by Ruthie Knox
Roman snorted. “You, sweetheart, are not other people.”
Ashley was still trying to figure out what to think about that when a car pulled up and parked in the spot next to the Escalade. Her equilibrium slipped away as she got a look at the driver.
Dark hair, dark suit … Not just a vaguely familiar face. Not a coincidence.
Fuck.
“Roman,” she said. “I think—”
But even as she spoke, the car’s doors opened as if synchronized, and a man and a woman stepped out.
“That’s Carmen,” Roman said.
Ashley barely heard him.
She was looking at her father.
Ashley got to her feet without any trouble. The lawn was uneven, the downhill slope steeper than she’d accounted for, but she only reeled on the inside.
Her father was here. Her father.
And Carmen. Who looked pretty much exactly as she had in Ashley’s imagination: like a Latina Maxim cover girl in a power suit and four-inch heels.
Roman had called this woman Kitten.
“Holy shit, and that’s the senator,” Roman said. “What’s he doing here?”
Roman’s hand found her elbow, as if he could steady her that way. Ha.
“Capturing me,” Ashley said. “He forgot to check his fence lines, and I got away.” She glanced behind her at Roman. “I’m a wayward calf,” she explained. “Not a person.”
“He can’t be that bad.”
He wasn’t—not by himself. Practically every Republican voter in Florida loved her father. He was their smiling Senator Bowman, so handsome, so sure of himself.
Ashley loved him, too, so long as they were separated by hundreds of miles.
“Just wait and see,” she replied. But then she made the mistake of imagining how it would go. How she would explain Roman to her dad. “Actually, on second thought, I would rather you two didn’t … Stay right here, okay?”
Before she could second-guess herself, Ashley took off across the lawn, meeting her father in the middle.
“Ashley.” His smile came a few beats too late to be genuine. Flashed in televised interviews and behind campaign-trail podiums, this particular smile of his made her think of hair oil and firm handshakes.
“Dad.”
His eyebrows were lifting, his attention focused over her shoulder. Ashley turned around to see Roman had come after her.
“Mr. Díaz.” Her father extended his hand. “I’m Bill Bowman. I believe we’ve met.”
Roman shook it. “Yes, sir.”
“The Miami Entrepreneurs dinner, wasn’t it? In the spring.”
“I’m surprised you remember.”
“I try not to forget the up-and-comers. Heberto told me you were going places in the Keys. It’s always a pleasure to meet one of our Florida businessmen.”
Roman’s return smile chilled Ashley’s blood. She’d forgotten that he could do that with his face.
He’d never told her he’d met her father.
“Thank you,” Roman said. “And I appreciate your work for us in Washington. The industry press has nothing but good things to report.”
“I’m glad to hear that. I’m a big believer in growth. We grow or we die, that’s an economic fact.”
“I hear you.”
“Guys?” Ashley cut in. “Maybe we could not do the bullshit?”
There was a moment’s awkward silence. Her father bounced once on the balls of his feet and cleared his throat. “Ashley,” he said. “I’d almost forgotten how … refreshingly honest you can be.”
“That’s one way to put it.”
“Right. Well. Can we talk?”
“Go ahead. I’m listening.”
“Privately,” her father said.
Ashley sighed. And then, internally, sighed at herself for sighing. Don’t go down this old road with him, she warned herself. Don’t instigate, don’t react. When she did that, she and her father created a feedback loop of rancor. He accused her; she antagonized him. “Fine. Let’s walk.”
She started moving away. Roman caught her elbow. Leaning close, he spoke in her ear. “You sure, Ash?”
“He won’t leave until I talk to him,” she whispered.
“I could take care of this for you.”
She closed her eyes, because it was such a sweet idea, and so completely untrue.
“It’s okay,” she said. “I can handle him.”
She kissed Roman’s temple and walked away, crossing the lawn toward the corner of the parking lot. Her father followed.
“You could have called,” Ashley said.
“You don’t return my calls,” her father answered.
“I don’t return calls from your aides. You haven’t called me in years.”
“Let’s not start this.”
This, meaning Ashley being a brat.
Which she was. She was. He was pompous, and she was a brat. She never could help it. Her relationship with her father had been arrested when he turned her over to her grandmother at thirteen. Though she tried to fight it, her feelings toward him remained a thirteen-year-old’s—yearning and resentment, unpleasantly mingled.
“How did you even know where to find me?” she asked.
“Carmen told me where to go. There’s an airstrip a few miles from here.”
When they reached the edge of the lawn, her father caught her arm and steered her toward the road. Ashley floated along, insubstantial as a piece of dandelion fluff in the breeze.
It was like this with him. He made her feel invisible.
There had been a time, once, when she loved her father without reservation. Before the divorce, before her mom had died. She’d often wished she knew how to get back to that version of their relationship, but she could never figure out how to rebuild all the bridges they’d burned—how to forget what had come after her mother’s death, when Ashley was taken by a nanny to live with her dad, like so much unwanted property.
He’d been a state senator then, focused on his campaign and his work, with no time for a grieving daughter he barely knew. Ashley had done everything she could think of to make him see her. She’d chopped off her hair and shortened her skirts. She used to clomp around the house in Tallahassee wearing huge boots and a dog collar, her black eye makeup smeared so thick that she looked like a cartoon.
When he’d finally noticed—when she’d finally managed to antagonize him into anger—their relationship had shifted for good.
