1
Harrison
Several weeks ago
Practicedsmile locked into place and eyes meeting hers for the appropriate amount of time; I nodded to show I was listening and interested.
Truthfully, I had no idea what the shop clerk just said.
“The love they’re shown is just as important as the quality of the air or the pH of the soil. Everything has to be just right,” she went on.
My head continued to nod in her direction, but my eyes roamed around the tourist shop named Brooks’ Baubles and Books. Honestly, I’d checked out two sentences in. If I came across as not listening, it wasn’t because I was rude, only that if a topic didn’t interest me, trying to hold the thread of conversation felt like trying to track a single cloud as it morphed and shifted with others. And that was on a good day. Today, my focus was more difficult than ever. The woman speaking was charming enough, but I couldn’t stay centered when the background music played so loudly, and the couple over by the artesian hand towels argued about the bottles of wine they splurged on. The bell above the door rang at sporadic intervals. A brunette woman with her back to me fidgeted with the postcard rack, and trinkets down the row sparkled for my perusal.
And louder than anything was my concern for my longtime friend and father-like figure, George Sedar. My worry was a man yelling into a bullhorn, demanding the lion’s share of my attention.
Once this movie wrapped, Iwouldvisit more often.
“Hello?” she asked, following my wandering gaze before coming back to my face to scrutinize it closely. “Are you local?”
“Nah. Just passing through.” I turned away, not wanting to be studied too closely, lest my features become recognizable.
My inability to focus was one of the many reasons people thought I was a bit thick. But didn’t everybody struggle to maintain a conversation? Didn’t everybody receive the input around them at full blast all the time? It was impossible to stay focused on the growing conditions of a particular grape when I wasn’t a big wine drinker to begin with.
In her defense, being in Sandia, the “hidden gem” wine town in Northern California, typically meant that onewasinterested in the fancy grape knowledge she’d just been sharing. This was probably a spiel she gave to a hundred tourists a week.
“I swear we’ve met,” she said. Her head tilted, examining me closer as I tucked my chin. She couldn’t have been thirty, which meant chances were she’d easily know who I was. Not vanity, just statistics.
“Not likely,” I said, usingHank, my Southern American persona. A slow-talking Southern drawl was like slipping into a familiar character, another layer of defense against notoriety. I tried my best to speak as little as possible as she continued. Not just because I had no idea what to say, but with every second that ticked by, she would likely realize that I wastheHarrison Evans, uber celebrity.
I picked up another item as she spoke. It was a simple bottle opener with the town name etched on the side. I made it dance by pulling on the square head of its spiral body. Arms up. Arms down.
“Wheee.” I brought it higher so she could see it looked like an excited person doing jumping jacks, but she didn’t seem entertained. Her brow arched as her spiel trailed off.
“Excuse me. I’m needed over there,” she said, scooting away hurriedly.
I set the trinket back down with a sigh. I only came down to town from George’s place to get some space to think. His house was thirty minutes away, higher into the surrounding Mayacamas Mountains. I’d been filming so much these past few years that visiting happened less often. Ever since George’s other half, William, died, I found it harder to return.
My best friend Emma Flynn would say I was uncomfortable dealing with my own impending mortality, and the loss of someone that close shoved that unavoidable fact in my face.
My other best friend Charlie Downing would just slap me on the back and tell me that time was a gift not to be wasted.
But Charlie had found Kate, and Emma had reunited with Wesley and were happily in love—or pretending not to be, as was the case with Emma—so their optimistic views on life couldn’t be taken as gospel.
My truth lay somewhere between. I was wracked with guilt and an overarching sense that something was wrong not only with him but in my own life. I felt stuck between two worlds yet fully in neither. The world of celebrity and fame, and the world of George and my past.
But I was here now. That mattered.
I discreetly shuffled away, feigning interest in goat milk soap as the woman chatted with another tourist. I couldn’t shake the feeling of being watched, even with my “normal American” disguise. That was to be expected. I was grateful for my fame, but it came at a cost I’d been paying since I was eleven and made the life-changing decision to join the cast of what would be the international phenomenonTerraformative.
George’s health couldn’t be that bad if he were still writing. I’d been repeating that sentence like a mantra. His last two books were well received not only by the frothing fanbase but also by notoriously hard to please reviewers. So things couldn’t bethatbad. Sure. He forgot my name from time to time, calling me Adam, but that was bound to happen to anybody close to … How old was George these days? I couldn’t recall, but he’d met hundreds of thousands of people in his lifetime, so he mixed my name up with my character from his novels. No. Big. Deal.
I moved to a bin of what appeared to be various miniature farm animals.
Who were these shops for? Who bought these incredibly overpriced knickknacks? In my hand, I turned around a tiny fluffy chick with literal twigs for legs.
“It’s alpaca fur.”
I jumped slightly. The woman was back.
