Free God-Shaped Hole by Tiffanie DeBartolo Page B

spread in the Hamptons, trust me on this. And what if she meets your mother some day?”
    “My mother will go along with it. She’s a good sport.”
    I couldn’t wait to meet Jacob’s mother.
    “I’m going to have to call her tomorrow and tell her the truth,” I said.
    “Why do you have to burst her bubble?” He was still chuckling.
    “Jacob, I’m serious.”
    “This from a woman who once told a lover that her parents helped put Nelson Mandela in prison.”
    “The reason I told him that was because I wasn’t planning on him being around long enough for it to matter and—” I froze. That thought gave me pause: what if this whole thing—what if I—was a big joke to Jacob? What if he was the best actor in the universe and I meant nothing to him? What if he had no intention of taking me any further south than Anaheim?
    Jacob knew what I was thinking. He looked my way to try and get a reading on my expression, and almost swerved into the median.
    “Watch the road, Slick.”
    “Do you think I think that?” he said. “Trixie, answer me. Do you think you won’t be around long enough for it to matter?”
    I didn’t say anything. I just tried to look mopey.
    “I have a surprise for you,” he said. “Look behind me.”
    I reached under his seat and found something wrapped in aluminum foil. It was a dish of crème brûlée.
    “Jacob, did you steal this?”
    He howled. “No! God, ye of little faith. Elise gave it to me. I told her it was our first official night living together, that we wanted to celebrate. She thought it was romantic.”
    It was. It was fucking romantic as all hell. And I was an idiot.
    Jacob called my mother the next day. He apologized to her and confessed that he was from Pasadena.
    “I’m nothing but trailer trash,” he said with pride.
    He gave my mother the whole rigamarole about how his father deserted him when he was a baby, probably for sympathy points. And he kissed up to her a little more by claiming he only said he was related to Thomas Grace because of me.
    “What you think is really important to Beatrice,” he said. “She just wanted you to like me.”
    When he got off the phone, he said my mother laughed and thanked him for telling her the truth. She was still being nice to him.
    “Her doctor must have her back on Valium,” I said.

TWELVE
    All Jacob needed was a place to write. I gave him the spare bedroom in our apartment, and you would have thought he’d been crowned lord and master of the world, he was so happy. He’d just sold a story to a big travel magazine, loosely based on the time he spent in Costa Rica, and with the money he made on that he was able to retire from the Weekly , at least for a couple months, and work on his book full-time. I was at my studio during the day so he had the place to himself.
    When Jacob was working, he had the dedication of a trained monkey. I would leave the house around nine and he’d already be at his computer. He kept his right elbow on his desk and his head in his hand, trance-like, unless he was typing. He typed like a monkey, too. When he was on a roll, it sounded like he was shelling out a thousand words a minute. I expected to see nothing but jumbled letters when I looked at the screen after one of his typing marathons, but I always found coherent sentences. He was the real deal.
    When I came home, at six o’clock or so, he’d still be sitting there, either letting it pour like mad, or in fierce combat, desperately battling with wherever his words came from, to spit out something he deemed worthy. His hair would be even messier than normal, and there would be a random bowl, a browning apple core, or a bag of potato chips on his desk. That was the only evidence I had that he’d moved all day. Sometimes he’d stay like that late into the night, forgetting to eat, to change his clothes, or to shower. I felt like I actually spent less time with him once he moved in, but I could live with the fact that I didn’t see him