Talk of the Town (34 page)
“This is gold,” Rodney muttered in my ear, motioning one of the cameras closer. “This is perfect. Bag this, lunch, and the rodeo, and we’re halfway there.”
For an instant, I felt guilty for coldly discussing the marketing of something so real, so tender and heartfelt as Amber’s homecoming. Reminding myself that all of this was in Amber’s best interest, I slipped into work mode and pointed out Brother Harve and O.C. “There’s some pretty good filler over there. Brother Harve runs the church near Amber’s house—the one where she learned to sing Southern gospel. His grandson, O.C., grew up with Amber. Ask him about the time they were in the calf scramble together. It’s good stuff.”
Rodney glanced sideways at me, seeming properly impressed. “Sounds perfect. Anything else?”
“Not yet,” I admitted. “I wanted to do some interviews in town, but there’s no way. The minute this Justin Shay thing broke, there were paparazzi everywhere. It’s a zoo, basically.” I glared across the lawn, trying to vaporize Justin Shay with my death ray. Unfortunately, he didn’t disappear. Bored with the family reunion, he strolled toward the corrals to look at the horse. Watching him pass the barn, I wondered momentarily why Carter hadn’t come out.
Rodney frowned. “What about getting Amber into the rodeo? Is it going to be a problem?”
I affected what I hoped was an air of supreme confidence. “We’ll do it just the way I described it in the email last night. I think we can get away with sending Butch and a camera operator in as advance. They can hide the equipment in a duffle bag, check in with our rodeo company contact, then pre-position somewhere near the press box on the west side. Everyone else will have to move in with Amber. We’re only going to get one chance at it. There’s no room for mistakes. As soon as the paparazzi finds out she’s here, it’ll be a circus. I don’t know about the concert plans this evening. We’ll just have to see.”
Rodney scratched a sneaker back and forth over the new spring grass. No doubt he was calculating the difficulty of transferring everyone from the dark interior of a horse trailer into position before the crowd went wild. “It’s always a circus with Amber,” he admitted dryly. “Has anyone heard from Ursula yet?”
Ursula
. Just the mention of her seemed to evaporate the hopeful possibility that this day would end well. I couldn’t admit that to Rodney, of course. “Not since this morning. Butch told me she’s headed this way. I had some missed calls earlier.”
Rodney lifted his head and sent a puzzled look my way. “Where were you this morning, anyway? Ursula’s on the warpath, Amber’s gone, I’m trying to move a crew, at what, may I add, was a ghastly hour of the morning, the press are all over us, and I can’t even give you a buzz to let you share the love? I almost turned in my union card and quit right there.”
“Very funny.” Even the thought of losing Rodney was terrifying. Rodney was an icon, a pioneer of reality TV. He’d forgotten more about the genre than everyone else knew, combined. “Rodney, if you quit, I’ll kill you. I’ll kill you and I’ll tell everyone I went temporarily insane.”
Rodney’s lips twisted in a wry sideways smile. “Not a long trip today.”
“No, it’s not. I’m halfway there already.”
“You’re all right, love,” he said, and moved a camera operator again with a subtle twist of his chin. “You’re better than you think. Just look at that.” He pointed, and I returned my attention to the ongoing family reunion, where Imagene was now gathering everyone for lunch.
“That’s perfect,” Rodney muttered.
“You’re right.” Whether it was luck, fate, divine intervention, or just the hapless magic of Amber Anderson, everything had come together at exactly the right time, in just the right way. As the Anderson family started toward the house, Amber with her arm around Amos, Avery stretched between his sister and grandfather like a human chain, and Andy in front of them, walking backward and chattering on about the ongoing baseball season, I knew the goose had just laid the golden egg.
On the back steps, Amber held out her arm to help her grandfather struggle upward with one good leg and one that swung stiffly at his side.
That scene was going to melt hearts all over the nation.
