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  Then I turned on the TV. Big mistake. The movie playing was Identity, with John Cusack, in which ten strangers are stranded at a hotel in Nevada and murdered one by one. There was John Cusack, coming out of a motel room that looked exactly like ours. Oh, come on! Couldn’t the motel somehow control what was showing on their channels so as not to frighten the patrons? The same way airplanes never show airplane disaster movies? I was trying to be a grown-up, but this was beyond. By the time Dean returned with the luggage, I was in full panic. Stifling my fear, I put the kids to sleep. Then I climbed into our bed with all my clothes and socks on. I looked up at the ceiling. What was that on the ceiling? Blood. I was certain it was blood. Could it get any worse? I huddled there in sleepless terror for the rest of the night.

  • • •

  Now we were headed to Dallas, my father’s hometown. On our way we stopped in Amarillo, Texas, to visit the world-famous Big Texan Steak Ranch, where we wanted to attempt the world-famous 72-ounce steak challenge. As they say at Big Texan, “Many have tried. Many have failed.” In order to earn our 72-ounce top sirloin steaks and a place of honor on the list of world-famous challenge winners, we had to eat a fried shrimp cocktail, a salad, a baked potato, a dinner roll, and the entire megasteak in under an hour.

  Dean ordered his steak medium and it came to the table dry and tough, cooked to the bone. Dean didn’t flinch. As always, he was a total competitor. He stopped talking to us and focused one hundred percent on the task at hand. Going primal, he started tearing long strips of steak off with his hands, standing up and stomping around to aid digestion. Meanwhile I was making jokes, hiding the shrimp, and shoving my dinner roll down my bra.

  Later in the dinner I started feeling guilty about the hidden dinner roll. I wasn’t a cheater. And besides, what if a reporter from Star magazine was in the corner of this Amarillo, Texas, steak-house watching and preparing to bust me for cheating and/or hoarding food because of my alleged eating disorder? I pulled the roll out and ate it after all.

  I probably ate eight ounces of steak—more than Scout!—but I barely made a visible dent in the plateful. Meanwhile Dean scarfed fifty-six ounces. A mere sixteen ounces short of the great glory. Alas, it was not meant to be. Stuffed and defeated, we paid for our meals and headed to Dallas.

  In Dallas we met up with my eighty-year-old cousin Sam, the son of my father’s oldest sister, Becky. I’d met Sam only twice: once when my family went to Dallas by private train when I was three and not again until he came to my wedding to Charlie. Now, in Dallas, I asked Sam to show me and Dean where my father had grown up—the house he lived in on Browder Street. Sam pointed out where my father’s house had been. It was a sleazy motel now, but his elementary school was still down the block.

  My cousin Sam showed up with a copy of my father’s memoir, some of the pages marked. He was clearly a Spelling: he came ready to give notes, in this case not on a script but on a life. Sam told me, “When your father left Texas, he tried to forget Dallas.” I didn’t remember it that way at all. He’d always told me stories about how he was too poor to buy shoes; how he brought home leftover bread from the bakery; how he ran home from school, trying not to get his ass kicked for being Jewish. But Sam said, “Aaron told stories that put Dallas down.” Where my father told stories of his poor childhood, Sam wanted to remember the love and laughter. He said, “I thought we were the luckiest kids in the world.” I think Sam felt like my dad abandoned the family to build a life of success and fortune in L.A. My opinion was that the storyteller in my father saw the dramatic appeal of his remarkable change of circumstances, his rags-to-riches tale, but I can see how his relatives may not have been thrilled about that portrait.

  I just said, “My dad always spoke fondly of Texas.” Sam seemed surprised and glad to hear that. He showed me family photos I’d never seen before and took me to my grandparents’ gravesite.

  There they were, David and Pearl Spelling, my grandparents. My middle name is Davey after my grandfather David Spelling, but I met my father’s parents only once, when I was three. They died soon after. On the other side, my maternal grandmother died when I was five. The only grandparent who was around when I was growing up was my mother’s father, but I always missed having a grandmother. It was part of why I wanted my children to have a relationship with my mother. I took a leaf from each gravesite for Liam and Stella’s scrapbooks.

  Here was another side effect of my father’s fear of flying. Because we rarely traveled, I always felt like I had a small family. Going to Dallas made me realize for the first time that I actually had a large extended family. I wished I’d had a chance to get to know everyone while we were growing up. The family history was dying out and I, at least, couldn’t do much to sustain it now.

