Waiting for Tom Hanks Read online

  A JOVE BOOK

  Published by Berkley

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  1745 Broadway, New York, NY 10019

  Copyright © 2019 by Kerry Winfrey

  Excerpt from Not Like the Movies copyright © 2019 by Kerry Winfrey

  Penguin Random House supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin Random House to continue to publish books for every reader.

  A JOVE BOOK, BERKLEY, and the BERKLEY & B colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Winfrey, Kerry, author.

  Title: Waiting for Tom Hanks / Kerry Winfrey.

  Description: First edition. | New York: Jove, 2019.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018058330 | ISBN 9781984804020 (pbk.) | ISBN 9781984804037 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Romantic comedy films—Fiction. | Man-woman relationships—Fiction. | Women writers—Fiction. | Motion picture industry—Fiction. | Hanks, Tom—Fiction.

  Classification: LCC PS3623.I6444 W35 2019 | DDC 813/.6—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018058330

  First Edition: June 2019

  Cover illustration and design by Farjana Yasmin

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Version_1

  For Lauren Dlugosz Rochford, first and best reader

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I could never have written this book without the help and support of many, many people.

  Thank you to my amazing agent, Stephen Barbara, for believing in this story and working so hard to find it the perfect home.

  Thank you to the entire team at Berkley, most of all my brilliant editor, Cindy Hwang, for making this book the best it could be. Thank you to Angela Kim for all your hard work and to Farjana Yasmin for this absolute stunner of a book cover. Thank you to Jessica Brock, Fareeda Bullert, Elisha Kate, and Brittanie Black for going above and beyond (and responding so quickly to all of my many, many e-mails).

  Thank you to all my friends and family for coming to my events and caring about my books. Special thanks to Lauren Dlugosz Rochford for reading everything I write and always knowing exactly what to do to make it better. Emily Adrian, thank you for reading an early draft, for reassuring me that it wasn’t terrible, and for being willing to talk about the minutiae of publishing. Dr. Catherine Stoner, thanks for recommending my books to the vets and for listening to the boring details of writing! Thanks to my pizza sluts for inspiring the friendship between Annie and Chloe.

  Alicia Brooks: your never-ending hatred for “Escape (The Piña Colada Song)” inspired an entire scene in this book. Thank you for your tireless efforts to make sure everyone realizes how weird that song is.

  Thank you to the booksellers and librarians I’ve met on my writing journey. I appreciate your enthusiasm and hard work so much. Special thank-you to Cover to Cover in Columbus and Joseph-Beth Booksellers in Cincinnati for being so supportive of me and my career. And, of course, thank you to the Book Loft for being a great place to set a fictional scene of sexual tension.

  I’m so grateful for everyone who read my Tumblr, A Year of Romantic Comedies, and messaged/e-mailed/tweeted me to recommend a movie or talk about Tom Hanks. Even when people swore the rom-com was dead, we knew it could never really die.

  Thank you to Nora Ephron for all the joy you brought to the world and how well you understood sadness.

  Thank you to Harry for occasionally taking naps so I could write this book. Thank you, as always, to Hollis, especially this time for being my fact-checker.

  And, of course, thank you to Tom Hanks. It’s an honor to name a book after you.

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  One Year Later

  Excerpt from Not Like the Movies

  About the Author

  Chapter One

  I just thought I would’ve met Tom Hanks by now.

  Not real Tom Hanks, the beloved actor. After all, he’s married to Rita Wilson, and I’m not the sort of monster who would want to break up what is perhaps Hollywood’s one truly perfect union. And anyway, I’m twenty-seven, so he’s a little bit old for me (no offense if you’re reading this, Tom).

  The Tom Hanks I thought I’d meet is the Tom Hanks of romantic comedies. The Tom Hanks who starred in Nora Ephron films. The one who wrote about bouquets of sharpened pencils or told call-in radio show hosts how much he missed his wife. The one who lived on an unbelievably luxurious houseboat or called Meg Ryan “Shopgirl.” The man with a heart of gold, the one I was meant to be with even if we lived on opposite coasts or owned competing bookstores.

  I should have run into him by now, while I’m carrying a large, unwieldy stack of books and he’s hurrying to some important business meeting. Or maybe I should have tripped over my own feet and fallen right into his arms (note to self: start wearing more impractical footwear). Or maybe I should’ve bumped into him while Christmas shopping, when both of us spotted the very last fancy scarf and we each desperately needed to buy it for our own fancy-scarf-wearing relatives. And we would fight and get angry and hurl insults that neither of us really meant, but that underlying passion would translate into some fantastic flirty banter, and then that scarf would get written into our wedding vows in a hilarious-yet-touching surprise that wouldn’t leave a dry eye in the house.

  Not that I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this, or anything.

  It’s just that I’ve seen a lot of romantic comedies, and I can’t even blame that on Tom Hanks himself, as much as I would like to pin all my problems on a celebrity.

