Just Another Celebrity

Just Another Celebrity

fiction
edward w pritchard

She was a movie star, a media star, and a great beauty, but had been at it long enough to want nothing more than her privacy.

Her half-sister and her brother in law were using her condo in Florida, and she was driving from Cleveland, Ohio to the their house in Akron, ostensibly to check on the cat and the plants, but really to have a few hours to herself.

Things hadn't started well once she hit Akron, near where she had grown up, and they had gotten worse from there. She had drove past the Grade School, near her sisters house and there was one of her old boyfriends, from high school, who when she saw him helping a little girl with one of those heavy yellow raincoats, she instantly remembered her Aunt telling her several times at holiday's, playing the town crier, that her ex-boyfriend was an assistant principal at the old school. She remembered the mean things she had said to him near here, years ago, about his lack of ambition for himself, but she was unable to not watch him now, as he bent down and put his knee on the ground, to help the little girl button the coat, and she of course knew it was his best suit, and the knee of the pants would be ruined, and his wife would be unable to fix it, but the wife would only pretend to be mad, and he would apologize to her a couple of extra times, but looking at him, although he was heavier, he was still tall and awkward in a good way, but gentle too, and the gentleness was something long gone in her life and she drove off feeling sad.

Later, she had went to a local convenience store, where she was sure the Arabic owner there didn't recognize her , or care who she was, but she couldn't find anything to buy, because of a very limited inventory, and even though she was cold and hungry and wet from an all day rain, she couldn't find anything she wanted here, and eventually she bought and old fashioned chicken pot pie, but not a name brand.

Finally she parked the rental car in the drive of the old family house where they had lived as children, that her half sister took over when their Mother died, and sat in the drive a few minutes and listened to the rain, knowing if anyone saw her they would think it her sister, who looked like her, only prettier, and she thought in a private joke against the world, for she had been named one of the twenty prettiest women of all time, but she always felt her half sister to be the prettier one, as did everyone about their own sister probably. Eventually she went in the house and went through the kitchen and living room which were still neat and homey and went to the old family room in the basement.

There was an old couch from when they were kids that had never been thrown away, but should have been, and her grandmother's, who was part Cherokee, old Indian blanket, which she wrapped up in, and she mashed up and ate the pot pie, and watched the cable, wishing she had an old fashioned TV guide rather than the onscreen version. As she finished her dinner, holding the cat, she dozed off into a deep sleep for the first time in a long time.