Tara pushed Ivy in a bucket swing. Dexter swung from the hanging rings. Brooke in her French hat and Matthew in sopping wet jeans rose from the hillside.
[Click here to read the first episode, or here to read the previous one.]
Earlier, while the children were preoccupied, Tara had learned that “the age of consent” in New York was seventeen. Any man older than twenty-one who had sex with a girl younger than seventeen committed a felony. Brooke wouldn’t be seventeen until Halloween.
Tara watched Brooke and Matthew King approach, keeping their distance yet moving as one. Matthew King must stand 6’5”, because Brooke was 5’4” without the hat. Tara noticed Brooke’s hat bobbing in line with Matthew’s shoulder.
Pushing Ivy lazily in the swing, she also noticed her sister and the movie star slow their pace and take in each other’s whole bodies with their eyes. Their two-way focus panned upward like a camera before they resumed their slow dance forward.
When Brooke and Matthew reached the playground gate, both children raised their voices. Matthew lifted Ivy from the swing. Tara said she had promised Dexter that Brooke would teach him to ride his mountain bike. That’s why he was already holding Brooke’s hand. She smiled down at him from under the hat brim. “Dexter, do you mind if we start in the driveway? We won’t be there long, because you’re so athletic.”
Athletic or not, Dexter had not learned to ride a bicycle yet because no one had taught him. So in L.A., he ignored the idiotic contraption with training wheels like Ivy’s. Brooke asked him to wait while she changed her clothes. “A few minutes, okay?”
Maybe two minutes later, Brooke appeared wearing low-slung shorts and a tiny blue T-shirt riding her narrow waistline. Tara hadn’t learned to dress accentuating her body’s demarcations, which she supposed were not nearly as definitive as Brooke’s anyway.
Seeing his instructor, Dexter slipped beneath Brooke’s long, golden arm, tan despite sun-screen. He gazed up, at least as besotted as his father, who was emerging from the house wearing beige linen slacks and a dark shirt.
Waving adiós, Brooke and Dexter reached the tall wooden fence that enclosed Sasha’s half-circle of asphalt, the incongruent driveway for the double back doors, which had seemed useless until now.
From the playground, they heard Brooke insisting Dexter wear a helmet; she always wore one. “Nuh-uh. This morning you were wearing that hat.”
“Stupid,” Brooke said. “You can bet going home, I’ll wear my helmet.”
Soon, however, Tara and Matthew could no longer hear them and sat in the sandbox beside Ivy. They packed sand into plastic pails and Tara asked Mathew if he practiced his actor’s skills in real life.
“What? You mean, on real people? Never. But if I ever did, I definitely would not choose to fool around with a sixteen-year-old girl.”
“It’s just that even if you weren’t an actor,” Tara said, “Brooke would still take everything that’s happening to heart for the rest of her life.”
“If I affect her that way, Tara, she’s not the only one.”
Rather emphatically, Tara emptied her bucket and the sand held its pail-shape until Ivy demolished it.
Matthew had stopped shoveling, struck by the light in Tara’s blue eyes. “I know I’m out of bounds.”
“Yep, you sure are.” She shrugged. “It takes two, of course. Except Brooke’s not an actress.”
“In fact,” Matthew said, “she might be the opposite. She seems to exist without guile.”
“Can’t you find an adult girlfriend, Matthew?”
“Tara, I really am way too far gone for that.”
“How do you know till you try?”
“Because it’s like this: I take some woman to an expensive restaurant where she shouts above the din about her shrink, her trainer, and worse. Afterwards, we visit the nightclubs, except no one place is best. So we try all night, staying long enough at each haunt for her to get drunker when she’s not disappearing to take drugs. Both of which just make her more and more obnoxious.”
Tara said, “You could go out with a local woman. Want me to fix you up with my English teacher? Or my mom; she’s only a little bit older than you. Except wait, Brooke would go ballistic.”
Matthew followed Ivy, crawling inside a plastic tower. “Thanks but no thanks, Tara. You understand, don’t you?”
“Sort of. What about the new James Bond? Did you tell Brooke how much they want you for that?”
Outside the pint-sized tower, he winced as if at the sunlight. “The screenwriter’s done serious, award-winning work for theater and the movies.”
“Bond.” Tara lowered her voice. “James Bond.”
(Click here to read the next episode)
