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Wil’s Bronco was the secondary recipient of her expendable income. Her dad had willed it to her, mostly as a joke. He’d died when Wil was in college after battling Huntington’s his whole adult life. They had been very close, and Wil had learned how to drive on the Bronco shortly after her first lesson, when she dropped its transmission.
She loved that truck.
“I love you, Mom,” Wil said, and leaned over and kissed her mother’s cheek.
“I do know that. I just feel it’s my duty to occasionally say important mom things like ‘Don’t drive a 1984 Bronco’ or ‘Maybe stop kissing people on the internet.’” Beanie grinned at her. It was a smile that said,I know you’re thinking about your dad. I would so much like to hear what you’re thinking. And feeling. Tell me about your heart, Wil, I’m your only mother.
“I take it all under advisement.” Wil had to wrinkle her nose, just a little bit, to keep the sting from traveling to her eyes. “I am well advised.”
Now that the parenting part of her evening out with Beanie was over, Wil ate her delicious food and wondered if she’d only see Katie from afar or if she’d actually have a chance to talk to her.
She’d just let her third roll dissolve in her mouth, swiping her finger through a pool of melted butter and dill dressing, when there was excitement by the huge granite breakfast bar that poked into the living room. The excitement was Katie, in black leggings and a black T-shirt with no bra, and a lot of cat hair, visible even from across the room. She was talking and smiling with a woman Diana was introducing her to.
Katie looked good. Wil was grateful for her outfit, actually. Her outfit helped. If Katie had come into the room as Hollywood Katie, Wil wasn’t sure she’d have been able to talk to her. Katie in interviews and talk shows was a creature so lovely, she was hard to understand as human. Her long limbs, awkward and too much in high school, turned out to be made to occupy drapes of precious fabric in impossible configurations under bright lights. The angles and planes of Katie’s facial structure—Upper Midwest by way of Norwegian immigrants—had always seemed, in person, back then, a little strange, but the camera caressed Katie’s face like it had been looking for those cheekbones and shadows its whole life.
But here, in the living room, with more than a dozen years between then and now, Wil could see that Katie’s body was seriouslyhot, and Katie had learned how to use it so that it looked like something gleaming and soft,andshe knew how to wear leggings—even covered in cat hair—like they were a gift of joy from the baby Jesus.
She had the same layered, shaggy, casually expensive blond-brown hair as in her photographs, but without styling, the track lights caught the halo of shorter, unruly hairs frizzed through it, and without makeup, Katie’s face was a fascinating kaleidoscope of Katie then and Katie now, shifting as she laughed and talked.
Wil couldn’t stop looking at her.
“Go say hi,” Beanie said. “Everyone else here is old. And get me a piece of the coconut cake.”
“Okey-doke.” Wil stood, determinedly not fixing her hair or otherwise preening such that Beanie would know exactly what she’d been thinking. “I assume you also want ‘just a teeny slice’ of the chess pie.”
“The teeniest. But not too teeny.”
“Got it. A regular slice of chess pie.”
Beanie winked at her.
Wil started across the huge room, arrowing toward Katie, who’d begun slowly making her way to the buffet. She was curious to find out where this would lead. Curious to notice justhowcurious she felt, considering the circumstances.
She wasn’t someone who had a problem approaching people. It was her ease with new people, combined with her lack of long-term romantic prospects, that had made one of her housemates say that Wil would never be able to reallybewith a person, even if she made out with a hundred people.
That had gotten Wil’s attention.
Probably someone else would have followed up on that observation in a different way, like reading self-help or scheduling counseling, for example, but Wil felt that her housemate had set out avery clear proposal for how to look at this issue, and the proposal intrigued her. She’d actually always loved kissing.
So she’d started the kissing TikToks as kind of a lark. A year into it, however, Wil was starting to understand that the project wasdoingsomething to her. Probably the kissing TikToks were why she’d said yes when Beanie invited her to Chicago to watch Katie.
All of which meant that as Wil made her way to the buffet, she felt like something new was happening, something important, but she wasn’t afraid. Not exactly. She was searching for how to let Katie know that she’d been thinking about her for a long time—more very recently—without suggesting that Katie should have been doing the same.
But also, Wilhadseen Katie’s smile after she spotted Wil in Chicago, so she couldn’t believe this would go entirely unfavorably.
Katie had arrived at the buffet now. She had a platter in her hand, not a plate—like the kind of platter you put on your wedding registry to put a whole turkey on—which made a surprised smile break across Wil’s face, because what kind of courage did that take? For Katie Price, Hollywood movie star, to tell Diana after all these years to throw one of her old-school holiday parties, then to show up in casual clothes, no makeup, and pile up a whole platter full of food. It was such a move.
It said,Look at me. I’m still me.
It said,Don’t treat me any differently than you used to. Don’t sell me out.
Plus, Katie Price with a big platter of food was delightfully familiar. Diana was probably the best cook Wil had ever met, and she never cooked on a small scale. All the Prices could eat. Their buffets were the only buffets Wil had ever been to thathadplatters.
Just as Wil was close enough to Katie that she couldn’t plausibly pretend she’d only been approaching the buffet to get dessert, Katie looked up and saw her.
This time, Katie’s gaze didn’t move away.
They made eye contact. In a single heartbeat, Wil knew that she hadn’t been invited to this party as an afterthought. It was no coincidence she was the only person here who was Katie’s age. She was the only person at this partyfor Katie. Everyone else on the guest list was for Craig and Diana.