Three Story House: A Novel (37 page)

He finished with Isobel and went in search of her cousins, presumably to give them their stories as determined by the all-knowing Beverly. Jake pulled her aside and said he had an idea he wanted to talk over with her outside of work. It rattled her because she didn’t know how to take it. At first she was afraid he was hitting on her, but then he handed her his business card—one that wasn’t for Craig’s company but that read
Jake Left Productions
. She agreed to coffee after they were done filming the pilot.

Before beginning the confessionals, Craig made what amounted to a speech. “Reality is a tricky business. Or rather, capturing reality is a tricky business. I want each of you to be as honest as possible, but make sure that you talk to the camera. Don’t talk to Jake—he doesn’t care, don’t talk to Kitty, even though she’ll be asking the questions, and don’t think too much, just talk.”

Isobel avoided looking at her cousins. She knew that what Craig was saying felt sleazy and managed, but she also knew it was true. “I don’t know if this is a long-term project for us,” Lizzie said.

Craig waved her concern away, already processing his next thoughts. “We’re going to pretend like we’ve already got money in the bank on this project. That’s how much I believe in it. If you say something I can’t use in the pilot, I’ll save it and use it in the second or even, hell, tenth, episode.”

Crossing her arms, Isobel sat down on the chair they’d dragged into the hall closet. The battery pack for the microphone dug into her back, and she shifted until she was comfortable. It was good to remember that all of this, even what she said during the time they were getting ready to tape, could be used in the show. Her words rang back in her ears. She should find a way to explain that to Elyse and Lizzie, who were talking in low voices in the hallway while Kitty and Jake finished setting up.

Kitty checked the lighting and adjusted the glare around Isobel’s face. The room felt overheated, and the seat, because of its metal frame, was uncomfortably warm. The first few questions were about Isobel’s family. She walked them through the overall happiness of her family and tried to skirt the issue of her mother’s having abandoned the family for a semiprofessional surfboarder she’d met at an audition Isobel had gone on. Kitty pushed her about her mother, asking how it had felt to have her father become the primary parent during the last years she worked on the television show. Taken one after another, the questions and her answers felt banal, but in her mind, she pictured the way Craig would find an old clip of her from
Wait for It
looking sad and then they’d find some Facebook photo of her mother and Chip. Or even just Chip. And over all of these images would be Isobel’s voice flatly discussing what it had been like without her mother in her life. “In the end I didn’t miss her,” she said. “That’s the kind of guy my dad is. Capable of being two parents if needed—you know like those emperor penguins who sit on the egg when the mother goes away.”

Isobel was so wrapped up in thinking about her mother that she didn’t register the change in topic as it was asked. It wasn’t until she saw Kitty’s body, which had been relaxed and fluid as she held the boom mic, tighten that she realized Craig had taken over asking the questions and had moved her into dangerous territory.

“Did you guys view Benny as a father figure?”

“A father figure? Benny?”

Craig stared at Isobel and then raised two fingers, motioning for her to continue speaking.

“We’re grown women. I’m not sure we’re looking for fathers.”

Craig’s lips tightened into a thin line. He crossed and uncrossed his legs and seemed to read over several of his questions before selecting the next one. “Did Benny get fired because it would save you money?”

“No,” Isobel said. Craig’s head tilted in a way that indicated he needed her to incorporate the question into her answer. “I fired Benny because he’d become a liability. His work had become dangerous. The question of money didn’t enter into it—although I’m sure it’ll help not to have to pay a drunk to take naps in his RV.”

She smiled at Craig, working out what it was that he’d been after. She figured he was trying to find a way to make Benny sympathetic.

“I think we’ve got what we need,” Kitty said after a few wrapping-up questions. She turned and invited Lizzie to sit where Isobel had been, hurrying her cousin into position. The speed with which they moved meant that Isobel wouldn’t be able to warn Lizzie to stay away from any questions they asked about her father. Lizzie didn’t know that they knew about her stepfather not being her real father. That had been such a huge mistake on her part, to tell Craig that in the first place.

