I picked up my phone and swiped through my security apps. I controlled the lights, the locks, and all the appliances in my house through the dashboard, and I checked to make sure everything was as it should be. Then I clicked to turn out the bedroom lights. I put the phone down and lay back in the dark.
I closed my eyes and saw Tessa Hartigan in the pink lingerie on the backs of my eyelids. Then in the black lingerie.
“Fuck,” I said aloud.
It was a long time before I fell asleep.
THREE
Tessa
“Nancy,”I said, “I’m begging you. You have to help me. I’m stuck in goddamned Michigan.”
On the other end of the phone, my agent laughed. “Well, I told you,” she said. “You should have stayed in L.A.”
I sighed. I was in my bedroom, still wet from the shower and wearing a bathrobe. I fiddled with the thermostat, trying to make it go colder. It was hot in here. “What was I supposed to do?” I said. “My grandmother died and left me a house. Afreehouse. What would you do if you were given a free house?”
“Me?” Nancy said. “Probably sell it and use the money to buy Fendi bags. Anything other than moving to Michigan.”
“I thought it would be nice to live in a house for once,” I said, poking the thermostat again. “I have more than one room to myself here instead of living with roommates in a shitty L.A. apartment. There are lawns here. Sprinklers. Kids on bikes, if you can believe it. There’s almost no smog and nothing’s on fire.”
“Jesus, it sounds fucking awful.”
I didn’t have the heart to tell her that the most popular place to eat in my neighborhood was the Cheesecake Factory, and that literally nothing was gluten-free. “It’s been five days, and I’m climbing the walls,” I said, getting down to business. “I need work.”
“Honey,” Nancy said, “the lingerie business isn’t exactly centered in Butt-Fuck Michigan. You knew that when you left.”
I gave up on the thermostat. It was ten o’clock in the morning, it was already hot outside, and it wasn’t much cooler in here. Every room in this house was hot. I’d barely slept for days. “There are catalogs east of Colorado. I know there are. Someone, somewhere, must want a bra modeled. That person needs me.”
“I know, babe. You can sell bras all day every day and twice on Sunday. But work isn’t thick on the ground. You might have to get a day job.”
This had already crossed my mind. Like just about everyone else in L.A., I had done plenty of bartending and waiting tables while I waited for my big modeling break. I was a walking cliché. “I know. And I will. But I need you to find merealwork.”
“The fact is, I don’t really do long distance,” Nancy said. “I told you that at our goodbye dinner before you left.”
Had she? We’d both been drunk. Or at least I had. Nancy was only a few years older than me, and she was slim and gorgeous. Why she wasn’t a model herself, I had no idea. But she was a killer agent, and I’d been happy to land her. “I don’t remember you saying anything like that.”
“I did. After the margaritas and before the gin. I love you, gorgeous, but business is business. You know how it goes.”
I stood paused in the middle of my grandma’s suburban bedroom, sweating in the heat, surrounded by dated furniture and flowery window treatments. “Are you… Are you dumping me?” I asked her.
“Not dumping,” she corrected me. “I’m staying in alignment with my goals. My goals being to have working clients who make me money. You don’t fit those goals anymore, honey, so I have to realign.”
She didn’t even sound sorry. We’d worked together for three years. I scrubbed a hand through my damp hair. “What about my goals?”
“Well, what are they?” Nancy asked me reasonably. “If your goal was a modeling career, then leaving L.A. was not in alignment. Perhaps you should re-center and reconnect with your inner self.”
“And in the meantime, don’t call you.”
“You know it isn’t personal.” As if on cue, there was a beep on the line. “That’s my new girl. She says she’s Giselle’s second cousin, but I think she’s lying. I have to go.”
I hung up and tossed the phone on the bed. Looked around.
I hadn’t known my grandmother. My mother called herself a “free spirit”—basically, she was a hippie. She’d met my father and gotten pregnant at nineteen. The two of them had packed a van and driven away from Michigan forever, on a quest to find themselves. They’d left my grandmother behind and never brought me back.
Now it was twenty-seven years later. My parents hadn’t worked out, of course. Mom was in Colorado, and Dad was in Texas of all places, where he ran an incense shop and lived with a different hippie woman—one much younger than he was. And I’d drifted to L.A., where I was hoping to make it as a model.
I wasn’t the best-looking woman in L.A. I wasn’t the sexiest, or the skinniest, or—this one hurt—the most talented. In high school in Colorado, I’d been pretty. In the sea of gorgeous people in Los Angeles, I was nothing much. I’d lived in a series of apartments not much bigger than this bedroom, with roommates who sometimes creeped me out, working occasional bar jobs and going on auditions. I’d gone to L.A. out of desperation, thinking I could be free of my shitty life in Colorado, where I had nearly crashed and burned. I’d resurrected myself and run. And it had been fun, for a while.