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Really brilliant dialogue, Elise. Absolutely inspired.
“Thank you. We moved in when my youngest child was around ten or eleven, so we were allowed many good family years here,” Dean affirmed. “You can imagine what it was like. Constant chaos. Kids were screaming from all corners of the house. I had three—which I sometimes said was three too many.”
He laughed. Elise joined him, feeling like a complete alien.
Hello! I’m number four!
“But now that my wife has died, and the kids are all off living their own lives, I must admit, the silence becomes deafening,” Dean said.
“I can understand that,” Elise said. “I was recently divorced, and my kids went off to college. I was once so proud of my house, proud to have guests over for dinner, proud of all I’d worked for to buy it. And now, I get lost in the sheer number of rooms.”
Dean studied her. His face reflected feelings of both confusion and intrigue.
“Where are you from, Elise? You don’t seem to be a Michigander.”
“I’m not. I’m from Los Angeles.”
Dean’s face twitched strangely.
Had he just had a flashback to Allison Darby?
“You’re a long way from home, then,” he told her. “I didn’t think most people outside of the Midwest even knew about Mackinac.”
“To tell you the truth, I didn’t. Not until recently,” Elise said.
“I see.” His eyes dropped toward the plate again. He looked on the verge of asking her another question.
But at that moment, the maid appeared with a big tray of eggplant parmesan, a whole baguette that had been re-baked with garlic, butter, and cheese, along with a salad. She returned moments later with a bottle of red wine, which Dean told Elise was made at a winery just outside of Cheboygen.
“That’s a funny name for a place,” Elise said.
“We’ve got a lot of funny names. Mackinac is a funny name, in and of itself.”
“Sure. But if you look at anything too hard, it’s funny, right? Like, Calabasas? It’s just a ton of syllables thrown together.”
Again, Dean’s face twitched. Probably, he remembered that Allison was from Calabasas, also.
“I’ve never made it out to LA,” he said. “I always wanted to go, but my career took off so quickly over here on the island.”
“And then, there’s always kids to pay attention to, and friends to see, and all that stuff,” Elise said. “I’m forty-two, and I feel kind of like my life just fluttered away from me, outside of my control.”
“It doesn’t get any easier. I can tell you that,” Dean returned.
Now, this was the kind of conversation I’ve always wanted to have with my father.
They dug into their food after that. Elise ate slowly, falling into banter with her father, who was much funnier than she would have suspected. Their senses of humor were pretty similar, and she found herself pausing several times to press her napkin across her lips and cackle.
“What is it you do, Elise?” Dean asked, chewing at the end of his garlic bread.
“I’m a screenwriter.” Elise was grateful that she was able to say it without hemming and hawing around the idea. “I’ve sold a few scripts and worked on several TV shows over the years.”
Dean leaned back, his eyes big. “Wow. So you’re actually a Hollywood girl.”
“Something like that.”
“I’m amazed,” he said. “When you’re out here, you don’t think anything like that is possible. We do normal things, like own bed and breakfasts, become teachers, work as doctors—that kind of thing. But you? You went out into the world, and you made something of yourself.”
“I wouldn’t call any of those other things,notmaking something of yourself,” Elise said with a laugh. “I wouldn’t know the first thing about being a doctor, for example. I would go so far as to say that there should be a law against me becoming a surgeon.”
