One
Celebrating Christmas with real-life celebrities can be complicated. This is partly because of the paparazzi they attract and partly because of the oversize personalities they possess. No matter how many times we look at their photos splashed across a tabloid cover and tell ourselves that famous people put their pants on one leg at a time just like we do, the truth is they probably don’t.
My name is Kyra Singer and I know this because I became famous, make that notorious, for falling in love with a movie star named Daniel Deranian while I was working on my first feature film, believing him when he said he loved me, and giving birth to his child. And because my mother, Madeline, is dating a rock star. Yes, my mother. Who I’m pretty sure is one of a very small subset of fifty-two-year-old grandmothers who can claim this distinction. (More on this later.)
It’s only a matter of days until Christmas and I’m standing in front of Bella Flora, the seriously cool 1920s Mediterranean Revival–style home perched on the southernmost tip of Pass-a-Grille, a historic fishing village on the west coast of Florida. I don’t know where you’re spending the holidays, but it’s a sunny seventy degrees here and the sky is a brilliant blue streaked with eyebrow-thin white clouds. The streetlights are garland-wrapped with great big red bows tied at the top. Blow-up Santas and palm tree trunks wrapped in Christmas lights line the two small roads that lead on and off the barrier island. There’s a much better chance of toasting marshmallows at a bonfire on the beach than in a fireplace. Anyone who’s looking for a white Christmas should stay where they are.
Personally, I’ll take fine white sand squishing between my toes over snowflakes falling on my head any day—not that I’m an expert seeing as how I was raised in Atlanta, where even the mention of snow empties grocery shelves and causes embarrassing events like 2014’s Snowmageddon.
The first time we saw Bella Flora, which was all my mother and co-owners Nicole Grant and Avery Lawford had left in the wake of Malcolm Dyer’s Ponzi scheme, she looked like a once grand dame in serious need of reconstructive surgery and smelled like a locker room. We brought her back to life out of sheer desperation and she did the same for us.
In the afternoon sunlight Bella Flora looks like a wedding cake fresh from the bakery box. Its pale pink walls and acres of windows are trimmed in white icing and accented by bell towers and wrought-iron balconies. The whole confection is topped by a multi-angled barrel-tile roof.
I step through the low wall that encloses a front garden filled with original plants from the twenties and feel the warm glow of love for this home that has been our one safe haven. As I follow a bricked path past a Deco-era dolphin fountain, take the rounded steps up to the colonnade, and let myself in the wooden double doors, that glow is dimmed by the knowledge that I’ve put Bella Flora at risk and could actually lose her.
In the foyer I pause as the house wraps its arms around me in welcome. Then I follow the sound of my four-year-old son’s laughter down the central hallway past the formal living and dining rooms and the Casbah Lounge, which is an ode to Spanish tile, leaded glass, and Moroccan leather, and into the kitchen where he and my mother are making Christmas cookies. Dustin’s standing on a chair next to her just like my younger brother Andrew and I used to, pressing holiday-shaped cookie cutters into the dough then transferring them onto the cookie sheet.
His dark eyes are intent on what he’s doing, and based on the amount of green and red icing smeared in his dark curls and across the smooth golden cheeks and chin that he inherited from his father, they’ve been at this for a while. He looks up at me through long dark lashes that any woman would covet and flashes his sunniest smile, also an exact duplicate of his dad’s. Except Dustin’s is not calculated while his father can flash it, and pretty much any other emotion, on cue. Sometimes I have to remind myself just what Daniel Deranian does for a living and how very good he is at it.
Because of my all-too-public pregnancy and the fact that I gave birth to Daniel’s only biological son, at the ripe old age of twenty-seven I’ve had way more than my fifteen minutes of fame. Dustin has had a whole life full. What began as me signing papers promising to keep Dustin’s paternity secret—a feat that proved impossible—has evolved into Daniel’s open involvement in Dustin’s life, his insistence that Dustin bear his last name, and his more recent demand that Dustin play his son in his upcoming directorial debut. I’m glad that Daniel has a relationship with his son and extremely grateful to him for buying Bella Flora for Dustin and me when we were forced to sell it. I’m less happy with the idea of Dustin portraying Daniel and his real-life movie star wife Tonja Kay’s son, and there’s no more time for hedging. I have to commit or refuse by New Year’s Day.
“Look, Mommy. I cutted out a Santa Cause. And a helf.” Beaming, he holds up the now-smooshed shapes in both hands.
“Here. There’s room for them right there on the baking sheet.” My mother shows him where to place them, her smile as warm as her tone is gentle. Mom’s always known how to make the most of a holiday without going all Martha Stewart in the process. She’s also created a “home” everywhere we filmed Do Over, the renovation turned reality TV show that took us from Bella Flora to South Beach, to a private island in the Keys that belonged to a then-reclusive down-on-his-luck rock star named William Hightower, and back again.
I staked everything we had, including Bella Flora, to remodel the Sunshine Hotel, a moldering midcentury hotel just up the beach, in an attempt to take back control of Do Over, and lost. We also lost the noncompete lawsuit the network slapped us with. Which has left my mother and me glaringly unemployed and virtually penniless.
This is why I’ve agreed to rent Bella Flora to a mystery tenant for an amount that gives me the option of turning down the million dollars Daniel and his wife offered for Dustin to play their son.
A text dings in. The knot of panic tightens when I recognize Daniel’s phone number. Coming in the day after tomorrow to bring Dustin’s gift. Will text when I land. There’s no asking if that’s convenient or mention of the decision I have to make, but I know better than to think the subject won’t come up. He and Tonja are not only starring in The Exchange, they’re investors. And they need Dustin for a lot of reasons, one of them being the publicity value of father and son playing themselves while Daniel’s real-life wife plays his mother.
“Kyra?” I look up into my mother’s face and see her concern for me. “Everything all right?”
“Absolutely.” I can’t face another conversation about Daniel’s movie or the fact that our son wants to act with his father. And no matter how stressful everything feels at the moment, I don’t want to ruin the holiday for Dustin or anyone else. If I don’t find a way to pay off the entire loan I took out, it could be the last one we get to spend in Bella Flora.
I watch my mother help Dustin start filling a second cookie sheet and think about how completely I took my childhood and my mother for granted. When our world fell apart, I was shocked to discover how strong she is. I think she and my father were surprised, too. They ended up divorced because he never figured out how to deal with it.
“I’m making these for Billium.” Dustin smashes another dough elf onto the baking pan enthusiastically. “‘Cuz he’s going to be here in a cuppa days. To see Geema.”
My mother’s cheeks turn red at the mention of William Hightower. It seems that we Singer women have a hard time resisting charismatic personalities. In my case the grand prize was Dustin. In my mother’s, well, like I said, it’s not every woman her age who gets to sleep with someone as hot as the man formerly known as William the Wild. She has a valid reason to blush.
“Thomas is coming with him,” my mother says, referring to Will’s thirty-year-old son. “I thought he and Andrew could share the pool house.”
I nod and step up behind Dustin to help him with a tricky bit of dough. I know that my mother has been a great influence on Will. I also know there’s a lot more to William than his looks and talent. For one thing he had the good sense to appreciate my mother; something my father had forgotten how to do. Watching her reimagine and rebuild her life out of the ashes of disaster has been completely inspiring. I hope I can be even half the woman she is by the time I turn fifty.