  When we left Texas, we had a long drive east to Mississippi. As the miles of highway rolled past, Dean’s and my true road trip selves emerged. Dean, who has a tendency to get completely consumed by new interests, particularly if they involve driving manly vehicles (witness his motorcycle obsession), got extreme about driving the RV. At the very first truck stop we hit, Dean bought truck gloves, a steering wheel cover, and weights that he could use to build strength in one arm while driving with the other. Each morning he made an enormous cup of coffee, put on a headset to listen to a CD (at one of the truck stops I got him two CDs, a Life on the Highway compilation and Greatest Country Hits), and climbed up into the driver’s seat as if he were driving a big rig.

  Once Dean had assumed his trucker role, there was no interacting with him. He was in character. A Method trucker. When I tried to engage him, he grunted sentence fragments: “Precious cargo. Must stay focused. Eyes on the road.” You didn’t have to have a special license to drive the RV, but a couple of guys on our film crew actually had commercial driver’s licenses. They could have given Dean a break. Even the executive producer offered to drive if Dean got tired, but nope. He wouldn’t hear of it. He insisted on driving the entire way himself. It was so Dean.

  Meanwhile, I found my own new obsession: truck stops. Okay, I guess I’ll concede that my obsession fell under the larger category of “shopping,” which meant it was anything but new to me. But it was certainly a new subcategory. I never knew there was such a thing as a truck stop, but before we left, Dean explained to me that truck stops were like giant 7-Elevens, stocked with every junk food imaginable, trucker souvenirs, and a wide selection of hats with slogans. He had me at junk food. Dean never wanted to linger. He had a certain number of miles he wanted to cover every day (of course), and we were always behind schedule. But when he was forced to stop for gas, Liam and I would dash into the truck stop for a little taste of America.

  If I went quickly, head down, grabbed my Cheetos, and hurried out, I could do a truck stop without getting recognized. But most of the time I wanted to scrutinize the aisles. People would stop, do a double take, then stare at me. I don’t think anyone expected to run into me at a truck stop in the middle of the United States. People were shocked. They touched me a lot, as if to confirm that I was real.

  We found un-PC hats about shooting ducks and eating deer. There was a stuffed animal lion’s head trophy to decorate the RV. I bought a sign that said, “What happens on the road stays on the road.” And Liam and I got seriously into pork rinds.

  There were long driving days in the RV. Dean drove while I did crafts with the kids. Before we left home I’d made a craft box for each kid. I put in homemade play dough, pipe cleaners, googly eyes, stickers, crayons, and paper. The play dough was a huge hit. We made farm animals using the pipe cleaners and googly eyes. We put stickers on each other’s faces. We read books, sang songs, and watched DVDs. The kids slept a lot.

  • • •

  Before I knew it we were rolling into Atlanta. The trip had been work; entertaining the kids in a small place is hard enough. With big cameras taking up critical room, space was pretty tight. And Dean was in such a myopic trucker trance that we barely spoke for the entire trip. When we finally arri
ved in Atlanta, I said, “Hi! I miss you and I’ve been in an RV with you for almost a week.”

  Dean said, “Well, we were on the clock. I had to get you here safely.”

  Now that we were here, intact, we were ready to fulfill our goal. We were all excited to see Patsy.

  It had been two weeks since Patsy’s surgery, which had gone well. She knew we were coming, but we wanted to surprise her anyway, so we hid at her sister Joan’s house. Dean, the kids, Scout, Bill, and I were all there to meet her. My friend James, who’s a designer, had come separately to help us with a surprise for Patsy. And Mehran was there too. He flew in to see Patsy and be part of the surprise. All of my friends have been with Patsy through the past few years, hearing her stories and knowing how much she wanted this surgery. They wanted to be there with her as she moved on with her life.

  As Patsy walked in the front door, the first thing she had to see was the Tori & Dean camera, there to catch (and spoil) her surprise. But Patsy walked in, saw the camera, and just kept walking. She’d been with us long enough to know the drill. Cameras don’t count. No matter what the circumstances, you pretend they aren’t there. Patsy was cool. She didn’t flinch or react to the cameras in the slightest. I thought, I’ve taught her well. Then we jumped out, all wearing “Team Patsy” T-shirts. When she saw all of us, she gasped, “Oh!” We’d surprised her in spite of the camera.

