Just Like Me, Only Better by Carol Snow Page B

was much older, just some guy with a couple of hardware stores. Mama Rush had a couple of kids and got all fat, and hubby started running around, and it turned out he didn’t have as much money as she thought he had.
    “When Haley was three or five—I think it was five—her mother noticed she could carry a tune, so, voila! She turned her into her little show pony, mostly for her own ego at first, but then she started making a little money off of her. By the time Haley sang at the state fair—she was eight or nine at that point—Mama was three hundred pounds and desperate. Maybe some guy said Haley should go to Hollywood, maybe not. Most agents won’t even set foot in the Valley. You think they’re going to pop off to a state fair in Montana unless they’ve been invited to Demi and Ashton’s?” He bit his lip. “Or is that Idaho?”
    “Haley told you all this?”
    “Ohhhh, yes. When she talks, she talks a lot. Other days she just mopes. It’s like she’s two different people.”
    “And now three,” I said.
    He giggled. “True. When they got to L.A., Mama and Haley lived in a crappy motel and spent their days going to auditions and modeling agencies. She has a little brother, but they left him back with Daddy. He moved out here once he turned thirteen, which worked out really well for him because it’s much easier to score cocaine in L.A. than it is in Montana. And, of course, Mama and Daddy got divorced somewhere along the way, and Daddy moved to Reno to marry a cocktail waitress. Shockingly, the relationship didn’t last.
    “After they’d been here maybe six months, Haley got cast in a peanut butter commercial, and then there was a laundry detergent commercial. A few others, I think. Her big break came when she was a teenager and she got cast in The Crazy Life of Riley Poole. Remember that one? It ran for two, maybe three, seasons. Haley played the nerd.”
    “Is Haley still close to her mother?”
    “Oh, noooo . . .” He held up a finger to signal “one minute” and disappeared into the back room, returning with a tabloid and a Diet Dr Pepper. He flipped through the magazine until he found the picture he was looking for and handed it to me.
    The headline was printed in enormous letters: HALEY TO MOM: GET OUT!
    There were several photos: Haley tight-lipped in big sunglasses; Haley as a young, smiling girl standing next to a large, brown-haired woman; a thin, blond, middle-aged woman getting into a car.
    “This is the mother? How’d she lose all the weight?” I asked.
    Stefano popped open his soda. “Stomach staple and lipo. Paid for by her salary as Haley’s manager .”
    “Isn’t Jay Haley’s manager?”
    “He is now. They met when Haley was on Riley Poole . Jay was some kind of production slave, and he got tight with Haley, which is kind of weird when you think that she was, like, fifteen and he was, like, twenty-five.”
    “Wait. So Haley and Jay were . . .”
    “ Officially , he saw her artistic potential and wanted to help her shine. Unofficially? His career was going nowhere and he saw financial potential. He’s the one who convinced her to move over to the Betwixt Channel, though, so you’ve got to give him some credit.”
    “But was there ever a romance?”
    “Romance! Oh, you are so quaint. She never said anything about it to me, and believe me, I’ve fished. What I do know is that Haley hasn’t talked to either of her parents since she turned eighteen, and Jay hasn’t exactly gone out of his way to mend the family rift.”
    “But what about the boyfriend?” I asked. “Brady Ellis.”
    Stefano licked his lips. “A tasty, tasty morsel. I keep begging Jay to let me do his hair, but I think he’s afraid that I might say something inappropriate. Which I wouldn’t, BTW.”
    “What does Jay have to do with Brady’s hair?”
    “Jay manages Brady, too. He’s got a handful of young clients. Not like Haley—it’s not a round-the-clock hand-holding dealie—but he manages