Being Audrey Hepburn Read Online Free

afternoon—only it wasn’t.
    The actual Montclair Manor was a dreary cluster of tiny, tumbledown, smog-gray minihouses surrounding a big parking lot and a community house. It had a lovely view of the Barclay’s Vinyl Window plant on Route 495 complete with the factory’s toxic aroma.
    To hear Nan, you’d think she was living at the Waldorf, but this place was depressing as hell. I don’t think she’s ever complained about it once. She didn’t even complain about the fact that the Montclair Manor community dining room smelled like old people’s feet. She never complained about any of the aches and creepy diseases that most old people wanted to discuss. And she never complained once about the fact that I was the only one who visited her. My mom and sister hadn’t been there in years. Ryan barely knew she existed.
    Mom and Nan didn’t see eye to eye. That’s the nicest way to put it. I wondered if that was something that ran in our family, like nonexistent boobs. There was totally this history of moms and daughters not getting along.
    Montclair Manor was an assisted-living home, which meant that the old people were basically on their own, but there was a nurse named Betty and a couple of staffers who checked on the residents every day to make sure that no one had fallen down or, you know, snuffed out in their sleep. I wouldn’t mention it, except it happened—twice last year and three times the year before. Sometimes you got a run where these old people dropped like flies.
    A crusty old guy two doors down from Nan died in his ratty plaid recliner while reading a romance novel called The Blackmailed Heiress . His name was Sarge, Army Retired. His name wasn’t actually “Sarge Army Retired.” That’s just the way he said it every time, and how Nan and I would refer to him. He was eighty-three and still trimmed what little hair he had left in a crew cut. He would drop down for fifty push-ups every morning.
    Poor Sarge must have been cringing in his grave, because every one of those old ladies he worked so hard to impress with his macho push-up routine found out, in excruciating detail, about his girly Harlequin-romance-novel habit. Personally, I thought it was cute. When the aides cleaned out his place, they found tons of paperback romances everywhere, stashed under the bed, in his old army footlocker, and under the kitchen counter. Sort of like my mom with booze. Anyway, I guess he didn’t want anyone to know that there was a starry-eyed romantic hiding underneath that tough GI exterior.
    Nan knew he was a softie. Sarge had a crush on my Nan; he’d tried to flirt with her in that gruff way of his. All of the old guys there did. They would ask Nan out to dinner at Mama Luigi’s or line up to dance with her on Copacabana Night. Her eyes still had a twinkle of enchantment in them. I didn’t know how she kept it going in that dreadful place.
    Betty the nurse was leaving as I walked up the crumbly path to Nan’s house. I tried not to laugh when I saw Betty. She had to be pushing seventy herself. She wore a push-up bra, a bucket of foundation and blush, and she dyed her hair unnaturally jet-black. It shined like the coat on Black Beauty, the horse. She also must have worn an industrial version of Spanx under her uniform. Who knew how she breathed in that thing or how she worked there when she should have been an inmate herself. It was pretty funny when she walked around all day checking on “the old folks” as she referred to the residents, calling them “old dear” and “ma’am” and speaking very loudly while emphasizing every syllable: “HOW ARE YOUR BOW-ELS? DID YOU HAVE A BOW-EL MOVE-MENT TO-DAY?” Please somebody kill me when I get so old people start asking me about the last time I pooped.
    “Nan, I’m here,” I yelled. I stepped into the living room and took a deep breath, inhaling the scent of rose oil and Joy perfume, which I loved—Nan’s patented antidote to wallowing in your own