“Oh my god, I wasn’t that pampered! I know what a spatula is!”
He grabs a wooden ladle and softly swats her arm right back. “Private. Chef.”
“Fine.Proceed.” She opens one of her drawers, points to a high-end silver object. “What’s this?”
“Cheese grater.”
“And this?” She digs into his bag, finding the slim yellow item he ordered online as a joke a few weeks ago and grabbed before he left his place.
“That,” he says with a grin, “is the Slice-o-Matic 3000.”
—
After brunch, a hearty stackof fruit-topped pancakes and a basic shakshuka that she declares is the best thing ever created in this kitchen, he insists on doing the dishes again.
“You’re going to make me a better person or something, aren’t you,” she says with a good-natured grumble as she stands atthe sink with him, reaching for a plate. “FuckingIt’s a Wonderful Life-ing me in my own home.”
He flicks a soap bubble in her direction. “If some of my more responsible traits rub off on you, would that really be such a bad thing?”
While they ate, he filled her in on the past week—theUs Weeklyreporter, the new security system now up and running at Lexi’s. Ramona was aghast, offered to pay for it, even, but he wouldn’t hear of it. “Those people are leeches,” she said, and he had to agree.
Now she disappears upstairs for a few minutes, changes into leggings and a cropped sweatshirt to give him the official tour. The strangest thing about her house, maybe, is that it feels like a showroom. Everything seems plucked from the kind of catalog that doesn’t have prices, from the blown-glass sculpture of a cat to the home theater to the infinity pool and Jacuzzi in the backyard, though she says the Jacuzzi has a filter issue she really needs to get someone out to fix.
“I never go in here,” she admits, pausing in front of a closed door at the end of the second-floor hallway. “Too many memories.”
And then, just before he can tell her they don’t have to go in if she doesn’t want to, she opens the door. He has to fight back a gasp.
The room practically shimmers. A trio of guitars is hung on one wall, her Grammys on a shelf with a little spotlight illuminating them. Album covers and magazine covers take up the rest of the wall space, headlines declaring her the next big thing. Records certifying her songs gold and platinum. Then there are the bookshelves and storage boxes overflowing with memorabiliaand merch, everything from her kids’ TV days to her final tour. Everywhere he looks, she’s smiling back at him—at eighteen, at twenty, at twenty-five.
Behind them, Janet lets out a warning meow, as though she knows how complicated this room must be for Ramona.
“Jesus,” Nick says. “It’s like a monument to everything you accomplished.”
Ramonammms under her breath as she steps inside. “Sometimes I miss playing guitar,” she says as she plucks a string, and even Nick can tell it’s out of tune. “But I think I’m just not ready yet.” She strums the other guitars, none of them sounding quite right. “I know maybe it seemed like I was being too harsh with my mom yesterday,” she continues, and he wants to reassure her that he thought no such thing. “But you have to understand…I can’t separate our working relationship from everything else. Because she never could, either. My mom always wanted to be an actress, and it never happened for her. She grew up pretty poor and thought that kind of quick-ticket fame would be enough to keep her out of the red for life. And when my parents had me…I guess they had another chance.”
Nick’s jaw clenches. He can’t imagine the kind of parent who wants that life for their child. But he can tell she has more to say, and so he lets her.
“I never wanted it,” Ramona says. “I mean, at first I liked making people laugh, and I loved the praise, the attention, especially because we were living just above the poverty line. My mom was more controlling than my dad, and he’d always thought she was kind of out of his league, so he just went along with it. They pushed me to take singing lessons and guitar lessons so they could transition me into a music career like other child stars.Pushed me to show off my body, but never too much, onlyjustenough to tease people. Maybe I would have wanted to pose that way, if I’d been given a choice…sometimes I think part of me would havelovedto own my sexuality. But I never had much say.” A firm shake of her head as she motions toward a framed magazine cover.WILDER CHILD, shouts the headline, with a late-teens Ramona lounging on a desk in an empty classroom, the photo accentuating her bare legs. “Every time I told them I was tired or uncomfortable or sick of it, they told me to suck it up. To appreciate what I had, because anyone would kill to be in my position.”
“Why didn’t you fire them?”
“They were only part of the problem.”
Every time he learns something new, whether it’s how miserable she was performing or the diet she texted him about yesterday, he’s hit with fresh rage. “When your mom showed up…that was me being polite. I don’t know if I’ve ever been so furious with someone I don’t even know.”
“What she said about me—”
“I wouldn’t believe any of it. Not for a second,” he says, reaching out to clasp her shoulder, as though urging her not to glance away. His thumb rubs slowly back and forth. “You went through hell. They were the ones who were supposed to be protecting you, and they fucking exploited you. Now you’re recovering from the trauma of a career they pushed you into, trying to make a life on your own terms, and all they want is to drag you back into it.”
He drops his hand, but keeps his body tilted in her direction. He’s starting to think that’s his natural state.
“It took me a long, long time to realize that. Even when I supposedly had all this success, it felt like I was failing. My albumsdidn’t always do better than the previous one, and I had all my self-worth wrapped up in my work. I just…looked around at my career, and all these people who worked for me, spent all their time with me, but didn’t know me, and I thought,This can’t be it.”
“It wasn’t. It’s not. You can do fuckinganything.” The words are hard-edged with how fiercely he believes them. “You’re this incredible, unstoppable force. You realized it was hurting you, and you got out. That’s the exact opposite of failure. I just—I hope you know how in awe of you I am.”
She presses her lips together, as though trying to hold back some emotion from escaping. “I do now,” she says quietly. “We’re both living in the aftermath. These massive events that completely changed the trajectories of our lives.” When she stretches out her fingertips to graze his chest, he wishes he could replay it in slow motion. “You can talk to me about the divorce, you know. If you want to.”
He never expected them to have something like this in common, but he guesses she’s right. More than that: he’s surprised to discover that he does want to talk about it.
