, anyway,” she said, letting herself slip, ever so slightly, into the
esprit de corps
, “he, ah, said to say hello. And to, ah, enjoy ourselves.”

“We are,” Sam announced. “We’ve been toasting him every hand.”

“I don’t suppose you asked him to join us?” Lil speculated.

“Um. I did. Actually. He declined.”

She could hear a clink of glasses in the background.

“We made a bet on that, too,” Ian said, filling her in. “Same odds.”

They were laughing now and talking over one another, not to her but to anyone who would listen. It was chaos, the way it used to be when they were little. A combination of sibling rivalry and genetic symbiosis. Her children were fine, Andy realized, just fine.

“I better hang up,” she shouted into her cell. “We’re about to board.”

“Hurry up, Mom!” Lil called out over the noise on the other end.

“What?”

“We want you to hurry up,” Sam repeated. “Get on the plane, already. We can’t start the party without you!”

Andy cut the connection with her children, as the passengers surrounding her began to assemble near the gangway, eager to board. It was the usual menagerie of travelers: business types, tourists, young families with kids, and those ubiquitous baby boomers—still flush with good health and money but clearly transitioning into the great
grayness of being
. She recognized herself in the members of this last group, in the crow’s feet framing their eyes and the subtle stiffness when they stood. She was one of them, even if she didn’t want to be.

Too late now, she reminded herself. There was no going back—to anything. There was only the inexorable movement forward toward an uncertain future that none of us has the power to own.

But we could own the past, she told herself. We could be the narrators of our own history, free to choose the meaning of our journey and, with it, the relevance of our lives. After all, wasn’t the ‘meaning’ of things relative? Didn’t we make most of it up? Didn’t we make
all
of it up? So why go looking for relevance when you could simply
bestow
it? Give it to yourself. Give it to anyone or anything you wanted! How much easier was that than to run around trying to
find
it?

Andy began to gather her things, then stopped and sat back to linger in her seat for a moment longer. She turned to the window, warming her face in the remaining rays of the day’s sunshine, as her favorite star descended gently into the ocean beyond the Bay of Banderas. She felt better. Less lost. More in control of where she had been and less anxious about where she was going. It really was okay to have been a mediocre writer. She didn’t care. What she cared about was that she’d had a career she adored. And she could live with having been a mediocre mother. Because she now understood, in ways she never had before, how much her children loved her. By the way they laughed at her. Worried about her. Asked her advice and then didn’t take it. And now, this minute, they were waiting for her at Mitch’s house. Waiting—not because she’d found their father or even because she probably saved his butt from drowning—but waiting for her because they all felt this indescribable joy in being together. And because they couldn’t start the party without her.

Better than a preacher, I guess . . .

Three weeks later, Harley Davidson stood by himself on one side of a ragged pool of sepia-tinted light, as his creamy blues blinked involuntarily. Andy had not seen him since the day he left her townhouse and made his desperate escape into the arms of Mitch and The Impresario. He was nearly unrecognizable. His boyish pudginess had melted by ten or fifteen pounds, giving his body well-defined features and his rosy cheeks a sculpted handsomeness that had not seemed possible. He wore a black, mock turtleneck t-shirt, a black silk suit jacket, and blue jeans. The only remnant of his past seemed to be his Nebraska cowboy boots.

“A comedy camp?” Andy repeated for the third time in succession.

Lorna fanned herself with the sheet of paper that listed the evening’s performers. “Somewhere in Ojai. I guess they teach people how to be funny.”

“Who thought it was a good idea to teach Harley to be funny?”

“Melissa thinks he’s a natural comic.”

“Geez,” was all Andy could come up with.

“Better that than a preacher, I guess,” Lorna opined.

Andy considered her accountant’s observation, as she watched her nephew wait his turn to take the stage. He was certainly several incarnations removed from Tabernacle U, his abandoned alma mater. And no one would mistake him for a Hasidic Jew this evening. Yet, it had crossed Andy’s mind on the drive from Valencia to the Loads of Laughs Cafe in North Hollywood this evening that comedy wasn’t all that different from religion. Perhaps it wasn’t such a surprising transmutation.

After all, both practices claim to understand the way the world works, while banking heavily on human beings to screw it up. One to get souls, the other to get laughs. And both have this affinity for putting some know-it-all center stage and letting him go on and on, uninterrupted by logic or common decency. Which, no doubt, explains why most clerics and comics are men with questionable social skills and a penchant for picking on women.

The real tie that binds, though, Andy had decided, is that religion and comedy are both masters of illusion. Truth, just like Funny, is in the mind of the beholder. And proof of God’s existence is about as tangible as a good joke; you either get it or you don’t. The point of either contrivance is to get out there and find a following.

All of which made Andy wonder—as her nephew finally took his place in front of the fifty or so people in the club—if Harley had finally found his true calling this time.

“Hi,” he said, awkwardly squinting into the spotlight. “My name is Harley Davidson.”

There was a small ripple of laughter in the audience.

“That’s not a joke,” he cut in, impishly. “So you don’t have to laugh yet.”

A larger ripple. The aspiring comic smiled, just slightly. His eyes twinkled. There was something thoroughly engaging in his persona.

“My god,” Lorna whispered. “He has a real stage presence, doesn’t he?”

Andy nodded in baffled agreement.

“I’m new to LA,” he began, sticking one booted foot in the air. “A refugee from Nebraska.”

More laughter.

“My mother sent me out here a few months ago to go to college. Which I fully intend to do someday. As soon as I get the time.”

Now there was a sprinkle of applause from the largely twenty-somethings.

“Anyway, I thought I should send her my class schedule, you know. Just to set her mind at ease. So I went online and ordered one from a website called
www.sex-drugs-and
-rock-and-roll. First, you select the ‘Parents’ icon, and then you click on the button marked, ‘What they don’t know won’t hurt them.’

Hoots of approval, as Andy shuddered involuntarily.

Lorna leaned in close to her friend. “It’s okay. Look on the bright side, Andy. At least this time he’s not telling you where you’re going to spend eternity.”

“But I’m not here to insult my Midwest upbringing,” the fledgling entertainer continued, clearly energized by the audience response, almost as if he’d finally found his jetpack. “Really, I’ll let all you vegans out there take care of Omaha. No, I’m sticking to the people I really can’t get enough of—you crazy Angelinos.”

His mischievous eyes danced across the room until they found Andy.

“Take my aunt . . .” said Harley Davidson. “Please.”

Despite the roomful of strangers, he had managed to deliver the line with more than a hint of affection, she noted, even as she braced herself for the irony of becoming someone else’s source material. Then Andy Bravos sat back in her uncomfortable folding chair and prepared, for a third time in one summer, to let her thematically consistent nephew condemn her to hell.

Nancy Gilsenan Hersage is the winner of five national awards in playwriting; her plays have been produced on three continents and by the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. She has written screenplays for NBC, CBS, ABC and PBS and treatments for Spelling and Cruise Wagner. Her novel, Tribunal, about sex trafficking, is available from Online Originals in London. Her new musical, Out!, written with Molly Hersage, is available from the Dramatic Publishing Company.

Contact Nancy or learn more about her novels, stage plays and screenwriting at
NancyHersage.com
.