CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Des had expected Allie to languish for a few days after her confrontation with Ben, but surprise: First thing the next morning, she was downstairs and dressed before Des.
“You’re up bright and early this morning,” Des noted.
“Places to go, people to see,” Allie replied.
“Are you having breakfast?”
“I already ate.”
Des watched as Allie prepared a to-go cup of coffee.
“Where are you off to?”
“Cara said Giovanni was starting the plaster repairs early this morning. I want to watch. I want to see how he does it.”
“Planning on a second career once you return to L.A.?”
“Just curious about how it’s done. And I want to know when it’s done so I can begin on the ceiling.”
“So you’ve come around?”
Allie turned and stared at Des blankly.
“The last time we talked about the ceiling painting, you’d pretty much decided not to try.”
“I changed my mind.”
“May I ask why?”
“Of course.” Allie leaned over the back of a chair that was pulled up to the table. “I did a lot of thinking last night. Not just about Ben—and we’re not going there again, okay?—but about being here and why we’re here. I thought a lot about Dad, how the theater was where he got his first taste of acting and how it changed his life. Mom, too, but we both know she never had the same talent Dad had. She was a wannabe actress. She did okay in the roles she had, but let’s face it, she was never going to be Katharine Hepburn or Meryl Streep. Now, Dad could have been a for-real star, but he put his own ambitions aside to let Mom shine. So I do think he loved her, to answer one of your previous questions, but that’s not really what I was thinking about.”
“Good, because you’ve lost me.”
“Dad wanted us all here for a reason. And the reason wasn’t just to renovate the theater. He wanted us to know each other and to work together. Maybe even to learn something about ourselves and each other. You’ve done a great job keeping track of the money . . .”
“Yeah, such a great job, we’re almost out of it.”
“Not your fault. A million dollars doesn’t go as far as it used to. And no one could have predicted the roof leak. It’s set us back, but it isn’t going to ruin us. You will get money from the movie posters, and eventually, the book Barney and Nik are working on will bring in a few bucks. Not a windfall, certainly, but enough to pay a bill or two, and that’s what you were looking for for the immediate future, right?”
Des nodded, still not sure where Allie was going, but she was willing to tag along.
“And Cara’s done a great job keeping all the mechanicals for the building on track. She’s had some help from Joe—okay, a lot of help from Joe—but let’s face it, she has no background in construction. She asked a lot of questions and took the time to learn what she had to know so she could make good decisions. Again, yes, with Joe’s help, but still, you have to give her a lot of credit. She’s kept it all moving.
“Which brings us to me.” Allie looked down for a moment, then met her sister’s gaze. “I haven’t been as engaged as you two have been. I haven’t taken this as seriously as you two have. I came here because if I didn’t, none of us would inherit a dime from Dad’s estate and Uncle Pete would have the honor of choosing which charity would get everything.”
“Al, where are you going with this? What’s your point?”
“My point is that it’s time for me to step up. I didn’t think I had anything to contribute. But I can paint those missing sections of the patterns on the ceiling, and I believe I can do just as good a job as anyone else, including the Balfour Group’s artist.” Allie’s chin jutted out with just a touch of defiance. “When I’m finished with that ceiling, no one is going to be able to come into that theater and tell the newly painted sections from the old.”
“Wow. It’s the old Allie, full of confidence and fire. Welcome back. After last night, I was afraid that—”
“We’re not talking about last night.”
“Okay. But can we talk about what brought on this new wave of yes, I can?”
“It’s like I said, I need to contribute. I need to be a part of the success of this venture, Des. This is what I can do.” She paused. “This is a legacy not just for Nikki, but for any kids you or Cara might have. And the legacy is not just the theater, it’s the town and the college and the park and everything that Reynolds and everyone else has contributed over the years. I want Nikki to know I was part of that. I don’t want to be like Mom. I don’t want to be a wannabe. I want Nikki to be proud of me.”
“Wait, what? You’re nothing like Mom, Allie. And Nikki is proud of you. So am I.”
“Don’t make me go for the tissues again, Des.”
Des laughed, and Allie made a move to leave, picking up her bag from the window seat.
“You know, Cara and I aren’t the only ones who might yet have kids. You’re still young enough to have another one or two.”
Allie snorted. “Gosh, had I mentioned I was considering in vitro via sperm donor? No? I didn’t think so.” Laughing, she turned for the door. “Sorry, I’m done with that. No hot prospects in my future.”
“If you could wait until I find something to put on my feet, I’ll go with you.”
“You have two minutes. But that means you won’t have breakfast.”
“I can grab a take-out sandwich from the Goodbye if I get hungry. I want to see what’s going on in the theater, too.” Des hurried from the kitchen and up to the second floor in search of her sandals. She was back down before the two minutes had expired in Allie’s mental clock.
