One Night Only (Season 1: Deni's Story)

Chapter Eleven

Alfie stirs inside of his carrier and sniffs a couple of times, then resumes his nap. I envy his ability to sleep on planes. As often as I travel these days, it's something I have yet to master, and today's travel day has been long. With traffic, it takes close to an hour to get from our house to LAX, adding to the nearly five-hour flight to Toronto, the time in between at Pearson airport, and the almost two-hour connecting flight to Thunder Bay.

"How long do you think it will take us to get to the lake once we land?" I ask Mom.

"It should be a forty-five minute drive, but we aren't going there tonight," she answers. "I booked us a hotel. We can pick up the keys for the cottage in the morning, and then get some groceries before we head out there."

I perk up at the thought of wandering through the aisles of a supermarket and loading up a cart with food. It's a symbolic return to something more normal for me, even if it's only for a little while. I don't think I've been inside of a supermarket in close to two years—not since I became famous enough to make tabloid headlines, although that's only part of the reason why I don't go. So much of my time these days is spent rehearsing, recording, playing shows, or being tutored and doing homework. Mom goes on her own sometimes, but most of the time we get our groceries delivered.

"Can we get ketchup chips?" I give her a hopeful look.

She wrinkles her nose. "Yes, but those sound gross."

"Nope! We had them once, remember? I think it was after a show in Vancouver. The chips made my fingers all red right before I had a meet and greet, and Brynn gave me heck for getting ketchup crumbs stuck all over my lips." I pause, smiling at the memory.

"You had them," Mom reminds me. "I watched. There's something wrong about potato chips being that color."

"I guess that means more chips for me." I grin, then think of something else. "How about bagged milk?"

"I draw the line at bagged milk. How do you even open or pour that without it going everywhere?"

"There are videos on TikTok and YouTube," I inform her. "You just need a pitcher to put the bag in."

"We'll stick with what I know."

Mom returns to her book, and I occupy myself with creating a mental list of snack food I want to sneak into the shopping cart. My daydreams of Smarties and Mars bars are soon interrupted by an announcement that we've started our descent and will be landing in Thunder Bay in twenty-five minutes.

The rest of the flight is uneventful. The terminal we walk out to after deplaning has a few gates we pass on our way to the exit, and then we take an escalator down one level to the baggage claim. This airport doesn't look familiar to me, but that doesn't mean much. I've been in more airports than I can remember over the last several years, and some of my flights have been on private jets chartered by my record label to make tight performance-to-performance or performance-to-talk-show bookings, with a chauffeur picking me up at locations that don't require going inside of a terminal.

"Have we been here before?" I ask, while we wait for our luggage to be unloaded from the plane. Mom hasn't told me how she decided on the lake we're going to as our vacation spot.

"We have, but you were a baby. You wouldn't remember being here. We came here with your dad."

One of our suitcases makes an appearance on the baggage carousel as Mom finishes her sentence. She lunges for it, and I go in search of a luggage cart.

The great thing about this airport is how close together the baggage claim and the car rental counter are. After we have all of our suitcases, it takes only a few minutes to get the key fob for a Jeep Grand Cherokee that Mom reserved before we left Los Angeles. Once we're finished loading our suitcases and are seated inside the Jeep, Mom takes a few minutes to master the GPS.