Chapter Text
Dee books a role during her first week in Los Angeles, and everyone is happy for her. Unsurprisingly, she’s playing a cute-as-pie eldest daughter in a family sitcom, a character several years younger than her age. The show gets picked up for a second season, then a third, and all the while Dee doesn’t make a single headline. The girl playing her little sister is arrested for shoplifting during the first season.
Her kindness seems to be incorruptible, and it makes everyone she left home a little jealous. Dennis starts referring to his sister as “Saint Dee of Hollywood” when he gets drunk (which is something he’s been doing with alarming regularity these days). Charlie keeps his face pressed to a rag filled with chemicals and his eyes on the prize. In Paddy’s case, the prize is an empty rat trap that will get the bar past its first health inspector.
Charlie isn’t too pissed that they didn’t make it the first time – but he is scared that the bar’s never going to open for business at this point. Worse, he’s the one putting in all of the labor while Mac chases girls and Dennis plans for He’s been barely surviving on blocks of Cracker Barrel and saltines, and he’s working extra hours at the roller rink job he hasn’t yet quit.
The traps come up clean this time, and it feels kind of like a blessing on his future plans.
**
Two weeks later the bar finally opens. It’s Tuesday night, past nine, when Charlie finally has time to take a break. On the bar’s small television set, he can hear Dee’s voice piping forth through the wires and tubes and layers of dust and gold separating them.
“Someone turn it on the ‘76ers game,” says Dennis. But Charlie doesn’t move to take on the task. He just stands still, rag in hand, beer pouring over the top of the mug he’d been filling.
He doesn’t see Mac behind him, just hears bottles rattling. “That positivity, man. It just comes through the screen,” says Mac. Then he turns back toward a doe-eyed blonde trying to order a Michelob.
But Charlie just keeps staring at the tv, transfixed.
It’s like looking at an angel. And suddenly no other woman can compare.