“I left a note for Nikki and Barney, though I suspect Barney is already out walking with her early-morning group.”
“Nikki might sleep for a few more hours. She had a big day yesterday.”
“It sounds like Seth’s party was the place to be. I’m sorry I missed it. It sounds like everyone had a great time.”
“You’ll join us next year.”
“You’re planning on next year already?”
“Thinking about the possibilities.”
“I think you’d make a great farm girl.”
Des laughed. “I would. I love that place of Seth’s. I love the fields and the gardens and the orchard and the vineyard.”
“And Seth?”
“Could be headed in that direction.”
“Wow. Who’da thunk it?”
They crossed the street to the theater once traffic had cleared—the morning rush hour of seven cars—and walked past Joe’s truck and one other to the front door, which was unlocked. Once inside, they made their way into the lobby, where the scaffold had been completed and the lights were all ablaze. At the very top of the scaffold, Giovanni stood as confidently as he might stand in his own house. Next to him, on the platform, sat Cara.
“Hey! What’s doin’ up there?” Des called.
“Watching the master perform surgery on our ceiling.” Cara held up a camera. “And taking pictures so we’ll have them for the scrapbook.”
“What scrapbook?” Allie asked.
“The one I’m making chronicling the transformation of the Sugarhouse from empty and abandoned to Mama, look at me now.” She turned all the way around and asked, “Want to come up?”
“Ah, no. No, thanks. It might disturb Giovanni,” Des said.
“No disturbing me,” he told her without taking his eyes from the ceiling. “Unless you shake the platform.”
“I’d like to come up,” Allie said.
“You’re actually going up there again?” Des frowned. That would make two trips up for Allie. “How can you stand it?”
“It’s something I really want to do. And it helps if you don’t look down.”
“I’ll come down,” Cara said. “You can have my space on the platform.”
Des watched Cara descend with all the grace of an acrobat.
“You make that look so easy,” she said when Cara had landed on the ground.
“It is easy.” Cara turned to Allie. “So have you decided to be our artist in residence?”
Allie nodded. “Crossing my fingers and hoping for the best.”
“I think it’s a brilliant idea that you had, and I have total confidence in you. It’s going to be beautiful.” Cara gave Allie an unexpected hug.
“Thanks,” Allie said softly. “So how’s he doing up there?”
“Amazing. Honestly, the sections he’s filled in so far are flawless. Except for the fact that the ceiling is blue and the plaster is white, you’d never be able to tell where it’s been repaired. It’s that smooth. It’s taking a lot of time, it’s slow going, but he’s just perfection.”
“Take that, James Ebersol,” Des murmured.
“I’ve never painted on plaster before.” Allie was staring up at the ceiling, where high above, Giovanni appeared oblivious to the conversation going on below, if in fact he could even hear them. “I think I’d like to go up and watch, see what the surface of the ceiling is like now that there’s some plaster on it. This is also a good time to get used to being up so high. Here goes . . .”
Allie placed her hands on the bottom rung of the scaffold and took a deep breath, then pulled herself up. A fascinated Des watched her sister climb to the top and lower her body to sit next to where the plaster wizard stood working with his hands over his head.
“I’m just speechless,” Des said.
“About what?” Cara’s gaze was still focused on the ceiling.
“We’ve both always been so afraid of heights. I can’t believe she was able to just . . .” Des gestured toward the scaffold.
“Mind over matter, Des.”
They watched the scene overhead, the short, elderly bowlegged man whose hands worked magic with plaster, and the young woman, blond hair streaming over one shoulder, whose heart may have been pounding in fear, but who was apparently managing to hold a conversation nonetheless.
“Well, I think I’m outta here. I’ve done my due diligence and watched the man do his thing. I’m so grateful we found him. He’s truly a master of his craft.” Cara looked around for the bag she’d brought with her earlier and found it near the bottom of the scaffold. “I guess I’ll see you back at the house.”
Des nodded.
“Hey, by the way, Joe and I had a blast yesterday. Your man really knows how to throw a party.”
“Oh, he’s not really my . . .” she began to protest, then, when Cara raised an eyebrow, Des laughed. “Well, I guess he sorta is.”
“He’s the real deal, Desdemona,” Cara told her.
“I know.”
“And for the record, Barney is over the moon.”
“Why?”
“She thinks she’s got us right where she wants us.”
“Where’s that?”
“Looking for a reason to stay in Hidden Falls.” Cara grinned and headed for the door. “And she might be right.”
Des passed the better part of a half hour reading and responding to email and taking pictures of the interior of the theater to post on Instagram. Another ten minutes passed, and she decided she probably had better things to do than sit and wait for Allie to come down, so she called up to her sister.
