A Girl's Best Friend Page 6

  “His name is Kyle Keller. I don’t really know him too well, but he’s the part-time music pastor.” Lilly pulls me aside and introduces me to someone else, but I don’t hear what she’s saying. There’s something about that man playing the guitar. I just feel like he’s sitting there, waiting for me to come over, and I can’t get to him. It’s not really an attraction thing, just intrigue, like he has something to say to me and I must hear it.

  The singles pastor, a man of about forty, sits beside someone I can only assume is his wife, as she struggles to keep two toddler boys looking like good little church children rather than the obvious terrors they hope to be. My money is on the boys. The mother, a young woman with a pretty face and thin, muscular arms wrestles the boys in place without missing a beat, and the pastor begins speaking. Everyone files into place, and the pastor opens up with a “pre-message” that, I have to admit, I don’t hear a word of. The pastor introduces worship and we listen to Kyle play solo while the words pop up on a blue screen behind him.

  After worship, we break into small prayer groups and “share.” This has been bred out of me, so I don’t say a thing, but I listen and nod with my most compassionate smile as everyone talks about the horrors of work and increasing rent. My eyes follow the guitar player as he gets up and leaves.

  No one knows who I am here. That is both freeing and utterly frightening, because no one really cares either.

  “So, Morgan, if you don’t have a job, maybe we could pray for your job search,” Steve Bandy, the dentist dandy, says.

  “Yes!” I point at him. “That would be a good idea. Pray I’ll get a job.”

  And a life.

  And an image.

  Please!

  chapter 7

  After a solid night’s sleep, I wake up to the roar of traffic on Highway 101 and my mother’s picture on the front page of the Chronicle. Lilly must have left it for me. My heart plunges when I see the familiar glamour shot and my mother’s poised elegance. How on earth she managed to have just the right pose every time there was a camera near remains a mystery. She was like a bat, hearing the high-pitched sonar squeal of the photographer and turning with extreme precision towards it with a gracious smile.

  I open the paper to the article in which she’s mentioned, and there again is the picture of me in Andy’s arms. The headline reads, “Like Mother, Like Daughter.” I crumple the paper and don’t bother to read whatever tripe they’ve dredged up today. I ran off with a loser, big deal. As if I’m the first. Where is Britney Spears when I need her?

  But my mother’s photo does give me pause. When my mother, Traci Malliard, is spoken of in public, both my father and I don a sorrowful, reverent look that would make even the most callous of journalists cower in sympathy for our shared pain over her untimely loss. There are, of course, the persistent rumors, but we never speak of them. We stand shoulder to shoulder and protect her memory as if she was Mother Mary herself. When in fact she had far more in common with Joan Crawford—more than the fact they were both actresses and liked fire-engine red lipstick.

  Life with my mother, when she was alive, was a persistent nightmare. My father escaped to his work, acquiring more and more real estate deeds and business deals to make himself feel like a man and escape her wrath. But whatever he owned, she wasn’t impressed with, and so at night he would come home to hear her estimation of his worthlessness.

  In contrast, or perhaps because of her snappishness, I thought my daddy hung the moon. I would hear my mother shriek at him behind slammed doors, and his eerie silence, ignoring her as though she was a mere gnat in his great forest. My mother was the great enigma to me. The woman behind the closed doors. She was truly a beauty—her nose is still a favorite of the plastic surgery set—but as far as warmth? She made Mrs. Henry seem like a cozy log cabin. At least from what I remember. I remember being frightened of her and avoiding her at all costs.

  Still, my father cared for her physically until the bitter end, keeping Mrs. Henry around to nurse her through her horrible fight with ovarian cancer. My mother’s once-glowing skin became ashen gray and her voluptuous figure withered away to a mere skeletal remnant. I don’t know what her faith was when she passed, but I am ever-hopeful. Yet sadly realistic.