Lunch didn’t turn out anything like I planned. It was mostly the Andersons, Brother Harve, O.C., and me eating, while the TV people flitted around, taking film of us and the food and the kitchen. One of the boys put his motion picture camera right over the table between Brother Harve and Verl and took a close-up picture of the roast before Brother Harve sliced it. Then that boy went over and got some film of the apple pies. I didn’t know if he was just hungry or if the roast and the pies was gonna get a starring role in Amber’s show, but I was glad the pies looked as good as they did. I’d forgot about them in all the commotion of Amber driving up, but it turned out all right, because apple pies take a long time to bake. That cameraman must have thought they looked pretty good, because he filmed them for a long time, then rested the camera on his shoulder, closed his eyes, and took a long sniff.
“I can go ahead and cut you a piece if you want,” I offered, and the crew boss, a dark-headed fella named Rodney, gave the camera boy an aggravated look. Rodney was kind of a quick-moving, impatient man, it seemed like. He was tall and thin as a rail, like he didn’t stop to eat much. Those kind of people make me nervous. I wished he’d stop moving those kids around the kitchen, let them sit down for a bite, and have one himself, too. Thin as he was, he could use it. I always like to feed skinny people.
“Just do what you’d normally be doing. Just act natural,” he kept saying. “Act as if we aren’t here.” That was a fairly tall order, considering that the kitchen was a tight fit, with all of us, all of them, and their equipment. The Anderson kids were pinned up against the wall, because we’d had to scoot the table back some to make room for the extra lights, and by the door, O.C. was hunched over his plate, because people kept hitting him in the head with microphone poles and cords and big reflectors that looked like giant pieces of stiff tin foil. It was a good thing Carter’d stayed out in the barn to work on the spare tire. I didn’t know where we would have put him. I felt bad about him not getting a plate, but I figured I’d send Amanda-Lee out with a tray in a while, since Carter was pitching in like a real trooper, trying to use Jack’s old tire-plugging tools to get either the flat or the spare fixed and aired up so the horse trailer would be ready this afternoon for the rodeo.
Every so often, as the lunchtime filming was going on, Amanda-Lee glanced out the window, like she was wondering about the horse trailer, or Carter, or both. When the filming was done, we got up and let the crew sit down, and Amanda-Lee disappeared out the door before I could give her a plate. After serving everybody and cutting the pies, I started fixing a little food to take to the barn for Carter and Amanda. I didn’t get in too big a hurry, mostly for selfish reasons. It made me feel good, having all those young folks around my table, going on about how good the food was. One of the camera boys said he used to work for the
Good Morning America
show and if I’d like to tell the rest of the world how to make a real apple pie, he could probably get me on TV.
I was so flattered, I turned red in the face. “Well, I might do that. I just might,” I said, and tried to imagine me, plain old Imagene Doll, riding an airplane all by myself, all the way to New York to cook on TV. Betty Prine and the ladies of the Daily Literary Society would sure drop their dentures over that, and wouldn’t Jack get a kick out of it?
I wrote down my phone number and handed it to that boy. “You just have someone call me when you’re ready,” I said, and he tucked the number in his pants pocket, like he’d really do it. He thanked me again for the lunch, then he and the good–looking baby-faced kid they all called Butch got up, got their things together, and asked me for directions to the fairgrounds, because they were planning to go on ahead of everyone else. I pointed out that it was still two and a half hours until the rodeo, but that didn’t seem to bother them. They wanted to look over the arena while it was empty, they said.
“Y’all can’t wait a little while?” Amber asked, and a glance passed between her and Butch. I’d intercepted that look a couple of times at the table. There was something going on between them, some private conversation underway. I wondered what was behind that, seeing as Amber was here with Justin Shay, who even in spite of his bad reputation, did have pretty good table manners. He complimented my pies twice and said he’d eaten in the best restaurants all over the world and didn’t know when he’d ever tasted anything finer. He winked at me and asked what he’d have to do to talk me into moving to Hollywood and cooking for him. I wagged a finger and told him I was too old for all that, but he could come into the Daily Café anytime, because I was the one who baked the pies there.
