Little Known Facts A Novel - By Christine Sneed Page 0,3

leave of absence. Her mother just found out she has cancer, and she asked Trina to come home for a while. I wondered if you’d be interested in flying down here to fill in for her until we’re done shooting. You’d be making phone calls and running errands for me. We’ve got about a month left. Unless you’re busy.”

It has been several years, since his second year of college, that he has worked on a set doing odd jobs for his father. The last time was for a film that had an enormous cast of extras, which Will had been hired to assist with, and was shot partially in Kenya, partially in Kashmir. He developed digestive problems in India and had to be sent home early. His father had asked him two years later to help with a shoot in Romania and Russia, but Will had declined. This is the first time since then that Renn has offered him work. “I don’t know, Dad. Can we talk about it when you’re here? Aren’t you coming home on Friday?”

“No, not anymore. There’s too much going on right now.”

“Can I at least think it over for a day or two?”

“No, I need to know tonight. If you can’t do it, I have to make other arrangements.”

“Can you give me an hour?”

He sighs. “All right. One hour. That’s all I can afford.”

Before they hang up, Will says, “I thought I was the one who called only when I wanted something.”

His father laughs softly. “You called me, Billy.”

“I don’t call you only when I need something.”

“Did I say that you did?”

“That’s what Anna told me.”

“I don’t remember saying that. I’m sorry if I did. I must not have meant it.”

After they hang up, Will sees that his sister has sent him a text message: Dad not coming. No dinner Sat. Ur off the hook.

In the morning he catches a flight from LAX to New Orleans. His ticket is waiting at the airport, the machinery of his father’s life well lubricated by his fame and large bank account.

His sister says she’s happy that he’ll be helping their father again, but asks in the same breath about his plans to retake the LSAT.

“I can still do it when I get back,” he says.

“Don’t you have to study?”

“I will.”

She laughs. “In New Orleans?”

“Why not? If I don’t apply this fall, I can always do it next year.”

It takes her a long time to reply. “Yes, you could,” she finally says. “If you still feel like it.”

New Orleans is much warmer than he expects when he steps out of the terminal and into the town car his father has sent for him. The outlying areas of the city have a stunned look, the effects of the hurricane still visible, despite the years that have already passed. He feels both guilty and relieved to have been living so ignorantly elsewhere, unaware of the scope of the city’s troubles. His father’s interest in it, his research and his four visits in the years since the storm, had until now only seemed to be a businessman’s pragmatism: here was a beleaguered region that could enhance his reputation and earn him more money if he managed to fashion something cinematic out of the ruins.

He is taken directly to the Omni Hotel on St. Louis and Chartres by a silent driver, an older, completely bald man in a dark gray suit. His father and a few of the film’s actors are also staying at the hotel, his unit production manager having negotiated a good rate on a block of rooms, but no one is in the reception area to greet him. The Quarter looks as he remembers it, largely unscathed by the storm, its black wrought-iron balconies glistening in the sun, their hanging ferns and flowering potted plants as effusive as he remembers them from a trip during his junior-year spring break, several months before the hurricane. His father’s film is being shot in the Quarter as well as in Metairie and on a shrimp boat in the Gulf. Will read the script early in the morning before he got on the plane; his father had given him a copy months earlier, but he had only glanced at it then. It is genuinely good, a story about a brother and sister trying to recover their livelihood after the storm and to keep their mother’s health from failing.

It is two in the afternoon, and he is struggling to stay awake. He didn’t sleep well