  No, I blame my mother.

  She’s the one who indoctrinated me into the Cult of Ephron, the one who showed me When Harry Met Sally . . . when I was only nine years old and way, way too young to understand what Sally was imitating in that deli scene. She’s the one who spent Saturday nights sobbing over the end of Sleepless in Seattle, showing me that true love sometimes involved a little bit of light stalking and a lot of encouragement from Rosie O’Donnell. She’s the one who introduced me to the charms of Rock Hudson and Doris Day sharing a phone line and being incredibly deceptive in Pillow Talk.

  And yes, only one of those films actually stars Tom Hanks, but that’s not the point. Tom Hanks isn’t a person so much as he is a representation of the kind of man I deserve, as my mom told me over and o
ver. “Don’t settle for someone who doesn’t adore you,” she told me. “My favorite thing about your dad was that he worshipped the ground I walked on.”

  She was kidding, but only sort of. Anyone who saw a picture of my dad and mom together would know that they were one of those golden couples, the ones who get together and stay together and end up like those old people talking to the camera in When Harry Met Sally . . . about how they met. And they would’ve been, if he hadn’t died when I was just a baby, before I even got a chance to remember him.

  My mom died much later, of a heart attack. I have a theory that you can react to tragedy in one of two ways: you either distract yourself from your pain with over-activity, or you make yourself a home inside your pain cocoon. In high school and college, my coping strategy was the former. Instead of thinking about how much I missed my mom, which could easily have been a 24/7 extracurricular, I threw myself into activities, clubs, and projects. I was valedictorian in high school and graduated summa cum laude in college with a degree in film studies. I studied movies, watched approximately one million of them, and dreamed of someday writing my own Nora Ephron–style romantic comedy.

  But after college, after I was done crossing off every item on my to-do list, my over-activity ground to a halt. I couldn’t bear to leave my childhood home, which my uncle Don moved into after my mom’s death so I wouldn’t have to change schools. I didn’t have anything to do after I hung up my graduation robe in the closet, but I knew one thing: Tom Hanks would be able to solve this.

  Again, not Tom Hanks himself, although he does seem like a very smart man, and I’m sure that if he can write a short-story collection or direct the film That Thing You Do! then he could probably figure out a way to fix my life. But in most romantic comedies, the female lead is floundering. Maybe she’s adrift, maybe she’s lonely, maybe she’s a workaholic who needs to learn how to love! But no matter what, she has some sort of dream she’s working toward, and she just can’t figure out how to get there. But then she meets him—Tom Hanks or Rock Hudson or the rapper Common in the way underrated basketball rom-com Just Wright—and it all clicks into place. She figures it out. She gets stronger and smarter and she achieves her dreams, plus she finds love.

  But I’m starting to think that the movies I’ve dedicated my life to may have lied to me. Nora Ephron herself may have indirectly lied to me. Tom Hanks, as much as I’ve trusted him, may have lied to me.

  Because I have it all: the sympathetic backstory, the montage of humiliations minor and major, unrealized career aspirations, the untamed pre-makeover hair. But still, I wait. Single, lonely, Hanksless.

  I can’t help but think that a large part of my current state of Hankslessness is due to the fact that I’m a twenty-seven-year-old woman who shares a Victorian house with her uncle.

  I let myself into the house as quietly as I can, slipping off my boots to avoid tracking slush through the house. It’s the middle of January, and the Columbus snow long ago ceased to be the sparkling, magical holiday treat it is in so many Hallmark Christmas movies. Now it’s just gray and gross, and it’s depressing to look at it and know there are months left of this. Ohio winters are an endurance test, not necessarily in how much snow you can handle but in how many gray, sunless days you can take before you flee to a warmer climate.

  I hang up my coat and try to creep through the living room and upstairs without being noticed, but then I hear Uncle Don’s voice ring out. “Annie!”

  I turn to my right, where four fifty-something men are crowded around our dining room table.

  I wave and step into the dining room, which is lined with dark wainscoting and the same red floral wallpaper my mom installed when I was a baby. “Hey, guys.”

  This is Uncle Don’s Dungeons and Dragons group. Every Thursday night they meet to—well, honestly, I’m not 100 percent sure what the game entails. I hear snippets—stuff about orcs and werewolves and ice lords—but personally, I wouldn’t know a wizard from a warlock, so I figure this is Uncle Don’s version of book club and try to stay out of it. Mostly I think it’s kind of sweet that these four men have been getting together almost every week for going on twenty years. And other than his part-time job at the gaming store, the Guardtower, Uncle Don doesn’t really get out much, so it’s nice that he has some built-in socialization.

  “How was the library, sweet pea?” Uncle Don asks, ignoring the glare from his friend Rick. Rick is the Dungeon Master, aka the boss of the game, which you would know if you saw the shirt he wears every Thursday that proclaims, “When the Dungeon Master smiles, it’s already too late.” I have no idea what this means, but since Dungeon Master Rick hates distractions, I’ve never asked for an explanation.

