Lost in Seattle (The Miss Apple Pants series, #2)

by Charlotte Roth

  “Go easy on the poor guy.” She leaned against the door and smiled.

  “How did he take it?”

  “Like me, I guess. He’s in shock, but he’s very happy, too. It’s really weird, you know.”

  “I know,” I had said and grabbed my sweater from the bed. I was already shaking, and I couldn’t tell whether it was because I was tired, cold, nervous, or all of the above. Daddy’s little girl was about to break his happy heart.

  “HI,” I WHISPERED, TRYING to will away the lump in my throat. I sat down next to him on the floor. He had an empty wine glass, a box of Kleenex, and an old picture frame lying in his lap. “So, I guess you guys talked?” I said, casually.

  “We did.” He cleared his throat and looked at me. “Mom said she already told you this morning.” He rubbed his beard and sighed. “Oh boy, I didn’t see that one coming. Are you okay with all of this?” He squinted at me.

  “Uh-huh,” I mumbled, trying not to use up any precious liquids; my mouth was already as dry as a hot summer day, and my heart was racing.

  “She also told me you wanted to talk with me about something, too. Math problem?” he suggested with a crooked smile.

  “No,” I said with a dry voice, thinking that maybe I could present it as a rather tricky math problem; how does one plus one equal three?

  “Well?” He sat up straight and pulled off his socks and placed them in his lap with everything else.

  “Dad,” I began, almost running out of air, running out of words, running out of liquids, running out of courage, running out the door. “Dad,” I tried again, buying time.

  “Yeeeeaaaahhhh?” He looked up and offered a smile so full of memories, so full of love ... and Dad. He was not making this easier. I mean, why did he have to look so damn huggable, so kind and fuzzy? Why couldn’t he just be some old mean passive-aggressive I-don’t-care-about-shit Dad like the ones in the movies that would kick the crap out of his low-life pregnant teenage daughter?

  “Dad,” I said again, trying to accumulate more spit from the back of my mouth. “I don’t know how to say this, um, I guess there isn’t really any way to say it, because I don’t, um, know how to...” I stopped and looked him straight in his kind eyes. This is it. Here goes nothing! “Dad, I’m ... pregnant.” There! I said it! I took a deep breath, trying to slow down my heart which had reached top speed—two hundred beats per minute. At least!

  Slowly, he took his eyes away from mine and looked down into his lap again.

  “Dad?” I tried with a thin voice. Two hundred and ten!

  He grabbed the picture frame from his lap and looked at it closely. It was an old picture from back when I was a little girl, maybe three or four years old. Mom—sitting next to Grandma and Grandpa—was holding me up in the air, showing me off to the camera. We were all sitting in the front yard at Grandma and Grandpa’s house. The picture had been Dad’s screensaver for as long as I could remember, and he had made a copy the very first day he started his new job at the foundation, since it was one of the only pictures we had now.

  I cleared my throat and looked at the little girl in the picture. “I’m having a baby, Dad,” I said a little louder. Still silence followed by even more silence, if there is such a thing. I heard Mom humming in the kitchen, splashing water all over. I heard my heart pumping blood to my veins. Two hundred and twenty! “Dad?”

  When he finally looked up, he had tears in his eyes. “You know,” he said, wiping a tear away from his beard, “I never wanted to have a baby. Not back then. I thought we were both way too young. But you know how it is with Mom and babies.” He looked at me and smiled. “Suddenly she saw pregnant women everywhere, and after a while I even started to see big bellies all around. Well, at last I caved in, and nine months later, there you were.” He looked down at me—the three-point-five edition—and smiled. “I think I loved you even before you were here...” He ran a finger over his little family in the picture and sniffed. “The first time I laid eyes on you, I realized that I had never felt so much love in me. I had never felt so happy in my entire life, but it was also very overwhelming. For the first time in my life I was afraid—afraid something might happen to you, afraid I might lose you. I just wanted to take you in my arms and never let go, and I remember thinking that you had to be God’s little gift to me, and you know how I feel about God.” He rolled his eyes at me and smiled, tears settling in his beard.

