Coco holds a finger up. “I’ll be right back.”
She heads over to the hostess station. “I think the couple at the bar is in the wrong place,” she tells Clover. “They ordered champagne, and they’re all gussied up.” Coco can’t believe she just used the word gussied; from time to time, she opens her mouth and Arkansas slips out.
“They didn’t make a reservation and I won’t have an open table for at least forty-five minutes,” Clover says. She lowers her voice and says, “The guy called me mate and tried to slide me a hundred-dollar bill. I was like, Whoa, are you trying to bribe me? Then he tells me he’s a movie producer and I’m like, Good for you, mate. I’m a restaurant hostess without any available tables.”
Coco perks up. She just finished her screenplay last week and has been contemplating her next steps. This, she thinks, is what’s known as manifestation.
When Coco returns to the bar, a dude who works for WAPA, the Virgin Islands power company, has taken a seat next to the couple, and they’ve struck up a friendly conversation—so friendly that the movie producer introduces himself. “I’m Bull Richardson and this is my wife, Leslee.” To Coco, he says, “How’d we do with the bubbly? I’ll need a third glass for my mate Harlan here.”
“We don’t carry any champagne, unfortunately.” Coco wonders if this couple thought the Banana Deck was more like Nikki Beach in St. Bart’s, where, if Instagram is to be believed, your server parades through the dining room holding your ten-thousand-dollar bottle of Dom Pérignon with Pitbull playing and sparklers shooting so everyone knows just how much money you spent on your buzz.
“No worries!” Bull Richardson says. He looks at Harlan. “What are you drinking, mate?”
“Bud Light, please,” Harlan says.
“I’ll have a double-shot rum punch with a Myers’s floater,” Bull says.
Coco raises her eyebrows. That’s a serious drink.
“I’ll have the same,” Leslee Richardson says. “And we’d like to eat.”
Coco slides menus in front of everyone and mixes up the double-shot rum punches with generous Myers’s floaters. She presents the drinks to the Richardsons and cracks open a Bud Light for Harlan from WAPA. The song changes to “Two Tickets to Paradise,” and Coco washes glassware while casually eavesdropping.
She learns that the Richardsons are renting in Peter Bay, aka Billionaire Hill. When he’s asked where they’re from, Mr. Richardson says, “We bounce around a lot. We did the holidays in Palm Beach, then we skied most of our winter away in Aspen. The snow was so good that we stuck around longer than we planned, which is why we’re here so late in the season. We’re going to spend the summer on Nantucket. I should say we’re moving there, finally putting down some roots. We’ve been looking at houses.”
When asked what business he’s in, Mr. Richardson says, “I own a beverage-distribution company. We supply water, soda, and sports drinks throughout Indonesia.”
Coco’s spirits deflate. Did this guy lie to Clover just to get a table?
“And Bull is a movie producer!” Leslee says.
“On the finance side,” Bull says. “I have people who tell me what’s going to be big, and I invest. For example, did you see The Main Vein?”
Harlan admits he hasn’t seen it, and neither has Coco. She can’t help but think of her mother’s boyfriend, Kemp, who announced he was going to “drain the main vein” every time he took a leak. Eww.
“What about Snark?” Bull asks.
Nope.
“They were big overseas,” Leslee says. “All the cinemas in Kuala Lumpur were showing Snark. There were lines down the street.”
Coco is glad to hear that Bull Richardson’s producer credits don’t include movies like Top Gun and Avatar. That means he might be open to taking a chance on a first-time screenwriter.
She asks if they’re ready to order. Bull slaps down the menu and says, “Give us all the appetizers.”
“You’d like—”
“All of them,” Bull says. “Please.”
Coco punches in the conch fritters, spring rolls, mozz sticks, wings, and quesadillas; she skips the peel-’n’-eat shrimp as a favor to the wife in her silk dress. The song changes to “Paradise City,” and Coco checks her garnishes. Harlan is sitting next to Leslee; he’s a white dude with a hard-hat sunburn that cuts neatly across his forehead. He’s explaining his job as a lineman, and Coco would like to ask how he can, in good conscience, work for a company that charges forty-one cents per kilowatt hour. (It’s ten cents per kilowatt hour in Arkansas; Coco looked it up.) But she doesn’t want to be rude. She needs to seize this opportunity.
