“Done,” I said, pulling out my phone and opening the UMe.com app. “Anything else?”
“No.” She was still studying the screen, then suddenly she looked at me. “Oh, wait, yes. Someone’s waiting to talk to you. In the conference room.”
“The conference room?” I turned. The lights were on, the usual array of food and drinks cluttering the table’s surface. At the very head, dressed in black with her head ducked over her own phone, was Ivy.
“What does she want?” I asked.
“She didn’t say. But she’s been waiting awhile.” Grandmother narrowed her eyes at the screen. “Now, Benji, suppose we wanted to put up something about a rental special or promotion. Would we do it on this page, or another one?”
“Either,” he replied, hitting a few keys. “But the best function would be this Newsflash button.”
“Newsflash?”
“Yeah. See, how that works is . . .”
I walked over to the conference room door. I was wary of seeing Ivy under any circumstances, but glad for once to be in my own territory. “Can I help you?”
She looked up, her face grim. “I don’t know. Can you finish the last of the filming for me, then wrap up everything here and coordinate the move of all of my equipment back to the city?”
“Nope,” I said.
She looked back down at her phone, her shoulders sagging. “Yeah. I didn’t think so.”
Neither of us spoke for a moment. I came inside the room and slid into a chair. “You need Theo,” I said.
“I need a capable assistant with a working knowledge of filmmaking,” she corrected me. “Which, in New York, are basically everywhere. Here, though . . .”
“Not so much,” I finished for her.
“Nope.”
Another silence. I wasn’t sure what, exactly, I was supposed to be doing here, only that it felt odd enough to want to wrap it up, and quickly. “Well,” I said, “I really should—”
“Look,” she said, cutting me off. “I know you don’t like me.”
“Ivy.”
“But right now, I need help. And I don’t even know where to start finding it.” She ran a hand through her hair, then looked at me. “The reason I’m here, humiliating as it is, is because I know you do.”
“You want to hire me?” I asked, confused.
“I want to finish my film,” she said. “I want you to find the people to do everything else that needs doing in the next week so I can do that.”
“I have a job,” I pointed out.
“I’ll pay you well.”
“There’s only so much time in the day, though.”
“True. But you’re efficient.” I must have looked particularly doubtful, because she quickly added, “Look, I know you’re leaving for school soon, so you could use money. And if this is about Theo—”
“It’s not,” I told her. “I just . . . I’m kind of overwhelmed right now as it is.”
She exhaled. “Emaline. Really. Do you want to see me beg?”
Truthfully, I kind of did. Not that I would have said so. So I was trying to figure out how to decline again, nicely, when I heard the front door open. A moment later, Margo came down the hall, my father behind her. He was carrying a folder, his face tense. When he saw me, it grew even more so.
“Just have a seat in my office,” Margo said, turning on the lights and waving him in. “Leah should be here soon, and we’ll get started.”
He nodded, disappearing inside. I glanced over at my grandmother’s office. She was on the phone, Benji still at the computer. He watched my father go inside, his own face darkening. You owe me a dollar, I thought. And then, I heard myself say something, this time aloud.
“Okay.” I turned back to Ivy. “I’m in.”
* * *
I clocked out at the office right at five. Ten minutes later, I was at the Pavilion, encountering the first of what I knew would be many awkward interactions.
“Hey,” Theo called out when he saw me. “You’re early.”
I nodded, withholding further comment. I knew this room mostly from social functions like the Beach Bash, when it was decorated in one theme or another. Now, it was just big and empty, with paintings and collages leaning against the walls and stacked on folding tables. Theo was crouched next to a large painting, a close-up of four tall, vertical plants, done in exacting, perfect detail. His laptop was at his feet, some papers scattered around it.
“This is nice,” I said, pointing at the canvas. “Very . . . earthy.”
“Oh, it’s amazing,” he replied, turning to type something on the laptop. “When he first returned here, if my timeline is correct, Clyde really shifted his focus. He’d been doing so much with metals and scrap, but suddenly there’s a lot of naturals, most in tight detail. I researched this one, and it’s this obscure kind of wheat plant that grows only in certain kinds of Southern pastureland.”
“Wow,” I said.
“I know. I can’t wait to see what people have to say about it. Hey, can you hand me that camera over there?”
I turned, seeing one with a zoom lens on the table behind me. I went over to retrieve it and brought it back. He took it, his eyes still on the screen, then said, “I thought we weren’t meeting until later. I still have a lot of stuff to do here.”