They didn’t ask Lizzie directly about her father. They followed the same line of questioning they had with Isobel, asking if Benny had become like a father to the women. Lizzie was stiff and awkward answering the questions. She had a look on her face as if she’d shown up at the right place but the wrong time. Isobel couldn’t put her finger on what was wrong with the situation. She felt relief when they all got through their interviews without incident, although she couldn’t shake the heaviness that had settled on her shoulders as she watched Lizzie in her interview.

Isobel’s father stood out in a crowd. Not because of how he looked, which was exactly ordinary, but because of the way he held himself. Faced with uncomfortable situations (and waiting on the curb for his daughter to pick him up fell squarely into the category of awkward), he stood as he had in military college. It looked as though he were trying to get his shoulder blades to touch each other—his rigidness mediated only by the way the wind tousled his hair. Since her mother had left, her father had never figured out how to get a haircut when he needed one.

Rolling down the passenger window, Isobel honked, waved, and called out, but he only acknowledged her when she pulled the car up directly in front of him. “Such fuss,” he said, tossing his carry-on bag into the backseat. “I told you I could take a cab.”

“Memphis isn’t a town you take a cab in,” she said, leaning over the seat to hug him.

“It’s been too long,” he said. “I’m used to seeing you for monthly Sunday dinners”

“I know,” she said, trying once again to find a reasonable explanation for her decision to abandon L.A. for the South. Coming up blank, she offered what she had at the beginning. “Lizzie needs us.”

“I wish you were as close with your brothers as you are with your cousins. They miss you.”

It wasn’t that Isobel didn’t miss her brothers, it was that their lives mystified her. With full-time jobs and families, their worlds revolved around commitments she couldn’t understand. Often when she was with them, she felt as if they spoke a foreign language.

“Wait till you see the house.” Isobel reached over and tugged at her father’s seatbelt to remind him to use it.

“I’m more interested in you.”

“Don’t say it, Dad.”

He rubbed his hands on his jeans, as if wiping them off. “I can’t help myself. You have so much more talent than you know and you’re wasting it. No, that’s not right, squandering.”

“It’s not a waste of anything,” she said, putting her blinker on after she’d already exited the interstate. “Lizzie needed the money for the house and, frankly, I needed the exposure.”

“That’s what I’m talking about. You don’t need exposure, you should get out of the television business. Try your hand at one of the million other things you’re good at.”

“Like what, Dad?”

He looked out his window as Spite House came into view. “What a house. I’ve always said anything that makes you look twice is worth twice as much.”

She looked, trying to see it through his eyes. They’d managed to make the place beautiful with the work they’d been doing. Lovely curtains hung on all of the balconies and the small but beautiful door had been painted a dark green. Jake, followed by Kitty, stepped onto the front porch. “You ready?” she asked.

They’d had to coax him into being on camera. Isobel would’ve been happy to leave him out of it, but Craig was intent on making the point that after all that had happened in Isobel’s life, she was ultimately her father’s daughter. Part of the compromise to get him to do the show had been to agree to film his arrival at the house, not at the airport. Being made a fuss over in public would have been too much for her father.

Stepping out of the car, he turned to Isobel. “So, let me get this straight, we’re having Thanksgiving today, even though it isn’t for two more days.”

“Right, Daddy. They need to let the crew go home to their own celebrations.”

Neither one of them were mic’d yet, so Isobel didn’t worry about their conversation as they walked up the set of concrete stairs. Her father had only a duffle bag for a carry-on, and he handled it as if he were a college kid unconcerned about its contents.

“Are we doing it over again on Thursday?”

“Nah, probably leftovers. I think Lizzie and Elyse are eating with T. J.’s family. Rosa May invited us too, but selfishly I want you all to myself.”

“You girls need to get married, start families of your own,” her father said.

“It isn’t like that, not for any of us except Lizzie and I don’t think—” Isobel stopped speaking when she saw the overhead mic stretch out over their heads. She wrapped her arm around her father in a sideways hug and laughed. He stiffened next to her and turned his head, as if he couldn’t figure out where to focus his attention.

“Act like we’re not here,” Jake said from behind the camera.

“Maybe talk about how the house looks the same or different. Or Isobel—has she changed since you saw her last?”

The silence thickened around them and then her father cleared his throat. “It looks like you’ve got a rotted soffit here.”