She considers saying, I’ve written a screenplay. And when Bull Richardson quips, Hasn’t everyone? Coco will tell him that her screenplay is based on a true story. Is there a more seductive phrase in the English language?
But what if he asks her to pitch him right then and there in front of his wife and the WAPA dude? Coco learned everything she knows about pitching a movie from watching The Player a dozen times, and although she practices her pitch in front of the bathroom mirror every morning as she waits for the shower to heat up, she can’t quite convey the magic of her screenplay, which is in the writing, the details, the emotional depth of her main character. She wants this guy Bull Richardson to read it—but why would he? He doesn’t know her; she’s just tonight’s bartender, and therefore she’ll be easy to dismiss.
There has to be another way to finesse this. There is another way, Coco realizes, one that nicely dovetails with her burning desire to leave the Virgin Islands for the summer.
She sets down the order of conch fritters, and Bull Richardson growls. He’s more Mad Max than Crocodile Dundee, Coco thinks. She can easily picture him cruising across the outback in a Ford Falcon seeking vengeance and justice.
“I heard you mention Nantucket,” Coco says. “I’m heading there myself this summer.”
Bull dips a conch fritter into the roasted red pepper aioli and seems to take an interest in Coco for the first time. Bull holds her gaze (Coco has been told her entire life that her eyes are something special; the irises are icy blue with a dark blue ring around them). She expects his attention will drift down to her chest, but happily, Bull isn’t as coarse as her typical bar customer.
Leslee, meanwhile, has taken the moment to squeeze Harlan’s grapefruit-size biceps. She turns to Coco. “That’s quite a coincidence. Do you know people on Nantucket?”
“Yes,” Coco lies. Then she scrambles. Who? Who? “I grew up in Rosebush, Arkansas, and our town librarian, Susan Geraghty, introduced me to Nantucket.” Technically, Coco thinks, this is true.
“Rosebush, Arkansas?” Leslee says.
“Yes, ma’am,” Coco says. Coco’s screenplay is titled Rosebush. Her opening shot is of the town sign, which announces a population of 423, then the camera pans to Rosebush’s seen-better-days Main Street, which boasts two businesses: Grumpy Garth’s Diner and the Pansy and Petunia Vintage Market, where you can buy anything from a donkey saddle to Aunt Sally’s amethyst brooch missing all but one of the amethysts.
The screenplay follows a high-school girl named (for the time being) Coco, who wants to get the hell out of Rosebush. Most people in Rosebush care about nothing but college football and NASCAR, but Coco is obsessed with grander things: film, literature, art, music—culture.
The screenplay starts during Coco’s senior year, when she attends a program for exceptional students in Little Rock. She takes a screenwriting seminar with a professor from NYU who tells her she has a “good ear for dialogue” and a “keen sense of story arc.” These two compliments set Coco on her path; she returns to Rosebush energized, inspired, aroused. She wants to hitchhike to LA but before she goes, she needs at least a little money. She steals from the register at Grumpy Garth’s and then the safe, but she’s caught by Garth himself, which is awkward and horrible because Garth is a wonderful man (Coco imagines Morgan Freeman playing this part). September arrives and there’s no money even for community college in nearby Searcy, so Coco moves up to Missouri and gets a job bartending near the Lake of the Ozarks.
A montage of Coco at her new job follows: She pulls draft beers and pours shots of bourbon; she counts her tips, then looks across the dull mirror of the lake in which the Hollywood sign appears as a mirage. She’s gotten away—but not far enough.
Coco is named employee of the year and wins a weeklong cruise to the Virgin Islands. There’s a scene where Coco leans against the railing of a cruise ship marveling at the green peaks of the islands, the clear turquoise of the water. She has reached a land of palm trees and steel-drum music, hibiscus and white sandy bays. She wanders through Cruz Bay and sees a Help Wanted sign at a bar not unlike the Banana Deck, and the viewer realizes she’s going to stay.
