Page 5 of It's a Love Story

And there it is, the thought that turns my tiny ache of hope into actual hope. I can figure this out. When I was twelve years old, I turned our lives around. I’m not going to squeeze an original song out of the biggest recording star in the country, but I have bought some time. I’m going to figure out how to catch this movie a tiger.

CHAPTER 4

I LEAVE WORK EARLY SO I CAN GET OUT OF THISSTUPIDdress before falling into the comfort of Friday night with my mom. There are no tigers to be caught on a summer Friday afternoon—they’re all in traffic headed to Malibu or the Hamptons. I’ve painted myself into a corner, and I could use some of my mom’s trademarked brand of misguided optimism.Call George Clooney,she’ll suggest.

We’re meeting outside the theater in Westwood, and I see her before she sees me. She looks like anyone’s mom, but younger and prettier. Her hair is long and highlighted back to the blond of her youth, stick straight and parted down the middle. My dad had curly hair, which is where mine comes from, and I have been fascinated my whole life by the way my mom just wakes up with orderly hair. It’s like if someone was born with mascara on—what a time-saver. She’s smiling into her phone, and an old fear sparks behind my chest.

“Jane!” she says when she sees me and pulls me into a hug.

“You look really good,” I say. “What gives?

She’s reading another text. “Sorry, it’s Gary.” And there it is.

“Gary,” I say. “Still?”

“Yes.” She smiles and loops her arm in mine. When my mom falls for someone, she falls hard. And when it blows up, she is as tenuous as a sugar cookie in the rain. Gary is a guy she met at yoga who spends an outrageous amount of time reading magazines at the Coffee Bean next door to the real estate office where she works. Her usual type can best be described as “dashing,” so Gary is a relief in a way. “Did you get tickets already?”

“I did,” I say, and we walk in and line up for popcorn. My mom and I have been doing Friday night movie dates my entire life. When I was little, it was our one big extravagance. We’d smuggle home-popped popcorn and little bags of chocolate chips in our coat pockets and hold hands when the lights went low. Then, afterward, we’d get Chinese takeout and play spa day. As I got older, it changed and stayed the same. Always a movie, always Chinese. But now sometimes it happens on Saturday, if one of us has a date we’re excited about. And we pay for our popcorn and Milk Duds.

We sit down on the aisle of the fifth row, per usual, just as the previews are starting. There’s a remake of a World War II movie coming this fall. There’s a Clearwater Studios film calledTrauma Train. What’s more commercial than that? There’s a romantic comedy about a divorced couple who are pretending to date so that their kids won’t think they’re lonely, and then they fall back in love. My mom is rapt. Her eyes are on the screen, maybe even a little wet.

“Mom. Come on,” I whisper.

“What?” She reaches for my hand and gives it a little squeeze. “It’s sweet,” she says.

I’m about to make a face, but the lights go all the way low and our movie starts.

*

WHEN WE’RE BACKat her apartment and we’ve finished the moo shu, we turn on the TV and do spa day. We don’t call it that anymore, but what started as my mom painting tiny daisies on my nails before bed has morphed into her giving me a smoky eye. A year ago she was experimenting with false eyelashes and matte red lipstick. Now it’s a neutral face and a smoky eye. I almost always leave here looking like a drag queen, but what I like about our Friday nights is what I’ve always liked: the touchstone with my mom. As long as we have Friday nights, I know she is okay.

She dabs a cotton ball on my eyelid. “You can just call Jack and ask. You have nothing to lose.”

I don’t want to enumerate all the things I have to lose here—my pride, my grown-up sense of self, my job. It wasn’t a small lie. “Even if I could, and I can’t, there’s no way he’d do it. It’s like I lost my mind for a minute. This Dan guy makes me feel like a kid on the playground, stuff comes out of my mouth and I swear I don’t know where it’s coming from.I know Jack Quinlan. Like why would I ever bring that up?”

She stops with the makeup and looks me in the eye. “Jane, you were fourteen. Let it go.”

I let out a little laugh. “I know. Obviously. I have a 401(k) and a mortgage—I swear I’ve recovered. But there is no way in hell I’m calling him.”

She continues the eyelid dabbing. “You can find another script.”

“I really want to make this one. This was the one.”

“You’ll find the one,” my mom says. She gives me the smile of a hopeless romantic, and I know we’re not talking about the movie anymore.

I play along because that’s what I do with her. “Sure,” I say. “But this script—I don’t know—I feel something. There’s something different about the romance, it’s believable.”

“You’ll figure out how to get it made,” my mom says. “You have an exceptionally good eye for story because you have an exceptionally good heart. And I bet grown-up Jack Quinlan would love your script.”

I smile because this is so my mom, putting the impossibly positive spin on everything. Even the great tragedy of her life, the story of my dad and her, has a happy feeling when she tells it. She told it to me regularly when I was growing up, my favorite bedtime story. They’d been young and fell madly in love and then had me, and they would have lived happily ever after, except he died when I was five. The first time we sawThe Notebook,I thought that if my dad had lived they would have died in each other’s arms like Allie and Noah. I told my mom that, and she added it to the end of the story, an epilogue. I later learned that this story is a lie made of half-truths and my own gullibility, so I wince when she tells it now. But I let my mom think I still believe it because it feels like a betrayal not to. I’ll eventually find a partner of some sort, and she’ll keep looking for love, like the walking, talking version of that heart-eyed emoji. I can’t protect her from this.

Tonight my mom perfects my smoky eyes and walks me to my car. “Get a good night’s sleep,” she says. “Everything will look better in the morning.”

CHAPTER 5

NOTHINGLOOKSBETTERINTHEMORNING,ESPEcially since I fell asleep with smoky eyes. I find Clem’s cold cream and get to work unearthing my face from my mom’s handiwork. I wipe my eyes and watch the black kohl smear across my face. I rinse the cloth and apply the cold cream again. And there I am. Brown eyes, brown lashes. Straightened hair curled right up again. The smoky eyes were an illusion. The blockbuster movie was an illusion. I can’t seem to grab hold of any of yesterday’s optimism. This project is slipping through my fingers, and it’s time to face that reality.

“How’d the fourth date go?” Clem asks when she joins me on the porch with her tea.

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