“Sorry, artists’ collective.” Oh, wait, was my straight-laced brother making a joke? Easy to miss them, they were so few and far between.

I could not tell a lie. “They’d like to make more money.”

“That’s what that network should have done a show on, you know. Who wants another celebrity exposé? They could have done something with the local arts and crafts scene up there. And then each week they could feature another town. Local is hot right now.”

“That’s what Violet wanted to do.” Again with the Violet. I took a sip of my wine. Colt watched me do it.

“All right, listen. You’re a man of mystery, Heath, and you want to stay that way. I can see that. All I’m saying is you can sell more without selling out. Let me help you and your hippie friends. Set you up with a real website, do some marketing. You’ll all triple your sales within the first month.”

I thought of Harriet and how excited she’d been about the TV show. And how disappointed she’d been when it had been taken away from her and the others. “I’ll think about it.”

“You don’t have to do everything alone, Heath.”

“Funny, mom just told me the same thing.”

“Our mom?” He looked shocked. I shrugged. We both ate for a few minutes in silence, lost in our thoughts.

“Good to see you, Heath,” he finally offered, looking at me with a surprisingly human quality to his eyes. I might almost say vulnerable, though that word and Colt had never crossed paths. “I know I haven’t…since dad died, we haven’t…”

“We’ve both been busy.” I gave us both the universal pass, the excuse that blanketed over every shortcoming.

“And you’ve always been so self-contained.” He shook his head, a slight smile on his face. “I always remember you with those blasted Legos.”

“You do?” Whenever I thought of our childhood, which I didn’t often, Colt wasn’t in it. He was four years older than me, which wasn’t so much now, I realized, him 29 and me 25. But back then it had meant he was gone, whisked off to boarding school right around the time the shit had hit the fan in our family.

“You’d spend hours making these elaborate constructions,” Colt recalled. “Completely absorbed. You had no idea what was going on around you.” That’s where he was wrong. I had been aware, only too, and that’s why I’d absorbed myself in Legos. But that was a conversation for another day.

“Anyway, what I’m trying to say is I’m proud of you for starting your own business. And for getting so good at what you do.”

“Thanks.” I meant it sincerely. And we had ourselves a brotherly moment. The first one in our twenty-five years of being brothers. Not bad for a dinner at the Harvard Club.

§

It was three days later when I got the call. I’d been thinking it was about time to head back up to Vermont. I knew the exposé wasn’t going to run. No new promos had leaked, and the network hadn’t aired the old one again. Even the most determined of paparazzi had to have gotten bored by now. There had to be much more promising scandals afoot than boring old me.

As for the good townsfolk of Watson? I was ready to go back and face the music. They might be pissed off, might give me some shit, but each day I was feeling more confident. I was the simple man I’d represented to them—and I was Heathcliff Kavanaugh surrounded by a crazy-ass family. Maybe there’d be a few folks who’d be willing to try to understand that I could be both at the same time?

My phone rang with a number from L.A. Violet had the same area code. It wasn’t her number, though. Thinking of Nelson’s directive—talk to no one—I let it go through to voicemail.

Then I listened to the message. It was Sam, Violet’s colleague who’d accompanied her on location. I hadn’t had much to do with him. He’d struck me as wily, always taking in more of whatever scene he was in than giving.

“Call me back,” he urged in his message. “I need to talk to you about something. It’s important.”

On impulse, and against my better judgment, I did.

“I’m the one who sold you out,” Sam blurted out right away. “Violet didn’t know anything about it.” He explained that he was the one who’d sniffed out my background and pitched the idea of the expose. He’d given Violet the paperwork for me to sign off on. She’d had no idea.

“Why should I trust anything you say?” I had to ask.

“You shouldn’t,” Sam agreed. “But I figure, why should the fucking Fame! Network get to make all of us miserable? They fired Violet. They screwed you over. Now that they can’t do the exposé they’ve fired me, too. They don’t get to have all the fun.”

