LITMIR.BIZ

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He started going by Joshua Reed when he moved to L.A.) But I never talked to him on the phone or anything. Once, when I was talking to Judy, she said that Joshua said to say hi, but I didn’t hear him say it, so I don’t know whether he was even in the room with her. He did write—a couple of times. Not really letters, but he would scrawl a note at the end of something Judy was sending off. He had messy, uneven handwriting, but his signature was polished. Probably from signing all those photographs. The first time, he wrote: Leanne, Judy tells me you’re my biggest fan. You’re the best! xoxo, Joshua Reed.

      The second time, he wrote: Leanne, you’re the best for keeping all this together!

      The third time, it was: Leanne, Be sure to tell all your friends about Villains, and also about Celebrity Jeopardy! That was right before Villains Can’t Be Choosers came out, and Judy was keeping him busy with all sorts of special events and appearances, mostly in California, but also in New York.

      Sure, it would have been nice if he’d written more or even called on the phone once or twice. That way I might have known him in a personal way, different from the facts and stories that were out there for everyone. But it’s impossible to know where a thread starts when you’re looking back on things. Maybe if I had known Joshua better, I would have quit the fan club long before I did, and Judy probably figured that. Still, it was fun seeing my name in his handwriting, and he spelled it right, too. A lot of people spell it Leeanne, or Leann, or some other way. But Joshua always spelled it right.

      I didn’t stick with the fan club because I thought that we were meant for each other, Joshua and me. I’m not going to say that a seventeen-year-old girl doesn’t imagine things, and I’ll admit that I imagined plenty in my early days with the club. But that was before Beau Ray suffered the first of his bad seizures and before Momma went through the months she’d come to call her “unraveleds.” I referred to those months as her mean seasons, since it seemed like she was pissed at everything and everyone in the world. Of course, folks in such a state never realize how ornery and off-putting they’re being, so when you find yourself in the midst of someone’s mean season, the best you can hope for is to stay out of their line of fire. Back in Momma’s worst times, I’d call Tommy or Susan for help, but neither ever offered to head home for even a week to make dinner and check which bills were least overdue. (That was around the same time that the idea of me going off to a full-time college stopped being talked about like it was a good thing, something that might really happen.)

      But whenever I thought maybe I ought to give up the club and focus on getting my own life in order, I’d feel a heaviness, almost like family, like I’d be letting Judy down. Judy, who always said “thank you” to me. Judy, who asked “would you please.” Judy, who sent cards on my birthday and told me when she would be unavailable (like during her honeymoon) and called whenever she was going to send a new set of photos or an updated credits sheet or a rewritten biography—so I’d know it was coming. Part of me wanted to be like her. Even more of me wanted to be her, out there in California, seeing Joshua close up and making dinner for myself, just myself.

      At the beginning of my seventh year with the club, membership reached 10,000. That’s paying fans, and dues by then were fifteen dollars a year. A year earlier, when it hit 5,000, Judy bought me a computer. I think she was exaggerating, but she said that she couldn’t have done any of it without me—that my help and organization and the way I always sent her the rumors that people wrote in about had helped Joshua’s career immensely. That’s why he’s only doing movies now. And good ones, big ones.

      But like I said, it had long grown routine by the time Judy called one Saturday.

      “Leanne?” she said. “Judy Masterson here.” She always told me her last name, although I didn’t know any other Judys so she didn’t have to. “I’ve got some wonderful news.”

      “What’s that?” I asked. Joshua had been dating this Belgian supermodel named Elise, and I thought maybe Judy was going to tell me that they were getting married. But she didn’t even mention Elise.

      “J.P. just signed to do a Civil War epic called Musket Fire. Think Taming of the Shrew meets Gone with the Wind. He’s not the lead—well, he’s the romantic lead, but not the historic lead, you know. We’re going to be filming back east, in Virginia, for about three months. Starting next month. Isn’t that exciting?”

      “I guess I should include that in the Summer newsletter.” I must have been tired when I said that. I wasn’t thinking that it’s only forty minutes from Pinecob to the Virginia border—and that once you hit Virginia where the mountains ease up, the roads run a lot quicker.

      “That would be great, but mostly, I called to say that I wanted to arrange dinner with you and me and Joshua. You’ve been working on the fan club for so long, and I swear, J.P.’s club runs so much more smoothly than any of my other clients’—I thought it would be nice…”

      “Oh—of course,” I said. “That would be great. I wasn’t thinking. When?”

      Judy said that she and Joshua would be arriving three weeks from that Sunday, but that the movie studio had already sent casting and location people to set things up. A lot of the filming would be taking place around Winchester and Front Royal, which were only an hour and a half or so from Pinecob. Judy asked whether I wanted to be an extra in the film. She said that Sandy and I could probably both be extras. It might require getting out of work for a few days, she said, but no one was a bigger movie buff than Mr. Bellevue, my boss in the county clerk’s office, so I knew he’d let me do it.

      I couldn’t believe it: Joshua Reed, coming to Pinecob—well, not exactly to Pinecob. He and Judy were going to stay across the Potomac in Virginia for a few days, in part because there are nicer places to stay around there than in Charles Town (and there’s no place to stay in Pinecob if you’re not at someone’s house), and in part because Joshua’s character (the fiery lieutenant Josiah Whitcomb) was from that area of Virginia, and Joshua wanted to get a sense of Josiah’s history.

      I told everyone, of course. How could I not? I told Beau Ray when he got back from “Move Your Body” class. I told Momma when she got back from her bee. I called Sandy and she screamed when I said how we could be extras, and she wondered whether she should try to get extra tan at the beach when she went. I even went to the Winn-Dixie a day earlier than usual, and when I saw Max, I told him.

      Max didn’t seem that excited, but he’s a guy and Joshua Reed is one of those rare people who’s better-looking than Max is. Least, I always thought Max was that good-looking. I spent way too many hours of junior high and high school embarrassing myself by hanging around when he and Beau Ray played football, just so I could see Max wipe the sweat off his brow or lean into his knees to catch his breath. He was Beau Ray’s best friend up until the fall, and I think he tried to be afterward, before it became clear how different everything was.

      After the fall, you couldn’t talk to Beau Ray in the same way—you had to keep to simpler, shorter conversations, and even then, he might not follow. Max would turn to me, since I was often around, to ask if I thought Beau Ray had understood something, or to try to figure out where my brother was taking a thought.

      They were talking about airplanes once, I remember. This was a few years after the accident. The three of us were sitting in the backyard when Beau Ray had suddenly looked up and pointed.

      “What’s that?” Max had asked, as Beau Ray traced his finger across something in the sky.

      I looked up. “That airplane? Is that what you’re looking at?”

      Beau Ray nodded.

      “Where do you think they’re going?” I asked him.

      “Hawaii,” Beau Ray said. He had watched a travel program a few days before with a piece on the various Hawaiian islands and the tourists who were flocking to them.

      “I don’t think that’s headed in the right direction for Hawaii,” Max had said, squinting upward. “I think it looks to be headed east of here. Maybe D.C. or even Europe or something.”

      “Hawaii,” Beau Ray said, sounding certain.

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