  Speaking of realistic. I look around to the concrete walls in Lilly’s apartment—the dusty windows twenty feet off the ground, the lack of art—and I laugh nervously. The dysfunction here is no different than in my own beautiful surroundings at home. We are broken people, regardless of station or environment, and my need for Christ becomes ever more apparent, like the one ray of light shining from the west bank of windows.

  As I sit here on Lilly’s futon and open my Bible, I am ready to delve into my history and leave it behind.

  Doorbell.

  Right after I get the door.

  I get up and open it to see my father in his double-breasted suit, his countenance missing its usual bluster, and it’s like a sign from above. As I let him in, I kick the balled-up newspaper under the futon.

  “I’ll get my things,” I tell him.

  He shakes his head. “I’m not here to get you.”

  But he looks parched, his color wan. I can’t see him like this without remembering how my mother treated him, and I worry that I am exactly like her. He doesn’t have the paper in his hand, and I wonder if he’s seen today’s dirt. (And where are the journalists when there’s a real story? Like that I wore rhinestone cowboy boots to a social function? Now that is scandalous.)

  “You’re not here to get me?”

  “Do you want me to be?”

  I think about this for a minute. “No, actually, I’m job hunting today.”

  I wonder for a moment if he notices my clothes, how they lack the proper fit and the labels he’s grown to recognize as my favorites, but he seems to be involved in his own thoughts and pays my appearance little mind.

  “Good for you, sweetheart. I hope you find a good one. Don’t let them pay you anything less than what you’re worth.”

  Which, as an unemployed, unskilled laborer, I have to wonder is what, exactly?

  “If you’re not here to take me home, why are you here?”

  “I’ve met a woman.”

  Lord have mercy.

  “You’ve met a woman?” I’m fearful. Granted, I only know my father’s love life to exist in my mother, but let’s just say his track record rivals my own. Maybe it’s a curse. I take some comfort in the idea that maybe my future is mapped out and I’m merely a victim of my genes.

  He looks me straight in the eye. “I didn’t think I’d ever consider marriage again, Morgan. But I am. I think I can trust her.”

  “Trust her as in you could buy a car from her? Or as in she wouldn’t steal from the store if left there alone.”

  “Trust her as in I could avoid a prenup.”

  “But you won’t, of course.”

  “True. One can never be too careful.”

  “Where did you meet her?”

  “At the club.”

  The thought of what he has in store for me as a stepmother sort of frightens me. Will she be twenty-four? Married fourteen times? Have a little trouble with the bottle? What could it be? The fact that I haven’t met her is hardly a mystery. Daddy usually doesn’t take women seriously enough to share them with the world. His idea of good publicity is to have a new woman on his arm at each event and keep the media guessing.

  My question is aimed at her. How in the world does she need him enough that he feels it’s necessary to tie the knot? And where exactly does this leave me, his codependent partner in life?

  “Daddy, why would you want to get married? I thought you and I had discovered we’re free spirits.” Translation: warped human beings who cannot function in the world of relationship.

  “Morgan, I’ve finally realized that you’re becoming your own woman. It’s time for me to start having my life now. I’ve raised you and you’re ready to fly.”

  I know this moment generall
y comes a bit before a kid turns twenty-nine, but I’m a slow learner.

  “Daddy, what about Andy?” I ask, wondering if he’ll see I’m not as ready for flight as he might imagine.

  “I never expected you to do things perfectly. Granted, I didn’t expect you to do things with quite so much lack of perfection.” He rolls his eyes at this. “You’ve had your Andy; you didn’t marry him at least.” He pauses and claps his hands. “I did marry your mother.”

  Daddy, I blew it too. “So when will I meet her?”

  “That’s why I’m here.” My father checks his watch. “I need you to meet us for dinner on Saturday night at the club. I’m going to be making my announcement public and I want you there to celebrate. Maybe the leeches can print something good for a change, no?”

  “Can’t I meet her beforehand?” I want to be prepared if she has a bad facelift or a puffy pink nose from an enlarged liver and too much alcohol.