  I nodded and smiled, still not sure where this was going, heart beat still over two hundred.

  “What happened?” he said all of a sudden.

  “Happened?”

  “The German guy? Hans?” he asked, not even trying to do one of his funny accents this time.

  I nodded, and then I gave him the PG-rated version of the night with Hans—low on intimacy details, attention on the condom part. When I finally was done rambling, I felt sweat pool in my palms and heat rush to my face. Dad, on the other hand, seemed steady as a rock, slightly nodding his head and rubbing his beard.

  “So, you are pregnant. It could be worse,” he said, probably thinking that at least I had used a condom. Apparently, his little sex talk had proved to be a lesson well learned. “Things could be worse,” he repeated.

  “Is that it? Aren’t you going to say, like, the obvious?” I said, almost choking on my own words.

  “The obvious?” he questioned, rubbing his beard even more.

  “Yeah! The obvious!” I leaned back and crossed my arms. “Like I’m wasting my life! And what about college, that is, if I decide to go to college,” I added. “And what about Hans? That kind of the obvious! Aren’t you angry with me?”

  He stopped rubbing his beard and looked at me. “Listen,” he said, still very calm, “I guess what you need the least right now is me giving you a hard time. I’ve had plenty of surprises lately. A few days ago, Mom told me she once got rid of a baby, and now she’s having one, and then you tell me you’re having one, too. As I see it, we’re winning by one baby.” He held up his fingers and counted to two. “Come here,” he said, pulling me closer to him. “We’ll figure it all out,” he assured me as he wrapped his arm around me. “I love you, little Miss Apple Pants. No matter what!” He kissed me and pointed at mini-me in the picture. “Remember when we used to call you Miss Apple Pants?”

  I nodded. They still did sometimes. “But why Miss Apple Pants?”

  “Look,” he said, still pointing at the picture. If you weren’t looking for it, you couldn’t really see it, but there I was—wearing a pair of purple pants with white apples on them.

  I looked up at Dad, my heart all soft, and smiled. “Ah. Miss Apple Pants.”

  He nodded. “Mom went to this flea market in Detroit, and all she found, good gracious, was clothes with food prints on them. I got an oversized shirt with all kinds of bananas; open bananas, closed bananas, green, yellow, even black bananas. She got herself a dress with tiny strawberries and a cucumber hat, oh boy, yes, she did. And for you ... she got you those.” He pointed at the evidence, captured on a hot summer day in the front yard. “I guess you were the only one who could really pull the whole food theme off.” He kissed me on my head again and smiled. “And how you loved those pants; you simply refused to take them off. We had to sneak in at night and gently pull them off, wash them and have them ready for the next morning. Eventually you grew out of them but not for a long time.”

  “You’re not mad at me at all?” I looked down at the little girl in the picture. She looked so happy. So innocent.

  “You know,” he said, gently squeezing my shoulder, “being pregnant is not the end of the world. It’s actually more the beginning, literally speaking.” He smiled and placed the picture frame in my lap. “Here, little Miss Apple Pants. It’s a keeper.”

  I grabbed the picture and leaned back into Dad’s arms—so fuzzy, so warm, and so unbelievably understanding. “It’s a keeper,” I whispered, looking at me, Mom, and Granddad sitting together on a hot summer day. I looked up at Dad with tears in my ey
es. “Thanks, Dad,” I whispered.

  He squeezed me a little tighter and smiled. “You know what they say?”

  “What?” I sobbed.

  “When life hands you lemons...” he said, not finishing his sentence.

  I sat up straight and wiped my nose on my cardigan. “Then what?”

  “Well, then you make lemon juice, right?”

  “Dad,” I said, almost laughing, “You are so—”

  “—I know,” he said, nodding, “I know.”

  Miss Cruella De Vil

  She was almost as petite as her sister—maybe a few inches taller—and she had the same perfect shiny gray hair and the same greenish-gray eyes, but they were a far cry from Miss T’s friendly and warm eyes. She was wearing a perfect coat of deep red lipstick, enhancing her somewhat-cold smile. She reminded me of someone—besides Miss T that is—I just couldn’t figure out who. She introduced herself as Livy, but I knew her real name was Liv, which means “life” in Swedish.

