Read This Is Where We Live for Free Online Page A

abandoned. Claudia moved back toward Esme and Jeremy, who had retrieved their belongings and were waiting for her to say goodbye. She tried to smile back with the same tipsy contentment that she read on their faces, but it felt forced. The aftershock had left her decidedly shaken.
    Carter’s assistant had the annoying habit of turning every statement into a question. She also repeated Claudia’s name compulsively, an annoying tic that Claudia suspected was intentional, perhaps to make clients feel at ease. To Claudia’s ear, it sounded patronizing. “Carter Curtis’s office?” the assistant queried, her voice squeaky and distracted. “Oh, Claudia again? Claudia, I’m sorry, but he’s in a meeting? I’ll take a message?”
    Claudia sat, breathing heavily into her end of the phone, trying to quell her anxiety. Carter’s meeting was taking an inordinately long time—by her count, he had been in a meeting for fourteen days now, since she first called him on the Monday after her film premiere. It was apparently a meeting that lasted all day and all night, leaving him only enough time to fire off a three-word e-mail to her—“No news yet.” That message had come a week ago, at two in the morning. She had heard nothing since.
    “Just tell him I’m trying to get a status update on the Fox deal,” she said.
    Frantic typing on the other end. “The Fox deal? OK? Anything else, Claudia?”
    “That’s it,” she said, and hung up.
    She sat at her desk in their guest bedroom and looked out the window at the retaining wall, a ten-foot concrete edifice that kept the uphill neighbor’s yard from sliding down into theirs. If she craned her head, she could see the sky, painfully bright, with a brown scrim of haze collecting across the horizon. It was barely nine in the morning, but the early August heat had already settled on the house, baking into the walls and turning their home into an oven. Sweat trickled down Claudia’s back, collecting in a puddle at the waistband of her pajamas. She leaned back in her chair and stared at the ceiling, fretting.
    The audiences hadn’t materialized. Maybe it was the earthquakes (unlikely) or maybe it was the fact that women didn’t go to movies (possible) or maybe people just didn’t like it (she hoped not), but regardless, the audiences never came out to see her film. Not the first night and not any other night. They had avoided it entirely, all opening weekend; had ignored the politely positive reviews in the Friday papers and Ebert’s genial thumbs-up. Claudia had read the box office report that first post-premiere Monday (outside, an unusual summer storm, violent spatters of rain against the sliding glass door even though the temperature outside was still above ninety), letting her eyes scan farther down the list of films in release, and still farther, all the way to the very bottom of the page, where her film had lodged just above a documentary about freedom fighters in Gaza and just below a slapstick comedy about competitive air hockey starring Cheech Marin that had already been out for forty-two weeks. Total box office take: $39,000.
    Reading the box office reports that morning, she felt something burrowing deep in her gut, a tiny worm of panic taking up residence. “But that’s just one weekend. It’s way too soon to know what your movie’s going to do,” Jeremy comforted her, and she reassured herself that he was right: There was plenty of time for word of mouth to gather and grow, and even if first-weekend grosses had been frankly dismal the film could still evolve into a bonafide sleeper hit over the course of the next months. The film hadn’t even been released in most of America yet; it was in less than two dozen theaters! Once it was in wider release, once it received more press, it was possible that the rest of the country would finally catch on.
    Except that the following weekend a half-dozen theaters bumped her film to make way for a Ben Stiller comedy. And