Chapter 28: A Surprise for the Family

The next stretch of production didn’t start until around 6 PM and ran through to 6 AM, so the day was his.

He needed it. Acting was not an easy job, whatever people thought. 10 to 12 hours a day, one after another, and then the drive back from the studio to the apartment on top of it, which was its own kind of tired. He’d never had that as an extra. The work had been light then, and there hadn’t been much of it.

Even so, he was happy. He was getting work like this, and it was the kind of work people would actually see.

He sat down on the edge of the bed and said it half to himself. "I should call home. It’s been what, weeks now? I haven’t said a word to Elise since I signed the thing."

He opened the laptop and brought up Skype.

Elise was showing online, so he called her straight away.

It rang a long time before she picked up.

And she was exactly as expected.

"What do you want?" She was looking off to the side of her screen at something else entirely. "I’m in the middle of something with my girls and you’re cutting into it."

He was used to it. "Are mom and dad around? Go put them on." Then her face started doing something, and he headed it off. "Oh, don’t give me that. I’m not calling to ask anybody for money, alright, I just want them hearing how it’s actually going out here for once."

She went quiet, working out what it was worth to her.

He let her do the arithmetic, then laughed at her. "Tell you what, Elise. You be a good little sister for about thirty seconds and there’s $100 in it for you."

Her eyes went huge. "$100? You’re joking!"

He smiled and let her have the moment. He’d been paid for finishing Episode 2, and $24,000 of it had gone into his account, and he still had no real idea what to do with money like that.

"Do I look like I’m joking?" He held the straight face on her. "Go get them, and the $100’s in your account before you sit back down."

She narrowed her eyes into the camera. "No. You’ve been barely scraping by out there for five years. And now you’re throwing $100 around like it’s pocket change? You’re messing with me."

Ronan laughed under his breath. "Did you forget who I’m working with? Jane Kingsley, Elise. On NBS. And believe it or not, NBS pays the people who turn up."

That stopped her. "Wait. Are you telling me you’ve actually been paid?"

"Yes." He nodded into the webcam. "There’s about $20,000 sitting in my account right now." Then he grinned, because he’d been saving this one. "And you’re going to love this part. I bought myself a car."

She wasn’t having it. "Don’t take me for a fool!"

"I’m not kidding you. Hang on, I’ll send you pictures, and then you can sit there and tell me I made the whole thing up."

"Send them, then! Go on!"

So he did. He’d already moved a week of photos off his phone onto the laptop, and he pushed them across with Skype’s file transfer.

They landed on her end a moment later, and she opened them straight away, and there was her brother standing shoulder to shoulder with Jane Kingsley.

There were more behind it. Him with other actors, him with crew whose names would mean nothing to her, all of it on the set with lights and equipment standing around in the background.

And further down, one of him and Riley together, with the car.

"Is-is that your car? That Honda?"

"Yeah." He couldn’t keep it out of his voice. "And see the guy standing next to me? Black guy, little shorter than I am? That’s Riley. He’s my agent, and he’s out of CAA."

Something small came out of her. "CAA. You’re telling me you’re with CAA!?"

"That’s right." He was enjoying this more than he should have. "So? What do you think, Elise?"

She looked at him a while longer without saying anything. Then she was up out of the chair in a hurry.

"Stay there. Don’t you dare hang up. I’m getting mom and dad!"

And she was gone out of her room.

He sat looking at the empty chair on the screen, and chuckled.

It didn’t take long. A minute, maybe, and then she was back, and there was a man coming in behind her.

Forties, blond, blue through the eyes, six foot and carrying a gut on him. He’d have been a handsome man without the weight.

The woman who came in after him was leaner and a good deal shorter, black hair, black eyes, plainly Japanese. She was near enough the same age as her husband and didn’t look it.

Ronan smiled at the pair of them. His father, Jordan. His mother, Ayumi.

Ayumi got herself in front of the screen first and frowned at what she found there. "Ronan. You’ve lost weight." She didn’t wait for him to argue it. "What are you eating out there? And don’t tell me that you’re eating, tell me what."

"Would you look at him, Ayumi." Jordan came in over her shoulder to get himself into frame. "That’s a grown man sitting there." Then, to the screen: "Son, listen to me. You say the word and there’s a ticket waiting on you out here, any day you want it. That offer doesn’t run out."

So Elise hadn’t told them. She’d been in too much of a hurry getting them down the hall.

Ronan had to work to keep the smile off. "Dad. Mom. I’m fine. I’m better than fine, actually." He tipped his head at his sister. "Elise, show them what I sent you. Go on."

That stopped the both of them. They looked at her, and she was nodding hard enough to shake the laptop, and then she turned the pictures round to them.

Their son, standing shoulder to shoulder with Jane Kingsley.

And behind that, everything else. That he was on a project with her. That he was being paid for it by the episode. That he wasn’t a face at the back of somebody’s shot anymore, he was the lead.

Then the car. Then CAA.

It was more than the two of them could take in at once.

Jordan came out of it happy and angry in the same breath. "Hold on. Hold on now. You’ve been working? Real work, a real show, with Jane Kingsley, and the first we hear of any of it is a photograph our daughter’s holding up at us?"

"You signed papers with a television network and you didn’t call your mother." Ayumi wasn’t finished either. "Not that night. Not the next day. Not once, Ronan."

"I know. I’m sorry, mom, dad." He got a hand up. "I’ve just been so busy."

It was how he said it that got through to them, more than what he said. He wasn’t putting it on. He really was that tired.

So they got the rest out of him, and the rest was that he worked ten to twelve hours a day filming.

That landed badly on both of them. A normal job ran eight hours, and their son was doing half again as much, day after day.

After that it stopped being about the pictures.

"Then when do you sleep?" Ayumi had come right up close to the screen. "Not how many hours. When. Tell me the time you go to bed and the time you get up."

Jordan had his own contribution and delivered it like a man who’d worked a hundred night shoots, rather than a family business in Dallas. "Eat before you sleep, son, not after. And past midnight it’s water, not coffee. You go loading up on coffee at two in the morning and you’ll be no use to anybody by four."

It warmed something in Ronan to sit there and take it from them.

Five years this town had been hard on him, and he had only lasted them because these two kept him standing. He knew exactly where the rent had come from in the years he couldn’t cover it himself.

He appreciated them more than he’d ever put into words.

The call went on for hours. Long enough that he stopped watching the time, and then he had to watch it, because he had work.

"I’ve got to go, I’m sorry." He said it to all three of them at once. "Call time’s 6 PM and I’m driving out to a place called the Golden Oak Ranch, out in Newhall, it’s this big ranch they shoot at. I need to get some sleep in first, because we’re going 6 PM straight through to 6 AM."

His parents nodded, and his sister with them.

They were worried, all three. And underneath the worry they were happy, because after everything, the boy was finally getting something back out of the thing he’d chased.