I was thinking what everyone else in the trailer had to be thinking. Alex Harvey’s body hadn’t looked like this in, well, never.

“Anyway,” he continued unaware, “Mary Gaul, the producer, said she’d look around for a couple of lines for me. She’s going to help me get my SAG card.”

“I just bet she is,” I smirked.

“What part are you playing?” Brett asked the lioness, ignoring the giggles that followed my remark.

“Oh me? Nothing much. The ex-wife. Two scenes. A phone call and a flashback,” she answered.

“Wow.” He smiled that smile again. “Sounds great to me. I haven’t actually seen the script. But anyway, congratulations!”

Was it his naiveté or his sincerity that grated on me? Jealousy over the lioness? All I know is I felt a rise in my throat, that tight flush of energy I get when I’m about to do or say something I will end up regretting. At another time, I might have censored myself, but three weeks on prescription diet pills had made me jagged and impolite. Mix that with a heaping tablespoon of insecurity, and I was a Molotov cocktail.

He put his cowboy hat back on and inclined it with a tilt. “It was nice meeting y’all. I guess I’ll go back to looking for my dressing room.”

I took a sip of coffee, now annoyingly cold. “Hey! Wait, cowboy. What’s your name?”

He turned. “Barney.”

“Barney?” I searched the trailer hoping to muster support for my incredulity. But the faces were impassive, except for Katie’s whose brow was furrowed with concern. She knew me all too well.

“Yes, Barney Macahaney, ma’am, but my friends call me Buck.”

In retrospect, it was probably the “ma’am” that lit the fuse.

“Oh well, Buck, that’s a lot better,” I snorted. “Listen, Barney, I hate to break it to you, but you don’t have a trailer. Stand-ins are herded with the rest of the cattle. And take it from me, you might want to think about changing your name.”

A crimson flush started at his collar and burned up his handsome face, scorching the tops of his ears. He blinked as if to clear his vision and opened his mouth, but no words formed.

“Bitch,” the lioness muttered under her breath. She got up from her chair and without a glance in my direction, took the clearly shaken Barney by the arm. “Come on sugar, I’ll show you where to go.”

As the door latched behind them, everyone in the trailer glared at me.

I should have apologized that moment, or at least that day. But my worry concerning the size of my rear end at certain camera angles took up all the space in my head.

“Excuse me, knock knock?” Nurse Pierre’s voice interrupts my reflections. He sticks his curly head in the door as Brett scrambles to his feet.