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“No, no, that’s not what I meant. I was kidding. Seriously.” I took her into my arms. “We are definitely not slipping back.”
She buried her head in my chest. Brie didn’t want me to see her cry. “I want you and Greg to have this weekend,” she said, and sniffed. She wiped her nose against my shirt and I laughed.
“I could get you a tissue,” I offered.
“No need,” Brie said, and did it again.
She pulled away. “Will you call me? Let me know how things are going up there?”
“I don’t imagine there’ll be much to report,” I said. “We’ll fish, we’ll drink, we’ll sleep. Pretty much in that order. And I’ll be back Sunday afternoon. Maybe we should go out.” I grinned. “Maybe that seafood place, because odds are I won’t be eating much of it at the cabin. The lake’s probably fished out.”
“Okay,” she said, and smiled. “That’s what we’ll do.”
We both went to work. Brie had a job doing payroll for several small local businesses, and I was off to give several estimates before taking off for the weekend. The car was already packed, and I’d be on the road before Brie got home Friday afternoon.
We would talk Saturday night, and she would tell me about her adventures with Charlie the exterminator.
But that Friday morning would be the last time I’d hold her in my arms.
Thirty-Two
No one was very excited about a midday Sunday rehearsal, but Albert felt there was no way around it. His play, The Casual Librarian, a comedic farce, was set to open in less than two weeks and they were far from prepared, and as the writer and director, Albert was more responsible than anyone for getting the production ready.
As if he didn’t have enough to worry about. But as he liked to say, to the collective eyeroll of everyone else in the production company, The show must go on. He had asked everyone to arrive by one.
The rehearsal was not being conducted in an actual theater, but in a rented space in an industrial mall in the north end of Milford. It was here where all preparations were made. Not just rehearsals, but set construction and costume design. As opening night approached, the sets would be carefully dismantled and loaded into a cube van, transported to whatever venue they had booked to present their show, and reassembled. There were some proper theater spaces in Milford, and if they were putting on a show that drew a large audience, like the annual Christmas pageant, they’d book one. But productions that didn’t have a guaranteed, built-in audience were presented in a local high school gymnasium or community center.
The Casual Librarian, as it turned out, was one of the latter.
Actors in community theater often weren’t actors at all, at least not professionally. Acting, for these folks, was a hobby, an extracurricular activity. Everyone had nine-to-five, Monday-to-Friday gigs, like Dick Guthrie, who worked in the Milford city tax office and was playing the librarian’s son, or Fiona Fitzsimmons, who was a real estate lawyer and was hamming it up as a Miss Marple–like detective. And there was Albert himself, who was the assistant manager at the Devon Savings and Loan office on Broad Street when he wasn’t a playwright and a director.
Not everyone, of course, worked normal hours. Lyall Grove, who was donning heavy makeup to play an aging lothario, worked for Milford’s fire department, and his shifts were all over the place. But he’d traded off with a coworker so he could be off much of Sunday. Constance Sandusky, forty, who was totally getting into the title role as an extremely randy librarian, worked as a 911 operator, and like Lyall, had rotating shifts. She had come off one about twelve hours earlier, and as anyone who worked an emergency hotline knew, Saturday nights were often the craziest. More car accidents, more bar fights, more domestic disturbances. She’d arrived with an extra-large coffee from Dunkin’ and was leaning up against a wall, sipping quietly.
Arriving late was Rona Hindle, just barely out of her teens, bitten by the acting bug in her high school theater arts class. She had a small role as a waitress. She was certain this was her ticket to Broadway, and Albert didn’t have the heart to tell her that was unlikely. Also wandering in twenty minutes after one was Candace DiCarlo, mid-thirties but looked younger, who did work a standard Monday-to-Friday routine at a fitness center in New Haven. She was once a personal trainer, but now worked in the office. In Albert’s play, she had the role of the librarian’s sister, whose attempts to fix up her sibling with the perfect man would lead to a series of comic misunderstandings.
Right now she was doing more yawning than acting and was filling a paper cup with foul-looking brown liquid from an aging coffee canister.
It wasn’t just the actors who were present. Two carpenters who volunteered their time to build the movable sets had arrived and were hammering away at the same time Albert was trying to guide his actors through a critical scene in the second act.
“Guys?” he called out. “Guys? Can you ease up on the hammering? Just for a couple of minutes?”
They both looked at him like he was an idiot. If they couldn’t build the goddamn set, then what the hell were they doing here?
“Okay, everyone,” Albert said. “If we could gather round.”
“Us, too?” one of the carpenters asked.
“No, not you guys,” Albert said.
The half-dozen actors and actresses formed a semicircle around Albert, all standing, arms crossed. Constance took another sip of coffee. Candace yawned. Lyall discreetly tried to reach around and scratch his butt.
“I want to do a read-through of act two before we actually go through the motions. It’s the pacing we need to work on. Some of the lines, they’re not getting the right punch, you know?”
“Is there any way I could get more lines?” asked Rona. “I’ve only got, like, eight.”
Albert sighed. “I’m afraid those are the only lines your character has.”
“Yeah, but it’s not like this is a play by Shakespeare or something where you can’t mess with it. You’re the writer. Couldn’t you come up with more for me to say?”
