Molly Bit by Dan Bevacqua

Author:Dan Bevacqua
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2020-02-03T16:00:00+00:00

* * *

The omelet was lumpy and over-fried but functional. Molly ate standing up near the kitchen island. Andrew was seated at the table. He ate methodically. He would cut the omelet twice, fork it up to his mouth, chew eight times, swallow, and repeat. She started eating with her fingers so as to break up the routine.

“What else did your father say?” Andrew asked.

When her mother called, it was always with news of cancer or terminal illness. Her father covered accidents, arrests, and natural disasters.

“Nothing,” she said. “I don’t wanna talk about it.”

“Was there a flood?” Andrew asked.

“No.”

“Did the pharmacy get robbed again?”

“No.”

“Did the police chief have an affair with his brother’s sister?”

“You’re an asshole.”

Andrew liked to mock the place where she was from. He had an idea in his head about what it had been like for her to grow up there. It wasn’t necessarily right. It wasn’t necessarily wrong.

“A guy I knew was arrested,” Molly said.

“What guy?”

“Jesus. An old boyfriend.” She changed her voice to a country twang. “Ma high skool boy-friend.”

“What happened?”

“He beat someone up.”

“What for?”

“Money, a woman, maybe it was a Friday—I don’t know.”

“Okay,” Andrew said. “But what’s his story?”

In one way or another, this was always the question.

“Both of his parents are dead,” Molly said. “First his father, who was a son of a bitch. Then his mother, who everybody called sweet because they didn’t know the first thing about her. It was one long illness after the other. He took care of them as they were dying. You can’t make a three-act structure out of hospital bills.”

“Sure you could,” Andrew said. “What are you talking about?”

“How?”

“Parents die. Bills arrive. He pulls a bank heist.”

“A bank heist?”

“Sure. Why not?”

“No bank heist,” she said. “Or sort of. But in reverse. The bank robbed him. They took his house.”

She looked at Andrew. He’d been reborn, reenergized.

“This guy’s a gold mine,” he said. “I mean really. It’s exactly the kind of movie I want to make next. Financial crisis. Medical insurance. Home foreclosure. It’s relevant. It’s happening. It’s real life.”

“It’s sad is what it is,” Molly said.

“Of course it is,” Andrew said. “It’s terrible. I’m not saying it isn’t terrible. I’m not some sort of monster.”

“Noted.”

He began to clear the table. He wasn’t very efficient at it. Andrew had never needed to stack plates on top of one another, race across the dining room, swing through the door, and shout “Behind!”

“You scoffed at bank heist, but bank heist is the way to go,” Andrew said. “You can’t do real human beings in straight-up melodrama anymore. The Best Years of Our Lives would tank at the box office. It wouldn’t get nominated for a goddamn thing. If you want to get actual feeling across you have to wrap it up in genre. Thriller. Action. Heist. I’m partial to a good old-fashioned rags-to-riches story myself.”

She had once loved this about him—his knack for filling up a room with the power of an arbitrary notion and selling it for fact.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.