He said he just might, and then he watched another private look pass between Amber and Butch and his grin turned upside down real quick. When Butch came over to tell Amber good-bye and to knock ’em dead at the fair, Justin leaned back, crossed his legs, and looped an arm over the back of Amber’s chair. “She’ll be awesome. She’s always awesome.” He flashed another smile at Amber before he turned back to Butch. “You get enough to eat there, Bubba . . . I’m sorry . . . Butch. It’s Butch, right?” Patting his flat, tight stomach, he looked down his nose at Butch, stopping at the point where Butch’s tummy drooped over his pants just a little bit.
Everyone at the table froze up, and I decided right then and there I didn’t like Justin Shay. It was bad enough that he’d taken a shine to Amber, who was too young and innocent for a rich dandy like him, but it was another thing to be hateful to poor Butch in front of everybody. Butch was a nice young fella. He probably had a real good mama somewhere who’d raised him right and taught him to show proper manners, especially in someone else’s house. In all the news articles about Justin Shay, I’d never seen one single mention of his mama. With all the rigmarole he was into all the time, his family probably didn’t claim him anymore.
Like usual, Amber couldn’t stand to see anyone get their feelings hurt. She stood up, gave Butch a big hug around the neck, and said, “Thanks, Butch. I guess if it wasn’t for you, we’d still be stuck out at the old Barlinger place.”
Butch turned red as a beet, then went out the door looking like a barnyard rooster puffed up to crow at the sunrise.
I fixed plates of food for Carter and Amanda-Lee, then headed out the back door. When I got closer to the barn, I could hear laughing inside. I didn’t mean to spy exactly, but I did tiptoe around the end of the barn aisle. Amanda had the lug wrench and she was holding it away from Carter, who was squatted down by the trailer, trying to get the tire back on.
“All right, this is war,” she said, giving him a flirty smile. “I’ll have you know that I
do
understand what a lug wrench is for. My father wouldn’t let me get my driver’s license until I’d learned to change a tire. I’m not the helpless urban girl you think I am.”
Standing up, Carter rested an elbow on the truck, looking like he was enjoying the conversation. “I don’t think I said that, exactly. I just said you probably didn’t want to get your nice clothes dirty.” He waved a hand toward her cute blue sweater and black slacks. Standing there in the barn, she looked as out of place as a flower in a hogpen. Carter seemed to appreciate that fact.
“I might,” she said and moved the lug wrench like she was thinking about getting down there and showing him how it was done.
“Now how would that look, a bigtime TV producer like yourself down here changing tires?” Pushing off the truck, Carter circled around and trapped her against the fender.
“You’d be surprised what producers do,” she said.
“I’ll bet I would,” he agreed, his voice low and soft. The two of them looked into each other’s eyes for a minute, slowly swaying closer together before he slipped a hand into her hair and kissed her. She let the lug wrench go, and neither one of them noticed when it hit the dirt and clattered against the tire.
A heat rose in my cheeks and I backed out of the barn aisle, figuring neither one of them probably had much appetite for food at the moment. Whenever they got finished in the barn, they could have a plate at the house. In the meantime, I had a little reconnoitering to do about the situation with Amber and Justin Shay. That match had no business happening, and I was about to see that it didn’t.
When I got back to the house, the kitchen was empty, Justin Shay was sprawled out on my sofa with a pillow over his face, and the film crew was busy on the porch, setting up lights and those overhanging microphones on long poles. They had Amber’s brothers and Verl out there in the rocking chairs, and they were telling them not to be nervous, just act natural and talk about Amber—how she was as a child, funny things they remembered about her, how she’d always liked to sing, and that sort of thing. Brother Harve and O.C. were waiting just inside the screen door, so I guessed maybe they were next in line to get on camera.