The Bette Davis Club by Jane Lotter

baby carrier containing an infant swaddled in pink. The baby sister, I presume. The curly-haired girl stands back, waiting for her sister to float off into space. The carrier doesn’t budge.
    “Rotten luck!” I call to her. In a gesture that reminds me of Charlotte in younger days, the girl folds her arms and sticks out her tongue at me.
    I return the phone to my ear. “I looked, but Georgia isn’t here,” I say. “Perhaps that’s because she’s in Palm Springs.”
    “Contact me as soon as you have any data,” Charlotte says. “Let me know when you achieve your objective.”
    Is there some reason she’s talking like a CIA operative? I can’t imagine. Then it hits me that Charlotte’s paranoid. She probably thinks the tabloids have hacked her phone.
    “I’ll do that,” I say. “I’ll be sure and telephone you when I locate Miss Georgia Illworth, the nineteen-year-old runaway daughter of film producer Charlotte Illworth, of the wealthy and important Illworth family, key players in the Hollywood film industry, who reside in an oceanfront mansion high in the hills of Malibu, California, at—”
    She hangs up.

    I put the phone in my bag. My long legs are cramped from sitting. Without thinking, I reach down and feel for the adjustment lever at the front corner of the seat. There it is. I press the lever to release the catch, and slide the seat back so I can stretch out my legs.
    How long has it been since I did that? I remember my father helping me adjust the seat when I was a child. Only in those days, we were sliding it forward. A dozen memories come to me. Of the car, of my father and mother.
    My father was the screenwriter Arthur Just. You may have seen his name on a few old black-and-white films from the 1940s and ’50s, although he started out in New York, working as a very young assistant to Orson Welles. Early in our friendship, I mentioned this family history to Dottie. “Really, darling?” she said. “ The Orson Welles? What was he like?”
    “A whirlwind,” I told her. “That’s what my dad said. But he also said Welles was a genius, that nobody else had his talent or zest for life.”
    In 1940, Welles went to Hollywood to direct his classic film, Citizen Kane . My father and his wife, Irene, came west a few years later, and my father began writing for the movies. He and Welles talked about doing a project together, but nothing ever came of it.
    For many years, I’ve put a lot of energy into not thinking about my parents. Into not thinking about how, due to the death of my mother when I was eight and, two years later, the death of my father, my childhood came to an abrupt and heartbreaking end. Now, I sit in my father’s car, flooded with memories. And when I reflect on all that I have lost, a lump rises in my throat and settles there.

    I look up to see Tully bending over the driver’s side, clutching two ice-cream cones. “Got you something,” he says. He holds out a cone.
    I can’t help myself. Tully’s offer of ice-cream triggers a memory so sharp that tears well up inside me and push their way out, like people fighting for the exit during a real-estate time-share presentation.
    “Oh jeez,” Tully says. He gazes at the cone as though it were a wilted flower. “Did you want a hot dog?”
    I shake my head, I can’t speak.
    “Don’t English ladies like ice-cream?”
    In spite of myself, I laugh. “I haven’t lived in England for years,” I say, wiping a tear from my cheek. “And I am not a lady. I’m just having a rotten day.”
    “Yeah? Me too.” He slings a leg over the car door and drops down in the driver’s seat, still holding the cones.
    “Sorry,” I say, sniffing back tears. “Obviously, your day has been far more wretched than mine.”
    “It’s not a contest,” Tully says. He licks one of the cones. “Okay, sure, I’m bummed about what happened, but I’m not so emo as to fall apart over an ice-cream cone.”
    “It’s not only the ice-cream,” I say.