First Lady

by Susan Elizabeth Phillips

  “I haven’t been by myself. Connie just left to go to the grocery store. She’s the neighbor who’s been taking care of us.”

  “Tell me another one.”

  “You calling me a liar?”

  “Yeah.”

  She didn’t like that at all, but there wasn’t much she could do about it.

  “Where’s the baby?”

  “Taking a nap.”

  He couldn’t see much resemblance between the girl and Sandy, except maybe around the eyes. Sandy had been big and bawdy, a gorgeous handful with a good heart and a decent brain she must have inherited from her mother, but never bothered to use.

  “What about your grandmother? Why isn’t she taking care of you?”

  The kid began nibbling on what little was left of a thumbnail. “She’s been in Australia studying the aborigines in the Outback. She’s a college professor.”

  “She went off to Australia knowing her granddaughters didn’t have anybody to take care of them?” He didn’t try to hide his skepticism.

  “Connie’s been—”

  “Cut the crap. There isn’t any Connie, and unless you shoot straight with me, Child and Youth Services will be here to pick you up in an hour.”

  Her features contorted. “We don’t need anybody taking care of us! We’re doing great by ourselves. Why don’t you mind your own damn business?”

  As he gazed into her defiant face, he remembered all those tough foster kids who’d appeared and disappeared next door to him when he was growing up. A few of them had been determined to spit in the world’s eye, only to be swatted down for their efforts. He softened his voice. “Tell me about your grandmother.”

  She shrugged. “Her and Sandy didn’t get along. Because of Sandy’s drinking and everything. She didn’t know about the car crash.”

  Somehow he wasn’t surprised to hear her call Sandy by her first name. It was exactly what he would have expected from his ex-wife, who seemed to have fulfilled her early promise of turning into an alcoholic. “Are you telling me your grandmother doesn’t know what happened to Sandy?”

  “She does now. I didn’t have a phone number so I could call her, but a couple of weeks ago I got this letter from her with a picture of the Outback and everything. So I wrote back and told her about Sandy and the car accident and Trent.”

  “Who’s Trent?”

  “My baby sister’s dad. He’s a jerk. Anyway, he died in the accident, too, and I’m not sorry.”

  He’d known Sandy’s current boyfriend had been with her, but not that he was the baby’s father. Sandy must have had a lot of doubts about him or his name would have been on that birth certificate instead of Mat’s. “Did this Trent have any family?”

  “No. He was from California, and he was raised in foster homes.” She thrust her small chin forward. “He told me all about them, and me and my sister aren’t going to any, so you can just forget it! Anyway, we don’t have to because I just got this note from my grandmother and she’ll be back soon.”

  He regarded her suspiciously. “Let me see the note.”

  “Don’t you believe me?”

  “Let’s just say I’d like some proof.”

  She regarded him sullenly, then disappeared into the kitchen. He’d been certain she was lying, and he was surprised when she returned a few moments later with a small piece of stationery imprinted with the seal of Laurents College, in Willow Grove, Iowa. He gazed down at the neat script.

  I just got your letter, sweetheart. I’m so sorry. Am flying home to Iowa July 15 or 16, depending on airlines. Will call as soon as I get in and make arrangements for you girls. Don’t worry. Everything will be fine.

  Love, Granny Joanne

  He frowned. Today was Tuesday the eleventh. Why hadn’t Granny Joanne packed up her notebooks right then and caught the first plane back?

  He reminded himself this wasn’t his problem. All he cared about was getting those blood tests without having to jump through hoops for some bureaucratic busybody. “Tell you what. Go get your sister. I’ll buy you both some ice cream after we stop at a lab.”

  A pair of streetwise brown eyes stared back at him. “What lab?”

  He made it real casual. “We’re all having some blood drawn. No big deal.”

  “With needles?”

  “I don’t know how they do it,” he lied. “Go get the kid.”

  “Fuck that. I’m not letting anybody stick a needle in me.”

  “Watch your mouth.”

