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EPISODE
3, SCENE 5
It was late in the afternoon. Skiers were coming off the hill. Kelly bid a grateful goodbye to odious Anthony Aldente at the ski school. She collected Mason at Locals and together they walked into town to attend Jordan Thorne's office party. Thorne's friends and fellow brokers stood around drinking rum-laced eggnog. A scale model of the completed Clifftop hotel was displayed like a shrine. What was supposed to be a celebration of the ground breaking was muted by a sense of condolence. Jordan tried his best to defuse it by telling eccentric Dolores stories. "Mom had more real estate savvy than all of us in this room combined," Jordan laughed. "There was this old cowboy who owned four hundred acres in Ridgeway when it was just a gas station. He wanted to split, go down to Florida, he was looking for a woman there, I don't know what... and Mom got him to trade her the four hundred acres for a new truck and a good horse. She threw in a trailer for the horse and the cowboy made the deal. Now his acres are downtown Ridgeway. Mom's genius, to me, is that she held onto it." Jordan raised his glass. Everybody else did too. Kelly worked the room, chatting up other brokers. When the talk turned to timeshares, Kelly listened. She wanted to know if they were getting as much resistance as she was. "I did better selling the Franz Klammer," she overheard one broker talking. "I think it was because of the garage. I could tell people Tom Cruise bought an apartment there just to have a parking space next to the lifts. What can I say about Clifftop? Walk out your door, you might fall off the mountain..." Kelly scanned the room for Mason. There he was, moping in a corner, hugging a beer. Kelly went over to him. "You're not having a good time?" she asked. Mason hated parties and they hated him. He also loathed the real estate crowd. Their relentless phony hustle. Their show of money. Their rulership of the town. It was all anyone talked about. "It's that obvious, huh?" He deadpanned, taking another swig of beer. "It's not good for business, Mason," Kelly whispered tightly. "Yours or mine." "You don't want to become one of them, Kel." "I don't intend to!" Kelly snapped back. She couldn't stand his sour imperious attitude. "But I'm working with them and it's a great job, a people job, and I could use you to be a little more of a person, even if you just pretend." Mason levelled a look at her. He placed his beer down on a table. "I'll be over at the Sheridan," he said, and walked out. His exit was noticed. Kelly was furious with him, and with herself for dissing him. The last thing she wanted on Christmas Eve! |