  “Morgan, your grammar, and you must stop questioning my decisions.” He looks at his expensive shoes, and his expression shifts. “You’re just like your mother sometimes. I don’t need you second-guessing my decisions. Do you understand?”

  “It’s good to be accountable once in a while, Dad. I just want to meet her before I have to plaster on a fake smile in front of people. Is that too much trouble?”

  “Your mother taught you how to handle social situations; you’ll be fine. You could have met her at home, but you’re the one who left. Made me trudge across town to visit this box you’re living in.” He checks his watch yet again. “Where are the windows in this place, Morgan?”

  “At twenty-nine, I left home. I’m twenty-nine, Daddy, and I’ve been gone all of two days. I would think with a new woman in your life, you’d be happy for my independence.”

  He gazes around the loft, and that marked disapproval I’ve tried my entire life to avoid comes to his face. “And this is what you have to show for it?”

  “I’ve been a little busy, Daddy. Working in your shop, attending functions with the jewels. I didn’t have time to build the life I might have. I’m just now discovering what that might be. Give me more than two days to build it, all right?”

  “Shouldn’t you know by now? This whole searching for self business is just a way people avoid work. You have a fine job wearing the jewels and honing my sales pitch. I don’t know why you need more. It buys you all the things you love, doesn’t it? You prefer this?” He raises his hands to the industrial ceiling.

  “Yes, I do.”

  He brushes his tongue over his teeth. “You’re an ingrate, you know.”

  “Just like my mother,” I finish for him.

  “Don’t blame others for your problems, Morgan. That’s how your mother got to be so selfish. Everything was someone else’s fault. She would have blamed me for the cancer if she could have.”

  This inflames me. Suddenly—perhaps because for the first time in my life I’m standing up to him—I’m seeing my dad in a different light. Rather than just distant, he seems cruel. I’m apparently seeing the brusque, sharp personality my mother saw on a daily basis, and all at once I think maybe their lack of love wasn’t completely her fault. Maybe she yelled because he never heard her otherwise. I know shouting seems to be the only thing that penetrates that thick skull of my father’s. Even Mrs. Henry has been known to shout when she needs something taken care of. No wonder my father thinks all women do is yell.

  These thoughts are so disturbing. I wish I had more time to contemplate them. I gaze at my father as though I’ve never known him and wonder where the truth of my childhood lies.

  “I don’t really want to go to the club. You can introduce her without me.” Besides, if I go the emphasis will be on me, anyway. “I can’t come on Saturday night.” I search for a reason, but what does it matter? He’d belittle anything as an excuse, anyway.

  “You can come, and you will. I won’t have the city taking away the moment from Gwen to notice you’re not there. Saturday night is her night, and you will not upstage her with your absence. It’s time you grew up, Morgan.”

  It is time I grew up, and I’m going to start by finding myself something to do on Saturday night. “I think you should leave, Daddy.”

  “You want to live like this forever, Morgan? Where you’re struggling for food and a decent living arrangement? You think this is romantic? Your mother lived like this until I rescued her, and let me tell you, she was living no picnic.”

  My father’s face is red with rage, and I know he sees my mother in me right now, but for once in my life, I don’t think that’s such a bad thing. I’m proud to have her spunk and her fire while he tears down the world I’ve created. Well, the world Lilly has created.

  “I’m not pretending to be poor, Dad. I’m discovering who I am and what I like to do. Newsflash: I don’t like to wear diamonds and attend parties with people twice my age every night. There has to be something more than dripping in jewels and getting my picture taken.”

  “Which is why you ran off with that Andy character, and look where that got you. Maybe there isn’t anything more, did you ever think of that? Maybe you’re searching for something that doesn’t exist and wasting my time and money in the process.”

  “Maybe I am, but it’s a free country. I can search.”

  “Not without a credit card. It may be a free country, but life costs money.” Again he glances at his watch to let me know how much valuable time he’s wasting with this conversation.