  She gave him a look that managed to be both condescending and contemptuous, as if he were the stupidest man on earth for objecting to her language. “You’re not my boss.”

  “Get the baby.”

  “Forget it.”

  Some battles weren’t worth fighting, so he headed down a hallway with a worn gray carpet and a bedroom opening off each side. One had obviously been Sandy’s. The other had an unmade twin bed and a crib. A whimper came from behind the bumper pads.

  Although the crib was old, it was clean. The carpet around it was vacuumed, and some toys were tossed in a blue laundry basket. A rickety changing table held a small stack of neatly folded clothes, along with an open box of disposable diapers.

  The whimpering turned into a full-fledged yowl. He moved closer and saw a pink-clad bottom wiggling in the air. Then a head covered with a few inches of straight blond hair popped up. He took in a furious, rosy-cheeked face and a wet, down-turned mouth that was open and yowling. It was his childhood all over again.

  “Quiet down, kid.”

  The baby’s cries stopped, and a set of gumball-blue eyes regarded him suspiciously. At the same time he grew aware of an unpleasant smell and realized his day had taken one more turn for the worse.

  He sensed movement behind him and saw the Winona lookalike standing in the doorway chewing on another fingernail and watching every move he made. There was something distinctly protective about the glances she kept shooting at the crib. The kid wasn’t nearly the hard ass she pretended to be.

  He jerked his head toward the baby. “She needs her diaper changed. I’ll meet you in the living room when you’re done.”

  “Like, get real. I don’t change shitty diapers.”

  Since she’d been taking care of the baby for weeks, that was obviously a lie, but if she expected him to do it, she could think again. When he’d finally escaped from the Hell House of Women, he’d promised himself that he’d never change another diaper, look at another Barbie, or tie another frigging hair bow. Still, the kid had guts, so he decided to make it easy on her. “I’ll give you five bucks.”

  “Ten. In advance.”

  If he hadn’t been in such a foul mood, he might have laughed. At least she had street smarts to go along with all that bravado. He pulled his wallet from his pocket and handed over the money. “Meet me by my car as soon as you’re done. And bring her along.”

  Her forehead creased, and for a moment she looked more like a soccer mom than a sullen teenager. “You got a car seat?”

  “Do I look like somebody who’s got a car seat?”

  “You got to put a kid in a car seat. It’s the law.”

  “You a cop?”

  She cocked her head. “Her seat’s in Mabel. The Winnebago. Sandy called it Mabel.”

  “Didn’t your mother have a car?”

  “The dealer took it back a couple of months before she died, so she drove Mabel.”

  “Swell.” He wasn’t going to ask how she’d come into possession of a battered motor home. Instead, he tried to figure out how he was supposed to get a teenager, a baby, and a car seat in his two-passenger Mercedes. Only one answer. He wasn’t.

  “Give me the keys.”

  He could see her trying to figure out if she could get away with mouthing off again, then wisely concluding she couldn’t.

  Keys in hand, he went outside to get acquainted with Mabel. On the way, he picked up the cell phone from his Mercedes, along with the newspaper he hadn’t found a chance to read.

>   He needed to duck to get into the motor home, which was roomy, but not roomy enough for six feet six. He settled behind the wheel and put in a call to a doctor pal of his in Pittsburgh for the name of a nearby lab and the necessary authorization. While he was on hold, he picked up the newspaper.

  Like most journalists, he was a news junkie, but nothing unusual caught his attention. There’d been an earthquake in China, a car bombing in the Middle East, budget squabbles in Congress, more trouble in the Balkans. Toward the bottom of the page was a picture of Cornelia Case with another sick baby in her arms.

  Although he’d never been much of a Cornelia watcher, she seemed thinner in every recent photograph. The First Lady had terrific blue eyes, but they’d started to appear too big for her face, and nice eyes couldn’t make up for the fact that there didn’t seem to be a real woman behind them, just an extremely smart politician programmed by her father.