“They fired Violet?”

“Same day as the pitch,” he confirmed. “She moved back with her mom in New Jersey.”

New Jersey, huh? That wasn’t far. Maybe I wasn’t headed back up to Vermont just yet after all.

CHAPTER 21

Violet

The thing about Honeycomb cereal was you had to eat it at just the right moment. It was an art and a science. Too soon and it tasted like little nuggets of cardboard floating in milk. Too long and the whole thing became a bowl of goop. Just right and you had yourself a whole bunch of honey goodness, with the milk soaking up exactly the right amount of sweetness and the cereal softened up just enough.

I sat on the couch in my mom’s apartment watching and waiting for that moment. Just me, a bowl of Honeycomb cereal, and the sweat suit I’d been wearing for days on end.

“OK. Come on.” My mom came into my room—aka her living room—and flicked on the lights. I squinted up at her, blinking. So bright.

“Time to get up and out!” she declared, opening a window next to me to let in a crack of brisk, fresh air.

“What?” Reluctantly, I set down my rapidly-transforming bowl of cereal. Not yet, but close. My spoon still hovered at the ready.

“You’ve had enough time on the couch.” Mom picked up a pillow next to me, plumped it up, then put it back. “Come on with me now.” She extended her hand.

“But wait! The Honeycomb—”

“Nope.” My mother shook her head, grasped my hand in hers and pried me away from my treat. “That’s enough of that. I gave you ten days.”

“But, Mom!” Yes, my voice did sound exactly like a whiney teenager’s. That’s what happened when you moved back in with your mom, crashed on her couch and ate breakfast cereal and Ben & Jerry’s for a week and a half.

Slipping on sneakers and tumbling after her out the door, I looked down and noticed my sweatpants had a few stains. “Shouldn’t I change?”

“Yes,” my mom agreed, not letting me head back inside. “You should.”

She drove me over to her salon, the one I’d practically grown up

in, watching her work her magic. I’d moved away seven years ago when I was only 18 years old, and I felt like I’d changed so much. But back home I recognized almost every house and shop we passed. Everything looked so much the same. My mom was even driving the same car, a beat-up Honda Civic now with close to 200,000 miles on it.

“Still running.” She patted the dashboard, maybe thanking it for getting her to work that day.

“Look who’s here!” the good ladies of The Beauty Mark sang out as I trailed after my mom into the salon.

“My baby’s home!” my mom declared, shining with pride over her hot mess of a daughter. They cooed and clucked, circling around me and admiring my blond tresses, my thin figure.

“Now, what you wearing, Vi?” One of them finally got real, stepping slightly to the side and gesturing to my neon melon-colored sweat suit with a comb.

“It was on sale?” I offered, wincing.

“Course it was on sale!” she declared. “Who’s gonna buy that crap?”

“She did,” another of them sang out, and everyone started laughing, myself included. And maybe when I got home I’d need to burn the melon sweat suit.

“Vi, you come sit here, baby girl.” Bess, a giant of a woman who’d known me since the day I was born—she’d told me this any number of times—put me in her chair. “I’ve known you since the day you were born,” she told me yet again. “So I can look you in the eye and say you need a little sprucing up.”

I saw myself in the mirror and winced again. When was the last time I’d showered? I couldn’t exactly remember. But Bess and the rest started taking care of that, and I surrendered to the hustle and bustle, the gossip and the laughter, joining in among the transformations happening all around me.

“How’s Leo?” one of mom’s weekly elderly customers asked me.

“He’s good,” I answered. She was in her late 80s and the moment I’d moved to L.A. she’d decided that I was dating Leonardo DiCaprio. I usually made it home for the holidays and at first when I’d seen her I’d tried to explain that not only was I not dating Leonardo DiCaprio, I’d never met him. But my mom had finally told me to let it be. “She likes the fantasy,” she explained to me.

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