Read Change of Scene: A 100 Page Novella for Free Online Page B

barefoot, and wore a telephone headset that made her look like something out of a late-night infomercial.
    “What the hell are you doing here?”
    “Mom? What the hell are you doing? Who is that on the phone?”
    Lise’s pale blue eyes narrowed. “None of your business. How long have you been creeping around out here?”
    Sean looked from mother to daughter and began to back slowly away. “Um, well, it was good seeing you both. Greer, don’t be a stranger.” He turned and fled. They could hear him clattering down the stairs, presumably two at a time.
    Lise turned her back to Greer and spoke into the headset in a low voice. “Sorry, baby, I’ll have to call you back. Yeah, I know. Okay, call it a freebie. Bye now.”
    She removed the headset, looped it around her neck, and sat down on an armchair facing the couch, bumping her shin on the edge of the heavy marble coffee table.
    “Ow.” She winced, rubbed her shin, then looked up at her daughter.
    “Well, that was awkward. You might as well sit down, since you’re already here.”
    Greer plopped down onto the sofa and stared at her mother, or rather, a stranger who bore a vague resemblance to her mother.
    When had she last seen Lise? Had it been almost a month? More like six weeks?
    Her mother’s thinning blond hair was longer than she’d worn it in years, and mussed, and showing at least half an inch of gray roots. Her makeup was smudged, with wobbly-looking brown eyeliner, and unevenly applied blusher. She wore no lipstick, which was in itself fairly shocking, and her wardrobe looked like thrift shop rejects.
    “Mom? Are you sick or something?”
    Lise put a glass in the cereal bowl and got up to head for the kitchen.
    “Why? Do I look sick?”
    She paused before an ornate gold-framed mirror on the breakfast room wall and peered anxiously into it. She patted her hair, wet a fingertip, and dabbed at the wayward eyeliner, but to no real effect.
    “You want something to drink? Some green tea maybe?”
    “No tea. But maybe a little sympathy?”
    Lise leaned forward and clutched at Greer’s hand. “I knew it. I had these weird vibrations all morning long. And then you drop in here, unannounced, which you never do. What’s wrong? I thought you told me you’d be up in Paso for at least another week.”
    Greer felt her lower lip tremble with barely suppressed tears. “Weird vibrations, huh? Wish I’d known that before I took this job.”
    “What is it?
    She let out a long ragged breath. “It’s a long, ugly story. The short version is, I let myself get conned on the location, there was a fire, and now Hank is blaming me.”
    She told Lise the whole story, even played the recording she’d surreptitiously made on her cell phone, with the director admitting he’d ignored her advice about getting a burn permit.
    “Hank Reitz. That asshole,” Lise said, her voice dripping venom. “It doesn’t matter that you can prove the fire was his idea, although it just might keep this Miller character from suing you. Hank will still try to crucify you in the trades. We should make a preemptive strike and sue him for slander or something. Thank God everybody in town knows what a big fat liar he is. Him and that pencil-dick Allen Talbott.”
    Greer laughed despite herself. “He sends you his love, by the way.”
    “He should go fuck himself,” Lise retorted.
    “Enough about all that,” Greer said. “You tell me what’s going on with you.”
    “Nothing’s going on with me. I audition, I pester my agent, I go out on cattle calls. I did get a callback for an adult incontinency commercial, but I heard they hired Suzanne Somers instead. Same stuff, different days.”
    Greer shook her head impatiently. “I meant, what’s going on with you and your, um, friend you were on the phone with when I walked in here.”
    Two bright pink spots bloomed on her mother’s cheeks. “You heard, huh?”
    Greer nodded vigorously. “Oh yeah. Unfortunately.”
    “It’s an acting