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“You mentioned that he’d passed but not much else.”
She generally preferred to listen to Major talk about his family, but she suddenly wanted to talk to him about hers. She wanted him to know her. “My mom was a model. She came from a poor family in Alabama.”
A brow arched in surprise over Major’s eyes. “Your momma is from Alabama?”
Her mom sounded pure LA, and she’d worked long and hard for it. “She wanted to be an actress, so she took a lot of classes and learned how to change her accent. Sometimes when she gets really worked up a hint of twang will come out.”
“I’m having a hard time envisioning your mother in Alabama.”
“Rural Alabama,” she added. “My grandparents were farmers, but Mom always wanted out. She was on a school trip to Atlanta, and she snuck away and visited a modeling agency. She got suspended from school but booked her first job, and my grandparents forgave her because she got paid well. About two years later, my grandfather had a heart attack, and Mom moved my grandma out to LA. She met my dad, who was a producer, and they got married and for a while everything was great.”
“And then he died.”
“Yes, he was older than Mom and he had a heart attack, and that was when Mom found out he was leveraged to the hilt and had borrowed against the company.” This wasn’t something she’d known at the time. She’d pieced it together from things her mom had said and many, many articles on the subject. Her mom hadn’t given interviews. She’d tried to keep them out of that particular spotlight, but it hadn’t stopped the media from jumping on a juicy riches-to-rags tale. “So he left nothing behind but debt. She thought she’d married well and had secured her future. She’d given up modeling and found herself with a dying mother, two kids, and a couple million in debt at the age of thirty.”
“That doesn’t sound so old.”
“In the modeling world, she was considered way past her prime.” Sometimes she wondered if those rejections still affected her mom.
“So she decided to put you to work.”
She hated the slight accusation in his tone, but it wasn’t anything she hadn’t dealt with before. “I had already done a few acting gigs by then. My dad was a producer, and he thought it was fun to put his kids in the films. I liked it, so when I was offered a chance to audition for a TV show, I wanted to take it. The fact that it kept us afloat was a plus.”
“You were five,” Major pointed out.
“I was, but I also understand why she did what she did. We were a month away from being homeless.” She knew one way her mom and Major were alike. “And her mother was so sick. She couldn’t take care of her without a roof over our heads. Weirdly enough, that job I got was the TV show with Gavin, and he helped us. He was the reason my grandmother got to stay in our home for as long as she did. Mom didn’t understand how to navigate the health care system in California, but Gavin’s lawyer did.”
Major’s expression tightened. “You mentioned your grandmother had dementia.”
“She had a host of things wrong with her,” Brynn said with a sigh. “But my mom managed to keep her comfortable. We hired an in-house nurse to stay with her. Gavin managed to get us in a government program that offered us a nurse for ten hours a day. When she got worse, we got around-the-clock care.”
“Uhm, there’s no program like that.”
“Maybe it’s a California thing,” Brynn replied.
“I don’t think so. There’s nothing that would cover twenty-four-seven care for anything but end-of-life care, and that’s only for days or weeks. It’s why I had to put my dad in the assisted living center. I could only afford it because of my dad’s former employer. They had an excellent health care program but we still had to have me buy the house from him so he wouldn’t have any assets or he wouldn’t have qualified for any assistance. Trust me. I know the system well. Twenty-four-seven care would cost thousands and thousands of dollars, even if somehow you were only paying the copay.”
That didn’t make sense, but then she didn’t understand the situation. “Well, all I know was my grandma got to stay with us.”
“My father is on experimental medication that is probably going to kill him and he wants to stay on it,” Major said quietly.
So that was the news he’d gotten yesterday. “What do the meds do?”
“They help with the dementia. I know Lila’s explained how it’s supposed to work, but I’m still not completely sure I understand. What I do know is the last couple of weeks have been the best my dad has had in a long time. He knows who I am and what year it is. I don’t have to explain that Mom died a long time ago and why I’m not still five.”