  When he’d been at Byline, they’d done a couple of puff pieces on Cornelia—her hairdresser, her taste in fashion, how she honored her husband’s memory—bullshit stuff. Still, he felt sorry for her. Having a husband assassinated would put a crimp in anybody’s happy face.

  He frowned at the memory of his year in tabloid television. Before then, he’d been a print journalist, one of the most highly regarded reporters in Chicago, but he’d thrown away his reputation to make a pile of money he’d soon discovered he had little interest in spending. Now all he wanted out of life was to wipe the tarnish off his name.

  Mat’s idols weren’t Ivy League journalists, but guys who’d used two fingers to punch out hard-hitting stories on old Remington typewriters. Men as rough around the edges as he was. There had been nothing flashy about his work when he was writing for the Chicago Standard. He’d used short words and simple sentences to describe the people he met and what they cared about. Readers had known they could count on him to shoot straight. Now he was on a quest to prove that was true again.

  Quest. The word had an archaic quality to it. A quest was the province of a holy knight, not a steeltown roughneck who’d let himself forget what was important in life.

  His old boss at the Standard had said Mat could return to his former job, but the offer had been begrudging, and Mat refused to go back with his hat in his hands. Now he was driving around the country searching for something to take with him. Wherever he stopped—big town or small—he picked up a paper, talked to people, and nosed around. Even though he hadn’t found it, he knew exactly what he was looking for—the seeds of a story big enough to give him back his reputation.

  He’d just finished his calls when the door swung open and Winona climbed into the motor home with the baby, who was barefoot and dressed in a yellow romper with lambs on it. She had a peace sign tattooed on one chubby ankle.

  “Sandy had her baby tattooed?”

  Winona gave him a look that said he was too dumb to live. “It’s a rub-on. Don’t you know anything?”

  His sisters were grown up by the time the tattoo craze had started, thank God. “I knew it was a rub-on,” he lied. “I just don’t think you should put something like that on a baby.”

  “She likes it. She thinks it makes her look cool.” Winona carefully placed the baby in the car seat, fastened the straps, then plopped down in the seat next to him.

  After a couple of tries, the engine sputtered to life. He shook his head in disgust. “This thing is a piece of crap.”

  “No shit.” She propped her feet, which were clad in thick-soled sandals, onto the dash.

  He glanced into Mabel’s side mirror and backed out. “You know, don’t you, that I’m not really your father.”

  “Like I’d want you.”

  So much for the worry he’d been harboring that she might have built up some kind of sentimental fantasy about him. As he made his way down the street, he realized he didn’t know either her real name or the baby’s. He’d seen copies of their birth certificates but hadn’t looked any farther than the lines that had his own name written on them. She probably wouldn’t appreciate it if he called her Winona. “What’s your name?”

  There was a long pause while she thought about it. “Natasha.”

  He almost laughed. For three months his sister Sharon had tried to make everybody call her Silver. “Yeah, right.”

  “That’s what I want to be called,” she snapped.

  “I didn’t ask what you wanted to be called. I asked what your name is.”

  “It’s Lucy, all right? And I hate it.”

  “Nothing wrong with Lucy.” He consulted the directions he’d gotten from the receptionist at the lab and made his way back to the highway. “Exactly how old are you?”

  “Eighteen.”

  He shot her his street fighter look.

  “Okay, sixteen.”

  “You’re fourteen, and you talk like you’re thirty.”

  “If you know, why’d you ask? And I lived with Sandy. What did you expect?”

  He felt a pang of sympathy at the husky note in her voice. “Yeah, well, I’m sorry about that. Your mother was . . .” Sandy had been fun, sexy, smart without having any sense, and completely irresponsible. “She was unique,” he finished lamely.

  Lucy snorted. “She was a drunk.”

  In the back the baby started to whimper.

  “She has to eat soon, and we’ve run out of stuff.”

  Great. This was just what he needed. “What’s she eating now?”

  “Formula and crap in jars.”

  “We’ll stop for something after we’re done at the lab.” The sounds coming from the back were growing increasingly unhappy. “What’s her name?”