Isobel blinked back tears. Her father’s fallback had always been to talk about the flaws he could fix. “Oh, Daddy, you have no idea.”

The crew filmed them replacing the rotten board on the underside of the porch roof for about thirty minutes. Lizzie joined them as they were finishing up. “They’re making Elyse nervous,” she said. “I think she wants them out of the kitchen until the food’s done.”

Lizzie looked up to where Isobel’s father stood on a ladder. “How you doing, Uncle Drew? Did you see the mess your daughter made of my house?”

“I see it now,” he said, screwing in the plywood he’d cut to cover the hole.

“Not my fault,” Isobel said, taking the drill motor from him so he could climb down the ladder. “It was all that Benny’s fault.”

Kitty stepped onto the porch. “What’s this about Benny?” Her voice was too high to be casual, and Isobel looked at her carefully.

“Nothing,” Isobel said.

“We should get you all set up for the dinner,” she said, handing out the wireless mics they’d wear for the rest of the night and explaining what they should talk about at dinner and that they should turn their mics off only if they were using the bathroom. “I mean actually peeing and stuff. If you go in there to tweeze your eyebrows, leave it on.”

“This is weird,” Isobel’s father said.

Kitty patted his arm, getting closer than was necessary. “You’ll forget you’re wearing it in no time.”

“Don’t,” Isobel said. “I mean you might, but don’t forget you’re wearing it.”

Kitty unfolded a piece of paper and glanced at it. “Production notes,” she said, turning to go into the house. She stopped and looked at them over her shoulder. “You know with your dad here, it might be a good time for the three of you to talk about fathers, you know—especially considering the situation with you, Lizzie. It must be hard to be the only one who doesn’t know her dad.”

“What is she talking about?” Lizzie asked as Kitty disappeared into the house. “How does she know about my dad? That wasn’t part of anything I ever said to her.”

Isobel’s face reddened as she considered the slip she’d made. “I might have accidentally mentioned it,” she said, knowing how Lizzie felt. There were parts of Isobel’s own life that she had no intention of living in front of the camera.

Elyse stepped onto the porch. “It’ll be ready in about thirty minutes—are Tom and T. J. still coming?”

No one answered her. Isobel’s father hugged her. “I see they’ve got a microphone on you as well.”

“We can’t talk about it,” Isobel said. Lizzie turned away from them and walked inside the house. “I mean the crew, the stuff they do to us.”

“Is she mad?” Elyse asked, untying her apron and setting it on the ladder.

“I’m going to go get washed up,” Isobel’s father said, following Lizzie.

Isobel climbed the ladder and sat a few steps up from the bottom rung. She stretched her legs out. “You ever hear that saying about poking a sleeping bear?”

Elyse nodded. “You shouldn’t.”

“Right. But the thing is, I think I did.”

“So, tell it to go back to sleep,” Elyse settled herself on the last rung and looked up at Isobel. “Or shoot it with a tranquilizer gun.”

“I wish.” The moment Kitty had walked away, Isobel had started going through all the possible outcomes. The best one involved the fact that they knew nothing and nothing happened. The worst was a scene where their Thanksgiving dinner devolved into an episode of Maury Povich with a number of men taking DNA tests to prove they were or weren’t Lizzie’s father.

Rubbing her temples, Elyse sighed. “I can’t talk in code forever. What are talking about? They’re going to find out anyway.”

“Lizzie’s father,” Isobel said, half expecting Kitty to appear and confirm that they were in fact listening to every breath. Instead, Craig’s car pulled up to the curb, and he stepped out carrying an enormous yellow and orange centerpiece. They watched him struggle with it, walking as slowly as he could, feeling with his foot for the steps because he couldn’t see them.

“So what if they do know? Isn’t it time everything came out into the open? What’s the worst that could happen? You had to know this would happen.”

Her cousin had spoken too quickly not to be trying to cover up something. “What did you do?”

“The rolls will burn,” Elyse said, standing, grabbing her apron, and retying it around her.

Craig called out for one of them to hold the door. Isobel ignored him and followed Elyse, yelling at her to explain what she meant. She chased her cousin down the narrow hallway and into the kitchen. Jake sat at the table, his camera at his feet. As he pulled apart one of Elyse’s rolls, hot steam floated into the air.