“Al, I’m going back to the house now.”
Apparently still in conversation with Giovanni, Allie waved an acknowledgment that she’d heard. Des walked back to the house, pondering the unexpected changes in her sister’s behavior. First there was her newly accepted sense of responsibility where the theater was concerned. Then there’d been her determined climb to the top of the scaffold, where she still sat, chatting away with Giovanni. As much as Des had hated to see the pain Allie’d gone through the night before, the experience seemed to have shaken something loose inside her. Whatever the reason, this new Allie was showing a side Des had once suspected might be there but had never seen.
It might be a long shot, but she hoped the new Allie would stick around a little longer.
Early the next morning, Des and Cara set out to run together. Since Cara was already in shape and Des was in catch-up mode, they’d agreed Des would be free to stop anytime she needed to.
“How can you keep on going in this heat?” Des gasped. “I can’t stand it.”
“I just think about something else. I sing a song inside my head, or play a scene from a movie.” Cara had stopped to wait for Des.
“Look at you. I’m gasping and you’re barely breathing hard. No fair.” They were in the park, Des leaning over the back of a bench.
“What’s your favorite romantic movie?” Cara asked.
“Pride and Prejudice.”
“Which version?”
“I like all of them.” Des took several long, deep breaths.
“Well, just think of your favorite scene while you’re running. Makes the time go faster.”
“Will it make my lungs feel better? Because time isn’t really the problem here.”
Cara laughed and set out running again, and Des followed her for a few blocks before dropping off. She walked back to the house, her chest heaving the entire way.
Her conversation with Cara came back to her on Saturday night.
No one ever had made much of a fuss over her birthday, and that was okay with Des. Unless, of course, they were on the set of Des Does It All on her birthday, when her mother would make a big deal about it, bringing in a very fancy cake and ice cream and decorating the lounge with balloons and crepe paper streamers. Otherwise, nada. Des learned at an early age that her birthday wasn’t much of a special day, so her expectations had never been very high.
Seth picked her up at seven, and they drove to Rose Hill and had dinner at the restaurant she’d once passed over in favor of Seth’s grilling steak. From there, they drove back to Hidden Falls. As they came through town, Des expected him to make the right onto Hudson Street to take her home, but instead, he made a U-turn in front of the theater.
“Why are we here?”
“I want to show you something.” He was at her door by the time she unfastened her seat belt. “Come on.”
As he unlocked the theater door, she asked, “Where’d you get a key?”
“Borrowed it from Barney.” He swung the door open and they went inside.
“It’s really kind of spooky in here at night, in the dark.” She ran her hand along the wall, searching for the light switch. She found it and snapped it on. “Oh, so much better. What did you want to show me?”
“Upstairs.” He took her hand, and they walked up the steps to the balcony level, then into the projection room.
There, on the table, was the projector he’d taken home to tinker with.
“You fixed it?”
He nodded. “Took me longer than I thought, but it’s working.” He led her back out to the balcony, and to a seat in the first row. “I thought for your birthday, we’d have a private viewing of your favorite romantic movie.”
“Wait, Pride and Prejudice?”
“Yup.”
“You talked to Cara. You had her ask.”
He nodded.
“And she was so clever in the way she did it.”
“She’s a smart cookie, all right. I thought she was my best bet. Nikki couldn’t keep a secret. Allie would forget to call me back. Barney never knows where her phone is, so she’d never have gotten my message.”
“That does pretty much sum up my family.”
“I’ll be right back.” Seth disappeared into the projection room, then a moment later, Des heard the soft whine of the projector. Seth turned off the lights, then hurried back to sit next to her.
He put his arm around her, and she snuggled in.
“Ooh, I like this version. This was a TV miniseries in 2005. It’s a lovely movie.”
“Shhh. I haven’t seen it.”
“There’s a surprise.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It’s sort of a chick flick.”
“Real men are not turned off by chick flicks.”
Des giggled, he shushed her again, and they watched the film to the end.
“That was the best birthday present ever.”
“It wasn’t bad. That was some romantic line he laid on her there when he was proposing.”
“Oh, you mean, ‘You have bewitched me, body and soul . . .’ ”
“Yeah, that one. Jane Austen had a seriously romantic way of expressing herself.”
She got out of her seat and sat on his lap. “Jane Austen didn’t write that line. It never appeared in the book. They wrote it for the movie.” She kissed him, thinking tonight she’d have that chance to make out with a hot guy in a movie theater she never had when she was a teenager. “Thank you, thank you, thank you.”
“Ah, Des, I think you might want to . . .” He was attempting to sit up when all the lights in the theater came on.
“Surprise!” came the cry from below.
