The Last Day on Set

The wrap was done by six, which meant the AD stopped yelling around six and the lighting crew started coiling cable like people who actually wanted to go home, and I stood by the grip truck with my arms crossed watching Laci walk a Pelican case out to the warehouse bay on that little folding cart she's had since before I knew her, one wheel wobbling the whole way, and she stacked it next to the other three like she was building a wall between us.

She'd announced the staff job three weeks ago at the production meeting, some network gig in Los Angeles with benefits and a 401k and health insurance, which is the kind of thing you stop joking about once you hit forty. She's 41, I'm 43, she grew up Black in Baltimore and I grew up Irish in Queens, and we've been sharing cameras and insults for eight years and sharing a bed for about three months, and none of that had ever been said out loud in daylight until it had to be.

Rufus found me at the truck. He's 48 and he's been the DP on half my jobs since my divorce, and he has this way of standing next to you and saying nothing until you say too much.

"You going to say something or just stand there?" he asked, watching her fold the cart flat.

"Nothing to say. She took a job. People take jobs."

"Sure." He scratched under his beard, and he watched her pick up a case by both handles, because of course she carries her own cases, she'd break both her arms before letting a PA touch one. "You've been standing there for ten minutes with your jaw tight enough to crack walnuts, but sure, nothing to say."

"I'm fine, Rufus."

"Right." He clapped me on the shoulder hard enough to sting, which is his version of affection. "Beer's in the lobby at seven. Try to be a person for one evening."

* * *

The wrap party was in the warehouse lobby, which meant folding tables, a cooler full of the cheap stuff, and a catering tray of empanadas from the place on the corner that the production assistant had been sent to fetch. The sound was bad dance music from somebody's phone speaker and the lighting was fluorescent, and it was the least romantic room in the borough of Brooklyn, and Laci looked good in it anyway, which annoyed me. She'd changed out of her work shirt into a green blouse, and she was laughing at something the gaffer said, and she was holding a beer like it had personally insulted her family.

I orbited. She orbited. We've been doing this dance since the first job we worked together, back when she was a camera assistant and I was a cocky operator who thought he knew everything.

"There he is," she said when I finally got close enough, tipping her bottle at me. "The man who can't push a dolly in a straight line."

"Six years," I said. "You've been telling that story for six years and it's still not true."

"It's completely true, Max. That move on the Colt commercial, the one where you drifted a full inch left and we did eleven takes, eleven, and the client's wife had to go home."

"An eighth of an inch, and the track was warped, and you know it was warped because you were standing on it."

"I was checking focus, not standing on it, there's a difference, and anyway a real operator shoots around a warped track." She took a sip and looked at me over the bottle. "You going to miss me arguing with you?"

"Not even a little."

"Liar," she said it lightly, but her voice dropped a little on it, and then the gaffer waved her over about some story she owed him the ending of, and she went, and I stood there with my beer like an idiot.

We did that three more times over the next hour, crossing paths at the empanada tray, at the cooler, by the door, each conversation about sixty seconds long and each one about a job we'd worked, a take we'd blown, a producer we'd both hated, and every conversation had a floor under it that neither of us would step on.

Rufus caught my eye across the room and just looked at me, didn't say a word, didn't have to, and I finished my beer and put the bottle down on the table next to the cooler.

* * *

She went out for air around nine, out the side door onto the loading dock, and I gave it four minutes so it wouldn't look like what it was, and then I followed her out with two more bottles.

The dock was quiet, just the hum of the HVAC unit and the street three steps down, and she was sitting on the edge with her legs hanging, and she didn't turn around when the door opened.

"I figured you'd come out," she said. "You always do this, you lurk for exactly long enough to make it weird."

"I brought beer."

"Then you're forgiven." She took one and I sat down next to her, close enough that our shoulders touched, and neither of us moved away, and we drank for a while without talking, which is something we've always been able to do.

"Saturday," she said finally, into the quiet. "I fly out Saturday morning. Nine forty flight, direct, which I paid extra for because I am not dragging my life through Atlanta."

"I know. I looked it up."

"You looked up my flight?"

"You told me the airline two weeks ago. It took ten seconds." I turned the bottle in my hands. "I almost booked the same flight in the seat next to you and then I remembered I have a job in Providence starting Tuesday and a life here I haven't figured out how to leave."

"So you didn't say anything."

"I didn't say anything."

She nodded slowly, looking out at the street where a taxi rolled past with its light on. "That's very you, Max. Three months of showing up at my apartment with groceries and fixing my garbage disposal and sleeping over four nights a week, and when it comes time to actually say a word about it, you go quiet and look up my flight instead."

"What do you want me to say, Laci? Come with me to Providence? Don't take the best job you've ever been offered?"

"No, I want you to say something, anything, because I'm tired of carrying both halves of this conversation in my head at two in the morning when you're asleep on my couch." She turned to face me and her eyes were bright in the light from the door. "I'm scared out of my mind, by the way. I'm forty-one years old and I'm moving across the country alone to sit in an edit bay for a network, and the only thing I know for sure about it is that it's the right call, and I hate that I'm leaving the one person here I