Thursday evening, November 12
Mae took off her coat and hung it over the chair that held the garment bag. She moved the bag first, carefully, then looked at the notebook under Willa's hand.
“Have you got something?”
“A little thing,” Jo said.
Willa opened her mouth.
“Not that little,” Jo added.
Mae smiled. She had brought olives in a plastic container and bread that she tore rather than cutting. Jo found plates. Willa opened the wine. They ate standing up until Mae asked whether there was any reason they couldn't use the kitchen table.
There wasn't. They took their plates in. The trunk stayed open, the lamp waiting beside it, the thank-you cards unwritten.
“What did you find?” Mae asked.
Willa looked at her mother.
“You start,” Jo said.
“Which one?”
“The good one.”
“Helpful.”
Jo leaned back. “I worked all my life to give my children things I never had.”
“An audience.”
Mae laughed, quietly.
“A sense of belonging,” Jo said.
“Backstage pass.”
“A mother who was there.”
“Where?”
Jo stopped, smiling. “Too hard.”
“It is too hard,” Willa said. “The other answer.”
They went back and tried it with the line they'd found in the back room. This time the exchange kept moving. Jo wanted a little credit for the sacrifices she'd made. Willa asked whether she'd kept the receipts. Jo had, of course, and wanted to return the daughter in her original packaging.
“They won't take me.”
“Why not?”
“I've been opened.”
“So have I. At your age I was still getting bookings.”
“That's the problem with being raised by a comedian. You can't disappoint her without knowing exactly how long she'll pause.”
Jo looked at Mae. Waited. Looked back at Willa.
“That long,” Willa said.
Mae laughed properly now. Jo did too. Willa had known she would wait, had found the line inside it rather than ahead of it. For a moment she wasn't trying to defeat her mother. They were pushing the same thing uphill and both knew where the wheels were.
Mae set down her bread.
“That's the ending.”
“To what?” Willa asked.
“The special. You come back. Ten, twelve minutes together. Not a roast. A conversation that happens to be better written than most conversations.”
Jo looked at Willa as if they were hearing the proposal at the same time. Perhaps they were. Willa couldn't tell.
“I've got the opener.”
“You'd still have it,” Mae said. “Different place in the night. They see what you do, then they see what you can do together.”
“Has this already—”
“No,” Mae said. “I'm asking.”
She didn't fill the pause. Jo picked up her glass, put it down without drinking, and watched her daughter.
Willa looked at the page. The little exchange sat there in her own handwriting, with Jo's word scratched into the margin. It did work.
“What would we do?” she asked.
“Build on this. The family. Both sides of being impossible.”
“It's not equal,” Willa said.
“No,” Jo said. “You're younger.”
Willa laughed despite herself. Mae leaned forward.
“You don't have to be equally guilty of the same things to be funny together. I don't think that's what you've just done.”
She waited again. Willa had the unpleasant sensation of being treated like somebody whose answer mattered. It made her want to give the right one quickly.
Jo said, “We haven't told you the other part.”
Mae looked at her, then took a folded sheet from her bag.
“Nothing's commissioned.”
Willa sat back.
“That sounds promising.”
“It is promising. It's also true.” Mae laid the sheet on the table, not pushing it toward Willa yet. “I've been talking about studio work for Jo. She doesn't want to keep living in a suitcase. Audio, six episodes, comedy. Not just a microphone on a dinner table. Something we make.”
“With guests?”
“Maybe. I wasn't seeing it clearly enough. Then I saw Saturday.”
Willa looked at her.
“You and Jo. Two women from the same family, both with a daughter they can't do anything with.”
For a moment Willa didn't understand. Then she did.
“Beth.”
“Not only Beth,” Jo said.
“But Beth.”
Jo leaned forward. “I know what happened.”
“You know what you saw.”
“I know I upset her. I know you should have told me he didn't know. I'm not saying it was a wonderful evening.”
Mae looked between them. She didn't pretend to be busy with her plate.
“Simon didn't know about the apartment,” Willa said.
Mae's face changed.
“Ah.”
“And then he did,” Jo said, too lightly.
Willa didn't smile.
“All right,” Mae said. “Then we don't try to turn that dinner into a pilot.”
“It's the same thing.”
“Some of it is. You'd have to decide what you want to make.”
Jo reached for the sheet and turned it so Willa could read it. There were only a few lines on it, a working description rather than anything that looked like a contract.
Mother and daughter. Both funny. Both apparently the only adult in the family.
Willa read it twice.
“I'm not the only adult.”
“That would be the joke,” Mae said.
Jo looked pleased. Willa could imagine her saying it into a microphone, the little turn that would let them both be wrong and both remain lovable.
“What happens if we don't use Beth?” Willa asked.
“We'll have other things,” Jo said.
Mae didn't answer at once.
“The sibling material worked. You know it worked. I'm interested in the whole family shape, not a guarantee of particular names every week.”
“It doesn't have to be cruel,” Jo said.
Willa could hear the hotel scissors in that sentence. She looked at her mother, then at the page again.
Mae opened her bag.
“I can pay you to do a pilot. Four thousand for the recording. If we get the six commissioned, the figure we're discussing for your season is twenty-four. That's a possible job. I don't have it to give you tonight.”
Willa tried not to let the number show on her face.
“Four for the pilot.”