  Another pause. “Butt.”

  “You’re a real comedian, aren’t you?”

  “I’m not the one who named her.”

  He glanced back at the blond-haired, rosy-cheek baby with gumdrop eyes and an angel-wing mouth, then looked over at Lucy. “You expect me to believe Sandy named that baby Butt?”

  “I don’t care what you believe.” She pulled her feet from the dash. “I’m not letting some jerkoff stick a needle in me, so you can forget about that blood crap right now.”

  “You’ll do what I tell you.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “Here are the facts, smart mouth. Your mother put my name on both your birth certificates, so we need to straighten that out, and the only way we can do it is with three blood tests.” He started to explain that Child Services would be taking care of them until her grandmother showed up, but didn’t have the heart. The lawyer could do it.

  They drove the rest of the way to the lab in silence, except for the Demon Baby, who’d started to scream again. He pulled up in front of a two-story medical building and looked over at Lucy. She was staring rigidly at the doors as if she were looking at the gates of hell.

  “I’ll give you twenty bucks to take the test,” he said quickly.

  She shook her head. “No needles. I hate needles. Even thinking about them makes me sick.”

  He was just beginning to contemplate how he could carry two screaming children into the lab when he had his first piece of luck all day.

  Lucy got out of the Winnebago before she threw up.

  4

  NEALY WAS GLORIOUSLY invisible. She tilted back her head and laughed, then flipped up the radio to join in with Billy Joel on the chorus of “Uptown Girl.” The new day was exquisite. Puffs of blue clouds floated in a Georgia O’Keeffe sky, and her stomach rumbled with hunger, despite the scrambled eggs and toast she’d wolfed down for breakfast in a small restaurant not far from the motel where she’d spent the night. The greasy eggs, soggy toast, and murky coffee had been the most blissful meal she’d eaten in months. Every bite of food had slid easily down her throat, and not a single person had spared her a second glance.

  She felt smart, smug, completely happy with herself. She had outwitted the President of the United States, the Secret Service, and her father. Hail to the Chieftess!

  She laughed, delighted
with her own cockiness because it had been so long since she’d felt that way. She rummaged on the seat next to her for the Snickers bar she’d bought, then remembered she’d already devoured it. Her hunger made her laugh again. All her life she’d fantasized about having a curvy body. Maybe she was finally going to get it.

  She glanced at herself in the rearview mirror. Even though the old lady’s wig was gone, not one person had recognized her. She had transformed herself into someone blissfully, sublimely ordinary.

  A commercial came on the radio. She turned the volume down and began to hum. All morning she’d allowed herself to dawdle along the two-lane highway west of York, Pennsylvania, which happened to be the nation’s first capital and the place where the Articles of Confederation were written. She’d detoured through the small towns that lay along the route whenever she’d wanted. Once she’d pulled off the road to admire a field of soybeans, although she couldn’t help but ponder the complexities of farm subsidies as she leaned against the fence. Then she’d stopped in a ramshackle farmhouse with a sign outside that read ANTIQUES and browsed through the dust and junk for a wonderful hour. As a result, she hadn’t traveled far. But she had nowhere specific to go, and it was glorious being absolutely aimless.

  It might be foolish to feel so happy when the President was undoubtedly using all the power and might of the United States government to track her down, but she couldn’t help herself. She wasn’t naive enough to believe she could outwit them forever, but that made each moment more precious.

  The commercial ended and Tom Petty began to sing. Nealy laughed again, then joined in. She was free-falling.

  Mat was the world’s biggest chump. Instead of being behind the wheel of his Mercedes convertible with only the radio to keep him company, he was driving west in a ten-year-old Winnebago named Mabel on a Pennsylvania back road with two kids who were as bad as all seven of his sisters combined had been.

  Yesterday afternoon, he’d called Sandy’s attorney to tell him about Joanne Pressman, but instead of guaranteeing that the girls would be turned over to her as soon as she got back in the country, the attorney had equivocated.