  “I should think you’d be happy I ran off with Andy. It was good publicity for the store.”

  “It was terrible publicity,” he spits. “Men refused to buy their girlfriends trinkets for fear of being seen at the store.”

  His comment makes me sick to my stomach. He really does care more about the sale than the dozens of marriages he’s helped crumble. In truth, he was thrilled for the publicity, and it’s only now, when my comment doesn’t serve his purpose, that he chooses to rewrite history. “There’s more to life than money. You’ve got enough now to retire a million times over; why can’t you go enjoy yourself? Maybe take your new wife to Fiji or something?”

  “I enjoy working. It’s the only thing that life rewards you for.” My father reaches for the doorknob and takes another glance around the room. “What is that smell?”

  “It’s Lysol. Lilly likes things to smell clean.”

  “Saturday night at the club.” He yanks open the door. “I’ll see you then and introduce you to Gwen. She’s a good, solid person and she doesn’t yell.”

  Well, now there’s a profession of love. “I can’t be there.” I say it as much for myself as him.

  “You will be there. You’ve done enough to damage my reputation in the last six months; you’re going to help me rebuild now or you really are going to find yourself in the school of hard knocks.”

  “I’m not.” I cross my arms, and I feel them trembling. I have never stood up to my father this way, and I can hear my blood vessels pounding in my temples.

  “You are, Morgan.”

  “I’m not,” I say, like a testy teenager.

  “This is for your own good—you come or I’m cutting you off.”

  “Meaning?”

  “No exclusive gym, no country club, no shopping in your little shops with my credit cards.”

  My mouth gapes open, but I quickly shut it for fear I’ll inhale too much Lysol. I have lived my entire life trying to please this man, but there is no appeasement. There is only my total and complete annihilation of self.

  “You’re threatening me?” I ask.

  His tone softens to the soft sell. “You leave me no choice, Morgan. It’s not like that, and you know it.” He gives me his best “close the deal” smile. “When people live a privileged life there are things that go along with that responsibility. You have been given so much, and I don’t ask for a lot in return.”

  “And my responsibility is doing what you tell me to do.” I raise an eyebrow at him.

 
; “Morgan, you are not prepared for the world that your friends live in. Do you realize that you’ve lived a very sheltered life, and when you’re in contact with the real world, things like Andy happen?”

  “A parent’s job is to prepare children for the world.” My words are like an icy sheath cutting through him. He cannot stand criticism of any sort, and I have just told him that if I am remarkably lame, it is his fault. I see him clench his teeth, and his jaw twitches with unreleased fury.

  Through his tightly bound porcelain veneers, he growls, “You are well prepared for the life I raised you to live.”

  “But I think I want something different.”

  He looks around the room again. “This is fun for a while, isn’t it? Living the life of a struggling single woman in San Francisco? So romantic. But you’ll see how fun it is when you can’t run home and be protected by my credit limit. You’ll see how fun it is when you can’t fill yourself with those expensive lattes and don those fancy shoes.”

  Like a weight, I suddenly hear my mother’s words. Her vicious accusations against the man I thought loved her intimately even in the face of her steely bristling. But with unusual clarity, I see that my father’s love is conditional. It always has been, but I can honestly say until this moment I never saw it. I only tried harder to please him and live up to his expectations because my mother was so appallingly bad at it.

  Now I think maybe that was her choice—to jump off the boat and swim for her life.

  “So you’ll be there Saturday night.” He reaches for the doorknob. “If you aren’t, I’ll have no choice, Morgan. You’ve got a responsibility to the Malliard name: you either keep your commitments, or you give up the privileges that are afforded with it.”

  He starts to walk out the door, his line in the sand drawn.

  “You never told me her name?”

  “Whose?”

  “This precious wife you’re taking. You never told me her name, other than Gwen.”

  “Gwen Caruthers. She’s in real estate and sold me my last property.”