  “Good,” I say. “I got a lot done.”

  Even though I’ve been attempting to write my own rom-com for years, right now I’m working as a freelance writer. Well, that makes it sound a little more glamorous than it is, seeing as I write “web content” with titles like “The Five BEST WAYS to Unclog a Toilet” and “Ten of Jennifer Lawrence’s Hottest Hairdos!” I may not be winning any awards anytime soon, but it pays (and you’d be surprised how often you use that toilet-unclogging advice when you live in a house with old pipes).

  “What did you write about today?” asks Earl.

  “Is It Expired? What to Keep and What to Throw Out!” I say with wide eyes and jazz hands, trying to mimic the excitement of the headline.

  “Did I ever tell you guys,” Paul says, wiping his glasses on his shirt, “about that time I accidentally ate a yogurt that expired in 2007?”

  “Ugh!” I say as Don asks, “What happened?”

  Paul shrugs, putting his glasses back on. “Well, I’m still here, aren’t I?”

  “But he did throw up for the better part of three days,” says Paul’s husband, Earl, who rounds out their gaming foursome. The two of them met through D&D, which would be a great meet-cute for a rom-com if I knew enough about D&D to write it.

  “Excuse me,” says Dungeon Master Rick. “But unless the evil gnome that’s currently trapping your party in a cave can be vanquished by dairy, I don’t really want to discuss yogurt right now.”

  “Fine, fine, fine,” Paul says. “See you later, Annie.”

  Uncle Don waves, rolling his eyes at Dungeon Master Rick, who’s already describing the various gnome inventions scattered throughout the cave.

  I smile and head upstairs to my room, the same one I’ve had since I was a child. Although it’s changed a little—now I have soft pink walls instead of kitten wallpaper, and framed photos of my parents (and, okay, one of Nora Ephron, too) instead of posters of whatever guy I thought was cute at the time. But other than that, it’s pretty much the same. My twin bed, my refinished antique desk, the green glass lamp that used to belong to my grandma.

  In other words, this isn’t the kind of bedroom you can bring a man back to. Other than the regrettable sex I had with my high school boyfriend right after my mom died in the hopes that it would make me feel better (spoiler alert: it did not!), I’ve never even had sex in this room. I mean, how would that even work? Would I introduce a dude to all the D&D guys, then excuse us with a line like, “Well, I’m going upstairs to try to bone this guy as quietly as possible, but everything in this house squeaks because it’s a million years old, so sorry, I guess!” I don’t even know how a full-size man would fit into that twin bed; his feet would probably hang off the end.

  But I haven’t done anything to change my situation, and that’s because I’m still waiting for Tom Hanks. And sure, he hasn’t found me yet, but it’s okay, because I’m just at the beginning of my rom-com, the part with a montage that demonstrates how sad, lonely, and down-on-her-luck our leading lady is.

  My Tom Hanks is out there, and I’m not going to settle until I find him.

  Chapter Two

  “I’m not saying you have to settle,” my best friend, Chloe, says as she sits down across from me at the wobbly table. “I’m just saying you should give
some of these guys a chance.”

  Nick’s coffee shop is the perfect place to get some writing done. It’s within walking distance of my house, there are plenty of outlets to plug in my laptop, and the ambient noise of people talking and cups clinking is the perfect soundtrack for working. I guess what I’m saying is that it would be the perfect place to work if Chloe wasn’t a barista there and we didn’t spend most of my work time talking.

  Well, she calls herself a barista. Nick Velez, the owner, simply refers to her as an “employee” because words like barista and latte art make him cringe. Nick’s other employee, Tobin, is a college student who rarely, if ever, shows up on time and usually drops more cups than he serves, but he has a good heart, and Nick keeps him around, despite always threatening to fire him.

  “I give every guy I go out with a chance,” I say, “but the last guy I went out with smelled like Funyuns.”

  Chloe wrinkles her nose. “You mean onions?”

  “No,” I say. “That would’ve been better. He smelled specifically like the snack food Funyuns.”

  Chloe rolls her eyes. “Okay, well, what about that guy?”

  She points to a dude in his late twenties wearing headphones and sitting at a table in the corner. I shake my head.

  “What’s wrong with him?” she asks, exasperated. “He’s cute!”

  “First off, he doesn’t give off ‘lives on a houseboat with his young son’ vibes,” I say. “And secondly, he’s just . . . sitting there. Big deal.”

  Chloe stares blankly at me.

  “Where’s the intrigue? The mystery? The part where we’re secretly pen pals but also own rival businesses?”

  Chloe shakes her head. “I always think you’re exaggerating, but you’re literally in love with a fictional man. You know those movies aren’t real, right? They’re made up! I’ve watched about ten thousand more rom-coms than I ever wanted to see because of you, and I can definitely say that they’re all bullshit.”