Over Her Dead Body
Susan Walter
All cruelty springs from weakness.
—Lucius Annaeus Seneca
What you are about to read is going to be a bit of a shock, so let me prepare you. I know what you are expecting, but I have chosen not to give it to you. For that I make no apologies. Your expectations are of your own making, as are all the choices one makes in a lifetime: whether to help or look away, give or take, flee or fight, hoard or sacrifice. With this, my last will and testament, I had an opportunity to be generous. But so did all of you.
This document represents my wishes, with no coercion or undue influence from anyone named herein. It was not written capriciously or with malice. My mind is sound and clear.
I am not available to entertain your objections, so you will have to work them out for yourselves. What you do next is up to you. Please choose wisely.
—LLG
PART 1
* * *
BEFORE
ASHLEY & LOUISA
CHAPTER 1
* * *
ASHLEY
“Can you do it sexier?” the casting director asked, from his seat behind the long rectangular table separating the dreamers from the dream killers. We were in the partitioned ballroom of a Sheraton in the Valley . . . or maybe it was a Hyatt? Doesn’t matter.
“Oh. Um . . . sure?”
“Great!”
The assistant restarted the camcorder, then pointed at me: Action! I tilted my head, flashed a smile so smoldering it would get me arrested in some countries, then read the copy. “Always happy to see you, eat your leftovers, and warm up the bed on a cold night. Now you can thank your dog for loving you like only a dog can. With Fido’s Feast.” I thought about blowing a kiss, but it was a dog food commercial—I didn’t want to sex it up too much.
“Thank you,” the head dream killer said, and that was it. An hour and a half of waiting for fifteen seconds of humiliation. All in a good day’s work.
Walking out I passed a parade of women—mostly former prom queens with shiny hair and straight white teeth—all waiting for their fifteen seconds. The odds of booking a national commercial were worse than winning the Powerball jackpot, yet here we all were—sufferers of the wretched acting “bug,” whose most tragic symptom (besides a wasted life) was being a disappointment to our parents.
I pulled my blazer tight across my chest as I crossed the parking lot to my car. I handed my validation to the guard—at least they paid for my parking!—then merged onto the 101 freeway toward home. October nights in LA’s San Fernando Valley are normally cool and dry, but it was strangely humid, and eerie wisps of fog curled over rooftops like cigarette smoke on the set of Mad Men. It was almost eight o’clock but there was still traffic. Oh, LA life . . .
I pulled into my driveway and lugged my day bag (hairbrush, makeup, wardrobe change, deodorant, water bottle, snacks) out of the back seat. Gotta be prepared if an audition pops up! Brando, my energetic golden-haired rescue, jumped up to greet me as I unlocked my front door.
“Hey, buddy,” I said as I crouched down to pet him. People often asked me what kind of dog he was. My go-to answer was “a shedding dog” because that’s all I for sure knew about him. If I didn’t vacuum at least twice a week, his hair would be like a carpet on top of our carpet.
“I fed him,” Jordan, my roommate, said, looking up from his seat at the kitchen table.
“Thanks.”
“How was the audition?”
“Slayed it,” I joked as I kicked off my shoes and flopped down on the couch—his couch, I should say. All the living room furniture was his. My only contribution to the rustic two-bedroom bungalow we shared was a few nice-smelling hand soaps in the powder room.
“You look beat,” he observed.
“Yeah, I worked a birthday party earlier.” Besides going on pointless auditions, I had a bunch of pointless actual jobs. Most days I was a Hollywood tour guide, but sometimes on the weekends I dipped into my costume trunk to thrill little girls by appearing at their parties as their favorite Disney princess. This morning I had donned my itchy blonde wig to be Cinderella for a dozen screaming five-year-olds. It was kind of humiliating to be seen behind the wheel of my cool-girl MINI Cooper in full princess regalia, but there weren’t that many ways a gal with a theater degree and no real-world skills could make three hundred bucks in an hour—not legal ones anyway.
“Want me to let him out in the yard?” Jordan asked. We had a small fenced-in yard. Brando was only twenty-two pounds; he didn’t need a lot of room to stretch his legs. I could have just let him do his business on the lawn and cleaned it up in the morning like I did when I worked a nighttime tour or stayed out late with friends.
I met my dog’s hopeful gaze. I had no way of knowing that taking him for a walk that night was going to blow up my life, so I gave in to the guilt and got up off the couch.
“No, it’s OK.” I sighed. “I’m getting up.”
I swung my legs off the couch and Brando literally jumped for joy. Dogs are so easy to please—let them out when they’re in, and in when they’re out, and they’ll reward you with sloppy, wet kisses for days.