Free Your Perfect Life by Liz Fenton Page B

reaction. This is her career. Her livelihood. What if she thinks I screwed up? After everything she’s told me and what I’ve now seen firsthand about her job, I would never forgive myself if I did anything to jeopardize her career, or worse, if I disappointed her.
    We sit in silence.
    As I watch, I see the mistakes, the flaws, the places my eyes moved back and forth, making it obvious that I was reading the TelePrompTer. I see the smoke everyone was blowing up my ass earlier. I feel so stupid that I believed their praise. I hadn’t so much as stood in front of a camera in forever and they called me great. Fantastic. I think someone even used the word magnificent . Of course the crew would never tell me if I sucked. Isn’t that how this business worked? Air kisses with a side of bullshit?
    Dean complained about me the entire time, but I thought it was just Dean being a jerk. Looks like he was right.
    Casey grabs the remote and hits pause. “Wow,” is all she says. Then she repeats it several times, looking stunned.
    I wait for Casey as she tries to compose herself. But I’m ready to take my lumps like a man. I deserve them.
    “You were . . .” She pauses and stares down at the frayed edge of the orange rug I’d been so proud to buy after reading it was the “it” color of the season.
    “It’s okay, you can be honest. I deserve it.”
    “You were really, really good.” She says the word good so quietly I almost don’t hear it.
    “Really?” Now I’m the one who’s stunned.
    “Really,” she says flatly.
    Then where is the smile? The thank-you? The relief ? “But there were so many mistakes. You saw them, I know you did.”
    “Well, yeah, I saw some. But it’s like you’ve been doing it for years. How long has it been since you’ve been in front of a camera?” Her face contorts as she calculates.
    “Since Audrey was born,” I say.
    “Over sixteen years and you walk out there and handle it just like me?” Her voice is shaky.
    “Isn’t that what you wanted?” I bite my cuticle.
    “Don’t do that.” Casey swats my hand away from my mouth. “That’s a fifty-dollar manicure you’re ruining,” she scolds.
    I look at my image paused on the TV screen. “I don’t get it, don’t you want me to do a good job?”
    She starts to say something, but thinks better of it. “No, I do. I do want you to do a good job. That’s what we need. To keep up appearances.”
    I can tell she’s bothered, but I decide to let it go.
    “How long is this going to go on? How long are we going to be held hostage in each other’s bodies?” She sighs and lies back on my faded tan couch covered with stains I’ve meant to clean for ages. Just days ago, I scolded Sophie for spilling soda on it. “Great. All we need is one more stain!” I’d yelled.
    “The baby spills stuff all the time and you don’t care. Your precious angel can do no wrong!” Sophie shot back, her eyes filled with tears. I’d sat there stunned, my voice caught in my throat, wondering if that was really how she felt.
    When John and I had told her and Audrey that we were pregnant—dangling I’M A BIG SIS T-shirts in front of their faces—they weren’t thrilled, but I’d been prepared for that reaction from the research I’d done online. What I hadn’t been prepared for were my own conflicted feelings as the girls fired off questions I didn’t know how to answer. With the shirts balled up in their laps, they interrogated us. Would I have to share a room? Would I have to babysit? And then maybe the hardest question of all: Why?
    It didn’t help things that my pregnancy was hard and I pretty much slept my way through it. And then once Charlotte was born, she had demanded a lot more of my attention than I’d anticipated. And I’d missed a lot: the opening night of Sophie’s last play; the deadline to mail in the money for a trip Audrey wanted to take with her class to Washington, D.C. And I’d clearly missed the resentment