Family Drama by Rebecca Fallon

Author:Rebecca Fallon
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollinsPublishers
Published: 2025-11-17T10:00:00+00:00

1989

One thirty in the afternoon, get it on – quickly! Before the school bus comes back and the streets are full again with the ricochet of children, before your boss opens the door to the break room and says, bit late for lunch. Try not to fumble with the remote (whichever one is it these days), or get caught by the dark reflection of yourself in the dead screen. Hurry, the world is springing to life, the familiar synthesizer: This is Life and Times! Dissolve; feel your own problems grow trivial against the melodrama, against the height of what a human can feel.

Here they come, just as you knew they would, those known and beautiful faces of Cedardale. That bartender, in particular, has really become one to watch, ever since the love triangle and now his strange moody drives out of town that he claims not to remember. He’s filled out, too, turned into quite the dish. Even now as he is pouring a drink for Margie Ludlow, there is a new potential about him, as though he might hit someone. You wonder whether something might happen between the two of them, and didn’t you read about it last week in Soap Opera Digest? Yes, make no mistake, something is going on.

MARGIE

You really haven’t been yourself lately, Joe.

JOE

How do you mean?

MARGIE

I don’t know. You seem like something’s on your mind.

JOE

Nothing’s on my mind, all right? Stop fishing.

Nothing’s going to come of it, Margie.

“Cut!”

“Tell them I dropped an earring,” Susie whispers, and ducks behind the bar to vomit into a small trash can.

“Can you see it?” Orson says, for anyone who might be listening. “Did it maybe go under?”

Most people are disappearing into the labyrinth of sets, setting up for the next tape, but Marion from make-up is watching, pursing her lips. Below him, Susie is wiping her mouth with a roll of paper towel, clearing her throat and saying “Got it!” Marion hums and waves slightly to Orson before floating off as well.

Susan groans, pulls herself up on the counter, Orson passes her a bottle of water.

“It’s worse in the afternoons,” she says.

“At least you’re done for today.”

“I might have to do that pick-up.”

“They won’t get to it.”

“They might.”

He takes in her pale face, the sour smell on her breath. “I’ll get rid of that,” he says, pointing to the bag full of sick.

“No, I can. My mess.”

“My bar,” he says, looking around the set that has hardly changed since he started filming almost three years ago. And hasn’t he made it his own? Outside the thick stained-glass door, a neon sign reading Joe’s. Inside, the chairs stacked up on the tables where he left them at the end of the scene. How many times has he stacked those chairs, has he swept these floors? In this corner he broke up a fight, in that one, consoled the matriarch after her third divorce. The wisdom of youth, Rip used to say, winking at him, but Orson is hardly so young as he was then.

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