  “It makes absolutely no sense,” Miss T had sneered, when she had told us about her estranged sister in Dallas. “They named her Liv, but she has always been the one with the least love for life. Loath of life would be more correct. That’s how we came up with ‘the wicked one.’ It’s not a nice name, but it’s accurate.” Miss T never tried to hide the fact that she and her sister weren’t that close. She had blamed it on the math of their family, which consisted of six older brothers and two younger sisters. Miss T was the first-born girl, following six boys. “And then only fourteen months later, Liv came. Just another girl! No biggie. Can you imagine?” I couldn’t, I had said looking at Mom. “And she always hated me for that, for being the first girl in a herd of boys, but I could hardly be blamed for that, right?”

  Mom and I had both agreed.

  In high school, the toughest years in a teenage girl’s life, as Miss T had put it, the relationship between them went from bad to disastrous: Liv, so jealous of Miss T, had purposely gone straight after Miss T’s boyfriend just to hurt her. One day Miss T had found them together in bed. “And in my bed of all places,” she had said with contempt in her voice. After that, they almost stopped talking altogether. A few months later, Miss T moved away, and only a few years later she met and married Georgie. She only spoke with her sister twice a year, on Thanksgiving Day and on her birthday. “Georgie never really liked her either,” she had explained to us more than once. “Maybe it was my feelings being projected, but he said he didn’t feel comfortable around her, so we never invited her and her so-called boyfriend Finn. We never really liked him either. He smokes too much, he drinks too much, and he is too big,” she had said (I guess being no taller than a second grader would make everyone else seem too big).

  Judging from the height, and color of his nicotine-stained yellow fingers, I figured it had to be Finn who stood next to Liv, wearing a mustard and purple tie.

  “Yes, I’m Finn,” he said like he was reading my mind. He grabbed my hand and shook it hard. His huge hand made mine seem tiny. I guess Miss T had been right about the size of him.

  “Ella,” I said politely and tried to retrieve my hand.

  “Aha!” Liv looked at me, frowning. “So, you’re little Ella,” she said, emphasizing the word “little.”

  I nodded, thinking at the same time how odd a tiny little woman like her would call me little. I guess she was referring to little as in age, not size. She looked at me from head to toe and threw her head back laughing, and that’s when it hit me; she was the perfect image of a miniature Cruella De Vil, minus the one hundred and one Dalmatians.

  “Charlotte spoke so highly of you last time I spoke with her. I guess that’s your mom over there?” She nodded in Mom’s direction.

  I nodded.

  “Nice hair,” she said, not really directed at anyone in particular. She grabbed her husband’s oversized nicotine hand and exchanged a look with him. He nodded and then they walked over and sat down together at the far end of the table.

  The lawyer, an old and very handsome man (in a Clint Eastwood kind of way), gestured for Mom, Dad, and I to sit down as well. Besides Livy and Finn, I guess we were the only ones coming.

  “It doesn’t make any sense,” Dad whispered in my ear.

  “What?”

  “I mean, with the lawyer, we’re four and they’re two.”

  “What? Is this a tricky math question or something?”

  “No silly, listen; we’re four people; me and you, Mom, and the lawyer, and we are the ones flying halfway across the country to come to Texas, but there are only two people living here. It should have been the other way around. It doesn’t make sense,” he repeated, “especially not with both of my girls here being, you know.” He smiled and placed a gentle kiss on my cheek. I smiled back and grabbed his hand under the table.

  “It’s because of the ashes,” I explained quietly.

  “Ashes?” Dad had been away on some conference in Boulder for a few days, flying directly to Dallas to meet us at the airport. I guess he wasn’t up to date with the Texas itinerary.

  “The urn,” I whispered. “After this, um, summons or whatever you call it, we are off to some special place to say goodbye to... um, to... Miss T.” I took a deep breath and looked at the lawyer pouring himself a big glass of water. Why was it still so hard to say those two little words? Maybe because it was so much more than words, so much more than a title. It was Miss T and all that came with that name.