Des peered over the balcony railing. There stood her family and the friends she’d made here. Cara and Joe, Allie, Barney, Nikki and Mark, his sister and two of her niece’s friends, Barney’s friend Tom, Ben, and Seth’s sister, Amy. Was it her imagination, or were Allie and Ben deliberately not looking in the other’s direction?
“Oh! Look at you all down there!” She turned back to Seth. “You planned this?”
“I did.” He looked enormously proud of himself. “Obviously I didn’t have a lot of time for planning, but next year, I’ll be ready.”
“It’s perfect. You couldn’t possibly top this.” She kissed him again. “You are the best guy. Thank you.”
“You’re welcome. Now let’s go downstairs and take a look at your present.”
“My present?” She made a face. “I just had my present. The movie . . .”
“That was a private showing. And it was good. Can’t say it was my favorite film of all time, but I didn’t mind it. But you have to admit, there was something missing.”
“What?”
“What’s one of the things you most look forward to when you go to see a movie in a theater?”
She thought about it for a moment, was about to give up, when she smelled it.
“Popcorn! I smell popcorn.” She jumped up and ran down the steps, hugging people as she joined them on the first floor. “Where is it?”
A laughing Cara directed her toward the lobby.
“OMG, as Nikki would say, you had the machine fixed!”
“Ah, no, Des. You wouldn’t have wanted to eat anything that came out of that old machine. Bugs, mouse nests . . . not healthy.” Seth walked over and tapped the top of the stainless steel and glass machine where the corn was popping into a white mound. “This is new, commercial grade. I thought I’d kill two birds with one stone. Birthday gift, grand opening night gift.”
“I love it.” Des all but danced around it.
Seth handed her a box. “Here. Serve your hungry guests so we can get on with the show.”
“We already saw the movie.”
“That was just for you. The next one has—how shall I put this?—a more universal appeal.”
“I can hardly wait.” She scooped up popcorn and passed it around until everyone had a box.
“There’s water here in a cooler,” Barney announced. “No soda—no machine set up yet—but water’s better for you anyway. Take a bottle and run up to the balcony and get your seats.”
Five minutes later, everyone had a seat, a bottle of water, and a large box of popcorn, and happy chatter surrounded her.
Des sat with her feet up on the balcony railing the way she figured she would have done had she grown up coming to this theater—and she wished with all her heart that she’d been given the chance to have done that. How much more fun would those childhood favorite movies have been if she’d watched them here, with her dad, her sister, a younger Barney.
She realized with a start she hadn’t included her mother in that happy scene. In an instant, Des was overcome with sadness. She missed what her mother could have been. She missed her father. He was a scoundrel, she’d no doubt of that, but that was who he was, and she’d loved him. Sitting here, in a seat he might have sat in at one time, in the theater her family had built and where Fritz’d graced the stage so many times in any number of plays, she felt generations of other Hudsons surrounding them. And here in this place where her parents had met, she understood that whether Fritz and Nora had loved each other was not an issue. Allie and Seth had both been right about that. Whatever it was, good or bad, had been between Fritz and Nora.
Of course, she’d thought her father was crazy when Pete Wheeler called her and Allie to his office to discuss the terms of Fritz’s will. Little did they know how their lives were about to change after that afternoon. As crazy as she’d thought the idea at the time, coming to Hidden Falls was the best thing that had ever happened to her. She’d discovered a sister she never knew she had, and an aunt who’d become more dear to her than she could say. And she’d found Seth, a man who was not only her best friend, but had turned out to be a whole lot more.
Des knew that she and Allie still had things to work out, but there were times these past few months when they’d been closer than they’d ever been, except maybe the time before Des had been cast in Des Does It All. She’d come to love and appreciate her family and their accomplishments, their generosity of both spirit and resources, those who’d come before her, and those she shared a home with. The grand house on Hudson Street was a home, in the truest sense of the word, for all of them. Des was happier than she’d ever been in her life.
She looked around in the dark, waiting for the movie to start. She wasn’t sure what it was, but she knew she’d love every minute of it, because it was planned by a truly wonderful guy who had put so much thought into making this a birthday she’d never forget.
Bewitched. The line from the movie played over and over in her head. Right at that moment, Des felt as much bewitched by Seth as Mr. Darcy had been by Elizabeth. She mused over the possibility of that single word as a small tattoo gracing somewhere on her back, or maybe her arm. It could happen.
It was hands down the best birthday of her life.
Seth returned to his seat and put his arm around her, entangled one of her curls with his finger, and Des smiled in the dark.
Definitely bewitched.
The familiar theme song began to play, and she clapped her hands and whooped out loud when she realized what movie he’d selected. Her all-time favorite.
The original Ghostbusters.
Best. Birthday. Ever.