The Cousins by Rona Jaffe

pot of water on to boil for the thick spaghetti she liked and hoped he wouldn’t get drunk. She had never thought of him as a heavy drinker, but then she knew so little about him these days, and in fact hadn’t for years except for the news from Aunt Julia. She put some feta cheese and a bowl of kalamata olives and a fresh baguette on the kitchen counter. “Nibble on this. Do you want to eat in the dining room or the kitchen?”
    “Whatever you want.” He took an olive.
    “I would think that having been Harry Hubbard’s stunt double and being so good you would be hired to do other work,” Olivia said.
    “Oh, I would,” Grady said. “It’s just that you have to eat crow to work, and it’s not worth it to me. There’s not what
I’d
consider real money, and with the income I’m getting from the family it would put me into a higher tax bracket so I’d end up getting less than if I didn’t work at all.”
    “But you want to work . . . ?”
    “Sure,” he said. “So the stunt coordinator called and asked if I wanted to do a full body burn on a fan descender—that’s a device with an air brake on it on a spool. I would fall seventy-five feet through the air, and crash through a plate-glass window . . .”
    “On fire?” Olivia said.
    “Of course; it’s a fire gag. So he offers me four thousand dollars. I give him a bid of seven thousand because that’s what it’s worth to me. He says no, that’s too much, it’s not fair to the company, and he gets somebody else. So then there’s another picture, and I’d get eighteen hundred for the week, and roll a car at the end of the week. You get an adjustment for the stunt, and since this one involves a car rollover I say okay but I want three thousand more. He laughs at me. He gives the job to a friend of mine who I know did it for just an extra twelve hundred. A lot of guys are working cheap just to worm their way in. I could get hurt and my career could be over tomorrow; I want to make a lot of money. Now the word is out that Grady Silverstone is difficult. They say I have a big ego, that I’m pricing myself out.”
    “Well, it’s very dangerous,” Olivia said. “They couldn’t pay me enough to do something like that, ever.”
    “I love it, it’s what I do, but I’m not going to kiss butt to do it,” Grady said. “Especially since it ends up that I’d be paying the government for the privilege.”
    It’s the family money, Olivia thought. It’s taken the edge off his ambition. If he loves being a stuntman so much, why does he care about his tax bracket? But the thought nagged at the back of her mind that there was something more, and she didn’t know what it was. “That’s awful,” she said.
    “And that’s why I haven’t worked for a year.”
    “You should try to be a stunt coordinator.”
    “Not if they don’t like me,” Grady said. “In this business it’s all whether they like you or not.”
    “In any business,” Olivia said. “Mine too.”
    “Besides,” Grady said, “if you’re a stunt coordinator you’re never home. I’m tired of packing bags and living in hotels and eating movie food.”
    “Well, today you’re going to eat my food.” She put the spaghetti into the boiling water and took the salad out of the refrigerator. “So what do you do all day when you’re not working?”
    “I have plenty of things to do. I work out. Clean my motorcycles. I do work on my new house.”
    “We’re going to eat soon.”
    “Where’s the bathroom?” Grady asked.
    She showed him where it was and decided to set the table in the dining room because it would be more festive. She used the good silver and china because she wanted to make him feel special. She had two bottles of champagne chilling in the refrigerator, so Roger could have some with them when he came home, and she took two of the beautiful old cut crystal champagne glasses from the set of glasses her mother had bought long ago to use at Mandelay for family