Amy Brashear - The Incredible True Story of the Making of the Eve of Destruction

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Dad forgot to call on Thanksgiving, even though he’d said he would. I didn’t hear from him until late Saturday night. The phone woke up Dennis, who ran to the kitchen. I knew this because I heard him curse when he stubbed his toe on the sofa table, the one Mom bought on sale on Black Friday. [40] 40 Since 1952, it is regarded as the beginning of the Christmas shopping season. It helps stores get back in the black after being in the red all year.

“Oh, thank God. Danny, I thought something had happened to Terrence,” he said.

I hesitated upstairs, standing outside my bedroom, listening.

“I’ll get her,” Dennis said, He jumped, seeing me hurrying down the stairs. “It’s your dad.” As we passed each other, he put his index finger over his mouth and went back to bed.

Thank goodness it wasn’t Mom who answered the phone. The yelling would have woken up the entire neighborhood.

Dennis told me right after the wedding ceremony, during the reception in fact, that stepdads were better than real dads because they stepped up when real dads stepped down. I smiled and didn’t believe him. But lately—

“Ladybug,” Dad said. The worst nickname ever . “I’m sorry”—the two words he always started off with in a conversation with me—“I know I was supposed to call”— but —“but things have been”— chaotic… insane… busy… choose your own word in place —“it’s been—”

Dad was slipping in his excuses. I could have sworn I heard someone yell his name. Maybe his train of thought was off, or maybe the explanations were running thin, but it was like his mind was elsewhere.

“Dad, is everything okay?” I asked.

“Of course, Ladybug,” he said, though his voice was shaky.

“You can tell me anything.”

“Ladybug, you’re better off not knowing some things.”

“Sergeant!” I could hear the man clearly that time.

Dad sighed. “Ladybug, I’m sorry but I’ve got to go—”

“Dad, you seem worried.”

“I am.”

The dial tone clicked, and I stood there in the kitchen, staring at my mom, who was staring at me with her arms crossed and her foot tapping.

“Your dad,” she said, but it was more of a statement than a question.

“Yes.”

“I should have known. He has no concept of time.”

The lingering smell of the rotting pumpkins set the mood—at least for me. The Harvest Party/Welcome Party had waited until after Thanksgiving to address the task of Halloween cleanup. Typical. Every other local was gushing over the invited guests. The ones who’d shown, anyway. Director Norman Edman looked intimidating, though his wire-rim glasses were smudged and his scraggly beard—I think you’d call that a beard—matched his hair, which looked like he hadn’t combed it in a week and was incredibly shaggy and wouldn’t fit in his baseball cap with the word Eve embroidered on. Granny would have made him get a haircut. His voice was groggy like he had been nonstop yelling. I was still intimidated by his presence. He had just sent the screenwriter—Eddie Payne, a “wildly charismatic genius”—back to the typewriter for a “rewrite” to fix the “issues” that he deemed “issues.”

Meaning: the girl who’d won the radio contest had picked a black kid as her plus-one.

That’s what I guessed, anyway. I was eavesdropping on Mr. Edman’s hushed conversation with a man in a suit, a man whose suit was pricey, a man who seemed more important than anyone else present. If I’d learned anything by living in Griffin Flat, it was the art of gossiping. You took snippets of what you overheard and spun them into outrageous truth.