“Yes.”
“And the six is—”
“Separate. Prospective. I don't want you spending it before I've found it.”
Jo laughed. “She knows us.”
Willa didn't laugh. She was thinking of the empty dates after the farewell, the square beside her name on Luis's pad. Twenty-four thousand was not a life; she'd been alive long enough to know that. It was time. It was waking up and having the work she wanted be the work that paid for the day.
“Who else have you asked?”
“For this?” Mae said.
“Yes.”
“No one.”
Jo looked at her. No joke. The room seemed suddenly full of things Willa had mistaken for obstacles: the open notebook, her mother's place at the table, her own name being said as though it belonged on a page beside Jo's.
“What would the stage ending be?” she asked.
Jo sat back, testing the question.
“We've spent an hour telling people what you've done to me. Then you come out and tell them what I've done to you.”
“I've already done twenty minutes of that.”
“So you have to get better.”
“Good briefing.”
“Thank you.”
Mae smiled. “Don't repeat the opener. The thing you've just done. Both of you trying to get paid for the same childhood.”
Willa heard a possible line and wrote it in the margin. Jo leaned over.
“What?”
Willa read it.
Her mother shook her head. “No. The childhood's free. It's the repeats.”
Mae laughed. Willa did too. She crossed out the line and put Jo's underneath.
They worked for a while without anyone saying yes. That was the danger, Willa knew, and the pleasure. They had already begun.
Jo offered a setup about how children blamed you for the things you'd done and the things you'd failed to arrange for them. Willa tried an answer. Too wide. Jo tried a shorter question. Willa gave her a shorter answer. Mae stopped them before Jo could improve it again.
“Keep that.”
“We haven't finished,” Jo said.
“I know. Keep it while you finish.”
They had enough for a minute, then two. The rhythm was better when Willa didn't wait for Jo to hand her the next turn. Once she interrupted, and Jo looked delighted rather than offended.
“You can do that,” Jo said. “I was going to take forever.”
“I know.”
“She's known me all her life,” Jo told Mae. “I had to work out what she wanted every morning.”
“Usually breakfast.”
“You could have said.”
“I was two.”
“There was a lovely small sign you could have made.”
Willa laughed before she could answer. It broke the exchange, but Mae made a note instead of asking them to start again.
Later they tried a softer turn. Jo said it as though she wasn't testing material.
“I wanted you to have everything.”
Willa looked at her.
“You stayed,” she said.
Jo blinked. For a second the room stopped moving.
Then Willa said, “Long after the warranty.”
Jo's laugh was very quiet.
Mae didn't speak until Jo did.
“That's nice.”
Willa looked down at the page.
“It's not a whole ending.”
“No,” Mae said. “But it's where the ending goes.”
Jo touched the notebook.
“And then we can turn it. The other daughter, the organized one. She leaves with everything in order. You don't get a forwarding address until she's checked the heating.”
Willa's pen stopped.
“Not the address.”
“No. Of course not the actual address. Just the turn.”
Mae looked at the page, not at either of them.
“We don't need to solve it tonight.”
Willa could say not Beth. She had said it earlier in the evening as a question. She could make it a sentence now.
Jo waited with a hand beside hers on the table. They had made something good. Willa could feel it still, the little pieces of it fitting, her mother needing her next line.
“The organized daughter,” Willa said. “Not the dinner.”
“Of course not the dinner,” Jo said.
Willa nodded. She wrote a bracket near the bottom of the page. A place for the turn. Not a line yet. They could find something. They were good at finding things.
“So,” Mae said after a moment. “Do you want to do it?”
“Yes,” Willa said.
Jo put her hand over Willa's, briefly, firmly, then got up for more wine. No embrace. They had work to talk about.
Mae took out her calendar. They arranged the pilot recording for Tuesday, the seventeenth, and working time before it. Jo asked how much she needed ready. Mae said enough to know what the show was, not six finished episodes. Willa wrote the dates in her notebook. The page was becoming the sort of page she'd always wanted to have.
At nine she went into the hall to listen to Luis's message. It had come at lunchtime while she was teaching.
“Will, I need the answer. If I don't hear tonight I'll give it to somebody else. Hope the thing's good.”
She held the phone against her chest for a moment. From the kitchen she could hear Jo asking Mae whether a guest would help or just give them another person to manage. Mae said it would depend on the guest. Jo said that sounded like a useful principle for marriage too.
Willa called Luis back. He answered on the third ring.
“Sorry it's late,” she said.
“You taking it?”
“No.”
“All right.”
“I've got some work.”
“The show?”
“After. Maybe. Something else.”
He was quiet for a moment. Then he said, “Good.”
“I'm sorry to leave you short.”
“You haven't. I've got people. I just needed to know.”
“Okay.”
“I'll leave your usual ones as they are for now. You'll tell me about next week?”
“Yes.”
She thanked him and ended the call. Twenty-one hundred went out of her calendar without a sound.
When she came back, her mother had put a glass of wine beside her place. The notebook lay open where she'd left it. Mae was reading their two-minute exchange, moving her lips once at the short answer before looking up.
“That bit,” she said. “Don't lose that.”
Willa sat down and pulled the notebook toward her.
“I won't.”
Her mother picked up the pen. “From the top?”
Willa looked at the first line, then at Jo.
“Go on,” she said.