“Stand down?”
There’s a very, very long pause.
“Lion Remnick is going to take over from here.”
Lion Remnick is a leading writer of superhero movies, car chase movies, and other movies in which things frequently explode. He’s not even a hack. He’s good at it. He’s the kind of person whose success I compare with my own, and come up short.
It’s not shocking for a script to change hands midway through development. It’s happened to me plenty of times before.
But this script is for my father.
“Wait, is this Scott’s decision?” I ask, my voice shaking. “You’re an executive producer. He can’t just fire me if you don’t agree with him.”
“I do agree with him,” he says flatly. “In fact, if you must know, I’ve had misgivings since the previous draft, and Lion became available unexpectedly, so—”
“So you brought on someone else behind my back? Because I’m too feminine? Isn’t that why you hired me in the first place? To write a woman who wasn’t just a stick figure with botched boobs?”
“Look, Molly, it’s show business. I shouldn’t have to tell you it doesn’t always work out.” The implication being, of course, that nothing of mine has worked out in a while. Not that he would be impressed with another rom-com even if it had.
“Are you serious, Dad?” I yell into my phone.
“You’ll still get paid your fee, of course,” he says calmly. Like this is about money.
“I don’t care about my fee. I care that my own father is firing me on Thanksgiving.”
“It’s not personal, Molly,” he says with a long-suffering sigh. “I have to do what’s right for the franchise.”
I shake my head at my own reflection in the kitchen window, because I need someone to join me in marveling at how offensive this is.
“Okay, it might not be personal to you. But does it occur to you that it’s personal to me? Do I register to you as a human being at all?”
“We can talk about this later, when you’ve calmed down.”
The suggestion that I’m being irrationally emotional makes me feel irrationally emotional.
I’m not done with this conversation. I am sick to death of being rejected by this man. And for once, I don’t want to make a joke or flee the conversation or numb out with Xanax and wine. Maybe it’s Seth’s fault—his insistence on communication. Maybe it’s Rob’s fault—I’ve had enough shitty men for one weekend. But I want to air my fury. I want to let my father know he’s not off the hook for hurting me.
“No, wait,” I say. “I have a question for you.”
He sighs. “And what’s that?”
“Why didn’t you take care of me?”
“What—”
“When you left.”
“Excuse me? Where is this coming from, Molly?”
“I suppose it’s coming from two decades of biting my fucking tongue while getting hurt over and over.”
“Don’t be dramatic,” he snaps. “I know the divorce wasn’t easy on any of us, but—”
“You left me with Mom. Who you knew was losing her mind and could barely take care of herself, let alone your thirteen-year-old. And you just left me to deal with it.”
“If I recall, you didn’t want to see me.”
“Yeah, I was a kid and you broke my heart. It was on you to fix it. And you didn’t even try to get partial custody.”
I’m not sure I’ve ever admitted to myself how much that devastated me.
“The situation was more complicated than that, as I’m sure you can imagine now that you’re an adult,” he says.
But I can’t. If I had a child, I’d put on steel-toed boots and chain mail to fight for them. I’d salt the fucking earth.
“Seeing your kid is not that complicated,” I say. “You abandoned me. You never have my back. Not even with your preposterous movie.”
“I’m not abandoning you. This was a professional arrangement with the attendant uncertainties that entails, and if you’re not enough of an adult to handle it, it just proves we’re making the right decision.”
“The ‘attendant uncertainties’? My God, you’re such a dick.”
“That’s enough,” my father yells. “Happy Thanksgiving, Molly. I’m hanging up.”
The line goes dead.
I throw the phone on the counter, hardly able to breathe.
I hate him. I hate him so much. I hate that his love is conditional. That he doesn’t give a shit about me. That he always fucking leaves.
