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“I mean, instead of a two-cam of y’all playing the song, how about we tell a story? Do it up all the way—costumes, sets, all that.”
“That’s got to cost a fortune,” Marcella said. Costumes, sets, additional production work—yeah, that was caviar taste on their Quarter Pounder budget.
But Darrin shook his head. “It’ll be more than parking a couple cameras in the corners of the studio, yeah, but I think we could swing it pretty cheap. My kid is studying fashion design in school, and I bet she’d work for a credit, plus materials and pizzas, and she’s got a whole crop of artsy friends.”
“I don’t want to do something that looks like we put together a backyard play,” Dash said.
“Yeah, me either.” The very last thing they needed, or could afford, was to do something half-assed and have that go viral for all the wrong reasons.
“It won’t be.” Darrin looked up, above their heads, imagining. “Something minimalist and atmospheric. A little gritty. We wouldn’t need to cast actors or anything. You two are hot as hell, and you sing like you’re fucking each other around the mic, so …”
Dash laughed. “Well, that’s an image I’ll remember.” He grinned at Marcella.
“Yeah,” she said smiling around hot cheeks. “No matter how hard I try to forget it.”
“We’ll take it to the band,” Dash told Darrin, then looked at Marcella to check in. When she nodded, he continued, “If they’re in, sure, we’ll give it shot.”
~oOo~
After they were done in the studio, Marcella drove to Broken Arrow to pick Ajax up from her father’s house. It was a little later than she’d hoped and already starting to get dark on this Sunday evening, so she crossed her mental fingers that Ajax had been working on his homework since they’d been back from their photographic hunting trip.
The odds were decent that he had. Ajax was a pretty responsible kid, though the way the tween years were starting off, he was slipping a little on that score.
She parked on the driveway, beside her father’s mud-spattered Land Rover, and headed up the walk.
Her parents were a textbook case of post-divorce lives. Her father, a recently retired senior engineer at a major Tulsa aeronautics company, had maintained, if not improved, his standard of living after the split. Though he’d never remarried and lived alone, he lived in this nice, two-story, four-bedroom house in a community with wide, sweeping lawns and landscaped gardens. He drove a stupidly expensive SUV. Took vacations abroad. Bought Marcella, Yvonne, Ajax, and Chase stupidly expensive gifts. The works.
Her mom, on the other hand, who’d been a stay-at-home mom until the split, had struggled hard while Marcella and Yvonne were still kids living at home.
The very first years had been hardest, when a stint with an office cleaning service had been the only work she could get. In those years, Marcella, at twelve and thirteen years old, had been the parent of record in the evenings, through bedtime, while Mom was at work.
But eventually Mom had gotten her paralegal degree and had been working as a legal assistant since. She still didn’t own her home, and most of her vacations had been brief staycations, with occasional weekend jaunts. Her biggest bucket-list item was a Caribbean cruise.
Marcella and Yvonne had been secretly saving for years so they could send her on that cruise when she retired, which was coming up next year.
All in all, though, their parents had done a pretty good job being decent divorced parents. Neither badmouthed the other, both showed up at school and sport events and even sat together to cheer her and Yvonne on. They even did holidays together. They’d gotten divorced because he’d worked crazy long hours, and they’d grown apart in all that time living separate lives in the same house. They’d started to fight all the time when they managed to be together. They got along much better when they were living truly separate lives, and Dad finally starting being an active parent, making time for his daughters he never had while they all lived in the same house.
So, despite the drop in their standard of living with Mom, things had actually improved for Marcella and her sister after the split.
She’d had a lot of friends in high school with divorced parents, and saw how bad it could get. Marcella felt pretty lucky.
She went into the house. “Heya!” she called at the front door.
“Kitchen!” her dad yelled, and she went back.
“Hello, my guys. How was hunting?”
“Hello, beautiful,” Dad said as she came around the corner. He was emptying out the dishwasher. She went and got a hug.
Ajax was sitting at the breakfast table, his homework spread out before him. Good boy.
“Hi, Mom,” he said.
“Hi, tiger. I was hoping you’d do your homework here.”
“After I finish my vocab, all I have left is twenty pages ofAnne Frank. I’ll do that in bed before sleep. I took almost three hundred photos this weekend! You should see!”
“That’s great! You can show me tonight, on your computer.” With a kiss to her father’s cheek, Marcella left him to go give her son a kiss on the head. Whoo. After two days in the woods, the locs really stank.