  Patsy always says that the babies forget her when she leaves, but both Liam and Stella ran right over to hug her.

  Our planning for the trip wasn’t all about hitting the best truck stops on the way. After we’d all spent some time together, I said to Patsy, “I have a surprise for you. You have a phone reading with John Edward.” John Edward is a psychic. On his TV show, Crossing Over with John Edward, he helps his audience members communicate with people on the other side. Patsy and her husband, Humphrey, had raised six children, but the great tragedy of her life was that the three oldest had died. Patsy has always wanted to meet John Edward. It’s one of her dreams—to communicate with the children she loved so much and lost. I knew that after her surgery she’d have a new lease on life, and it seemed like the right time to try to get her a reading. I talked to my publicist, and through her John agreed to do a phone reading with Patsy, and while he was at it, he’d do it for me and Dean too.

  Patsy was so excited. She and her daughter Amanda went upstairs to have the phone call in private. Later she told us that John Edward kept talking to her about a woman who’d lost a leg. When she said it, Patsy’s sister Joan exclaimed, “It’s Mom!” Their mother had died when Patsy was twelve. Now her sister told her for the first time that right before their mother had died in the hospital, doctors had amputated her leg. It hadn’t saved her life. The leg had been sewn back for the funeral, and Joan had never told Patsy. John Edward also said that Eddie, the son who died most recently, wanted to talk to his sister. Patsy put Amanda on the phone. Eddie spoke to Amanda through John Edward. I don’t know what was said on the other end of the line, but when Amanda came down she was crying. It was intense, and I knew Patsy’s yearning for her children would never be satisfied, but I also knew she was deeply moved.

  Dean and I were supposed to have readings too, but John Edward was running out of time. We decided that he would do readings for me and Dean at the same time. We picked up two extensions in Joan’s master bedroom, but as soon as we started talking, Dean’s people dominated our reading. John Edward doesn’t control who comes in, and it was Dean’s family who came through, clear as day. His father said something about a truck: his truck was Dean’s dad’s prized possession. And as for his mother, John Edward said, “She says that you’ll know what this means: you took a furniture set of hers.” It was true—Dean had his mother’s bedroom set. Then John Edward said, “Your mother is saying that she was just with you. She wants you to know she just saw you. At a powwow. I see Indians, tepees, an Indian headdress. Someone vomited. You guys were just there.”

  I said, “Oh my God, Dean. That woman, that place, the petrified wood, the tepees!” There had been tepees in the desert around the souvenir shop at Stewart’s Petrified Wood, where we’d met the woman who struck me as looking exactly as Dean’s mother would have looked if she were still alive. And Stella had had a stomach flu the same day. She had vomited in the RV. Everything fit with John Edward’s vision. It was mind-blowing. I stared at Dean in amazement. He said, “Oh, wow, that’s cool,” but (not for the first time) he wasn’t as worked up as I was. I don’t know if he bought it. It’s hard for him to go there. I knew the woman who’d looked like Dean’s mother wasn’t her, but I still believed that in some way she had come through to see us. It was a huge moment for me. Not so for Dean. I’ve never heard him tell the story and I’m pretty sure he hasn’t thought about it since.

  After Dean’s parents had their piece, I was waiting, hoping to hear from my father or Nanny or my old friend Jeremy, who passed when I was almost thirty. Then John Edward said, “There’s a person here. The person wants to reach out to someone through you, Tori. The person wants to reach out to someone whose name starts with the letter R.”

  I said, “Randy?” Was it my father, trying to reach out to my brother through me?

  But John Edward said, “No, no. Richmond?”

  I don’t know a Richmond. I said, “Randall?” still hoping for Randy.

  Then John Edward said, “No. This is really weird, Tori. I have no idea what this means, but I keep getting a picture of Farrah Fawcett.”

  I said, “Are you sure? I mean, I’ve lost some important people. Nanny . . .”

  He said, “No, it’s Farrah. Farrah Fawcett’s coming through.”

  I said, “Well, maybe my dad’s there? Behind the hair? Or a young guy named Jeremy?”

  John Edward said, “Nope, I’m still getting Farrah Fawcett. Does that make sense?”

