Excerpt: Red Carpet Fringe

“Okay then. And then it says here Penelope that your father will be picking you up in Los Angeles. Is that correct?”

“Yeah,” I said softly. If you use the term “father” loosely.

Mom and my biological father broke up when she was still pregnant with me. They hadn’t been together for very long; Mom was a senior in college, and my father was in town for the filming of Matchbox. He’s Jackson Vance, the Jackson Vance, the guy who starred in Matchbox (and Patriot Place, On Eagle Wings, Aquanaut, Finding Foxholes…he’s that guy that had at least a bit part in almost every movie produced in the late nineties and early 2000s). Almost everything that I know about him comes from my best friend Fiona and I researching his Internet Movie Database profile page. He’s won three Oscars in fifteen years, hosted Saturday Night Live four times, and been voted PEOPLE’s Sexiest Man Alive twice (Fiona thinks he was robbed last year, that there is no way Hugh Jackman is hotter than he is – all I can say is ew). His profile calls him “this generation’s Paul Newman,” whatever that means. I know that he’s 40, his birthday is September 28th, he has a younger brother named James, and he’s been married for the past three years to some dingy blond actress whose sole claim to fame is a ten-second two-line part in one of his movies, Cassidy Shepherd (I guess it’s Shepherd-Vance now; whatever).

I also know that his profile states that he has no children. He paid Mom child support for me without involving the government (and paid more than the government would have made him, which is why Mom never complained), and he paid for my private school tuition, and he helped out with any lessons or camps or anything like that which I wanted to do. But aside from that, the only thing I ever got from him was the occasional sporadic birthday card, and a refrigerator magnet from the location every time he shot a movie outside of Los Angeles. He never called, he barely ever wrote other than the Post-It he stuck in with the magnets explaining where he was (I did get a postcard from Alaska once, four years ago, in a random gesture that wasn’t repeated), and I found out anything important in his life the same time as the rest of the world. I read about his engagement in PEOPLE magazine, and I saw the pictures from his wedding on Entertainment Tonight.

Not that I really cared about any of this. I’m fairly certain that I can count on one hand the number of times he’s been in the same state as me (let alone town, building, or room) since my conception, and I was just an infant the last time that I saw him. I had my life in Maine, with a family that included Mom and a stepfather who was more of a dad than Jackson Vance could ever hope to be.

Notice I said “had,” past tense.