  “I know,” Dad said when he saw the look on my face, “I know,” he said, squeezing my hand tight.

  The lawyer cleared his throat and set his glass down a little too hard. We all looked up at him simultaneously. “Excuse me,” he said with a rather thin voice—immediately undermining the Clint-Dirty-Harry-Eastwood look. “I want to thank you all for coming,” he said as he sat down. He took his time looking around the table before he continued, “Charlotte knew she was dying. She had cancer, stage four, just like George. The doctor had given her anywhere between three weeks and three years. They had already made all the necessary arrangements back when George was still alive, except for one thing. The very same morning of the accident, the day she passed away, she called me and said she had made some adjustments to the will. She never told me what, but she said she had mailed me this.” He held up a big yellow envelope. He got up and walked to the end of the conference room where he picked up a box from underneath the end table. “And this,” he added, walking down to where Mom, Dad, and I were sitting. He stopped right in front of me. “It’s for you,” he said, as he placed the box on the table in front of me.

  I looked at the box. I already knew that no matter what was in it, I was going to cry.

  “I promised to give it to you in case something happened to her. She wanted you to have this.” He smiled and placed a friendly hand on my shoulder.

  “Me?” I said, still looking at the box, still trying to comprehend everything he had just told us. She knew she was dying?

  “Yes, you,” he said, letting go of my shoulder. He looked at Mom and Dad and nodded before he returned to his seat.

  I looked up. Everyone was staring at me, especially Cruella De Vil, who had put on a pair of flashy red glasses. I guess she didn’t want to miss this for the world. I turned and looked at Mom.

  “Go ahead,” she whispered with tears in her eyes.

  I looked at the box again. The tape had already been cut open, probably by the nice-looking lawyer. Carefully, I opened the lid and looked into the box: A little envelope was sitting on top of a smaller box decorated with Christmas wrapping paper. The envelope said, “Miss C” in what could only be Miss T’s handwriting; she was the only one who had ever called me that. I looked at my name again and imagined how she would have been sitting at the kitchen table, her little feet dangling to the side, writing a letter—her final letter—to me. God, how I missed her. I looked up at Mom. “I can’t. My hands,” I whispered, looking down at my shaking hands. It was only half the truth. I was more afrai
d that my heart wasn’t strong enough to read her final words.

  Mom looked down and nodded like she knew it wasn’t only about the hands. She grabbed the envelope and took out the card inside. It was a picture of Dylan from 90210 standing in front of his Porsche. She smiled and flipped it around, but before she had time to read it out loud she was already in tears. “The remains and beginning of you,” she read out loud, biting down on her lip, “from your BFF, Miss T,” she finished, sobbing. She put the card back in the envelope and looked at me, her smile mixed with tears. “She wrote ‘BFF,’ honey. Remember?”

  I nodded. I had taught Miss T all kinds of slang and everyday acronyms one afternoon, sitting in the kitchen, watching Mom make her famous starchy potato soup. At first, she had mixed them all up, saying that even for an old English teacher with a passion for semantics, acronyms, and word games, it sure was hard for an old cow to learn some new tricks. But by the time the soup had been served, Miss T had had most of the more common ones down, and after we had finished eating, she had looked at Mom and said:

  “FYI, my BFF, that soup sure was DAY.”

  “TAL,” Mom had said, giggling.

  “Uh, thanks a lot?” Miss T had said, followed by Mom nodding.

  “SSTISSTMM,” I had teased.

  “What?” they had both said at the same time, four eyes staring at me.

  “So starchy that it’s still stuck to my mouth,” I had said, opening up my mouth to show them the soup.

  “YLP,” Mom had hissed back with a sarcastic smile.

  “YLP?” Miss T had looked at Mom for help.

  I had looked at Miss T and smiled. “It means you little pri—”

  “—prentice... apprentice,” Mom had said, cutting me short, “apprentice, as in start making your own damn soup,” Mom had said, looking into the soup bowl like she was examining the level of starchiness.

  “Oh,” Miss T had said, like she was still thinking about it. “Well, it was yummy, IYAM.”