  I said, “Well, we were neighbors . . .”

  John Edward said, “And your father did Charlie’s Angels.”

  “True.”

  John Edward said, “Yeah, it’s definitely Farrah.”

  “That’s bizarre,” I said. I couldn’t imagine why Farrah would want to talk to me. I mean, I knew Farrah. She lived next door to me. She worked on my father’s show. We had commiserated one time about bad ex-boyfriends. And it’s true that she was dead and was therefore qualified to contact me through an other world specialist. But never in a million years would I have expected Farrah Fawcett to show up at my psychic reading.

  John Edward said, “You think it’s bizarre for you? Think how bizarre it is for the medium. I’ve only had a celebrity come through once before and it was royalty.”

  I laughed.

  Dean said, “Farrah was royalty to me in my teenage years.”

  So Farrah Fawcett hijacked my reading. She told John Edward that she lived near me, which was true. She wanted me to tell her family that she was okay and that she was with her mom. And she wanted to get in touch with her son Redmond. Not my brother Randy. The person whose name started with the letter R was her son Redmond. She kept saying, “Tell him to remember Hawaii and Daffy Duck.”

  That was the end of it. John Edward hung up and I reflected on the message I had received from beyond. What was I supposed to do with Farrah’s request? Call Ryan O’Neal and tell him that Farrah was okay? Contact Redmond in his court-ordered residential rehab program to tell him about Hawaii and Daffy Duck?

  I believe in communication from beyond. When Liam says, “There was a monster in my room,” Dean tells him, “Oh, I sent him in to make you laugh.” But I’m like, “What did the monster look like and where was he standing? What did he tell you?” I couldn’t help wondering if it was true. What if Farrah did jump in because it was the only opportunity she had, and I’m the asshole who doesn’t reach out to her family? If I saw Redmond and mentioned Daffy Duck, would that turn out to be his childhood nickname? I was dying to find out. But Farrah had chosen her recipient badly. Seriously, I couldn’t call Redmond. Me,
of all people, selected by a dead person to reach out and give a message? As if I would call someone I don’t know, much less call them to give them a message from their dead mother about Daffy Duck. Didn’t Farrah know how nonconfrontational I was? Could I ask John Edward to tell her that?

  I never called Redmond, of course. It’s unresolved and it still kind of haunts me. I should call him. I really should. Shoot.

  • • •

  John Edward wasn’t the only surprise we had planned for Patsy. Though we’d only just arrived at her sister’s place, the reality was that, unbeknownst to Patsy, we’d actually come to town a day earlier and gone straight to Patsy’s house. We had some work to do there.

  The whole idea started with a new mattress. I knew Patsy liked our Sleep Number mattress at home. Patsy had always said that her mattress killed her back, and if we got sick of our bed, she’d gladly take it. So when I was still back in L.A., I reached out to Sleep Number. When I told them about Patsy, how she’d just had surgery, and how much she loved our mattress, they agreed to give her a Sleep Number of her own (and no, I didn’t get paid to mention them here. Or anyone else for that matter).

  Then I started thinking bigger. Patsy’s house was new, but she’d gotten it around the time that Eddie died and she’d been working for us almost the whole time since she’d moved in. She’d never had a chance to decorate it, and even now that she was home, she’d been too ill and depressed. I wanted to do something to make her house more of a home. Patsy always said she liked my style. Maybe along with the mattress I’d redo her bedroom. I knew she’d be in there a lot while she was recovering. I asked her daughter Amanda for pictures of the house to see what we could plan.

  When I got the photos, I saw that Patsy’s bedroom was newly painted, but there were other parts of the house that could use a face-lift. We arrived in Waleska, got the house keys from her sister, and in twenty-four hours, with my friend James’s help, we did everything we could to brighten the place up. Our budget was small, so we started by painting everything: we knew we could do that on a shoestring. Patsy loves red, so we did an accent wall in her kitchen. And I knew she’d always wanted a red front door, but people told her she was crazy and shouldn’t do it. So we took care of that too. We added new pieces from Pier 1. We framed pictures of her family and hung them on the wall. We found pictures of our kids in a closet and hung them up too. After a day of work, we saw Patsy, talked to John Edward, and told her, “You can’t go back to your house today. Sleep at Joan’s tonight.” She squinted her eyes and said, “I know you’re up to something.”