She still remembered the strange expression that had passed over his face the first time he accused her of thinking of no one but herself. You’re inexcusably selfish, he’d said, and it was as though the conclusion quenched something in him. As though it relieved him, because he’d finally figured out how to slot her into place.
Selfish.
Ashley was selfish, just like his mother—two selfish people—and after that, it had only been a matter of time before she was banished to live with her grandmother.
She pulled her arm from her father’s grip.
“You know why I’m here,” he said.
“Not really.”
“Carmen called me. She filled me in on the situation at Sunnyvale.”
“What does it have to do with you?”
“There’s a video on the Internet with people talking about you chaining yourself to the palm tree. You didn’t think that would get back to me?”
“What video?” Roman had taken pictures with his phone, but no video. She couldn’t think how anything might have leaked to her father, not unless he had spies or something, and even then—
“We had an arrangement,” he said. “I’ve got to protect my image, and you’re jeopardizing it.”
“I’m not jeopardizing anything,” she shot back. “I’m on vacation.”
“Spare me, Ashley. Carmen told me what’s going on. You’re sleeping with the developer, manipulating him, lying about seeing Key deer—it’s unconscionable.”
His volume was rising now. When his voice boomed t
his way, her heart raced.
Shouldn’t there be some cutoff, an age she could reach after which her father could no longer make her feel like a badly behaved child just by raising his voice and using five-dollar words like unconscionable?
Ashley looked toward the water. You couldn’t see it through the brush and the trees unless you knew it was there, but if you knew, it winked at you. It reminded you that there were open spaces to counteract suffocation. Cool breezes that settled and soothed.
If you looked.
She had to keep looking, because she wasn’t a child, and if she’d behaved badly, she could take responsibility for her own mistakes. She was a woman worth loving, whether her father could see that or not.
“That’s not what’s going on,” she said slowly. “Roman and I—”
Her father raked both hands down his face, and that was all it took to bring her to a halt. She’d seen that gesture hundreds of times. The precursor to countless lectures. He wouldn’t hear her. Nothing she said would get through to him.
He began to pace. “You know, whatever you think is going on, it doesn’t even matter. What matters is how this is going to look—my daughter the leader of some rogue protest at the property my mom used to own. Can you imagine the headlines? Because I can.”
“I don’t see how—”
“You get yourself into these situations—”
“I’m not in a situation.”
“You’re in a classic Ashley situation. This is your M.O. You find the last man alive who might be good for you and throw yourself at him. I keep thinking you’re going to grow out of this phase.”
“I’m not in a phase.”
“You’re in your tenth year of a childish, rebellious phase where you do everything you can to make me pay attention to you.”
Anger welled up, knocking against the wall of her chest, and it was all she could do to keep it contained. “I didn’t call you here. You’re free to go anytime—I’m just trying to have lunch.”
“That’s another thing,” he said. “Why are you visiting Esther? Your grandmother’s dead.”
“I’m aware of that. Esther, however, is still alive.”
“Dragging that trailer around all over the country, talking to my mother’s friends—what’s your agenda? Did you run out of other ways to get at me?”
“Do you actually have spies?”
“She’s dead, Ashley. She’s dead and buried, and you’re making a spectacle of yourself to humiliate me because humiliating me is the only way you know to make yourself feel better.”
“This has nothing to do with you!”
“It has everything to do with me. She was my mother!”
“You never even talked to her!”
“I don’t talk to you, either, but you’re still my goddamn daughter!”
Bellowing now, with sweat beading at his temples, her father appeared utterly rattled, and she was so small. She tried to search for the water. The shine of the sun, a wink of light. She tried, but she felt …
She felt.
Ashley felt the whistling breath of the cool, damp air of the well. The lid torn off.
She felt everything inside her rising up, reminding her of what it was like to be around this man. How much she’d needed him to love her. How, instead of loving her, what he did—what her father always did—was tell her what she was like.
She couldn’t stand it.
“Your grandmother was not a nice person,” her father said. “She was a bad mother.”
“You were a bad father.”
“And you’re never going to let me forget it.”
“Why should you get to forget it? My mom died, and you dumped me on your mom, who you didn’t even like, because you couldn’t be bothered to talk to me.”
“You were impossible! You didn’t leave me any choice, and then you turned into her.”
“She saved me.”
“Saved you.” He laughed, incredulous. “From what?”
“From turning into you! Grandma taught me how to be happy. She was beautiful.”
“She was nuts.”
“She loved me.”
Her father snorted. “Of course she loved you. You were her meal ticket.”
Ashley’s heart stopped. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I had to beg her to take you, Ashley. I had to pay her.”
The words pushed into her gut, and she had to wrap her arms around her middle. “Room and board,” she suggested, her voice weak. “Expenses.”
“More than that. Thousands of dollars extra so she would keep you for the school year, thousands more if I wanted her to take you on those trips of hers in the summer.”
“You didn’t.”
“I most certainly did.”
He paid her. Paid her to take care of me.
And she never loved me. Not the way I loved her. She cut me out of her life when she was sick, cut me out of Sunnyvale’s sale, left me with nothing, didn’t even think about how I would feel.
Because she didn’t care.
Ashley wanted to crumple to the ground under the weight of all of it—her folly, her idiotic hope, all the years she’d spent thinking she was a free spirit, a whirling spark, when she’d been nothing of the sort.
She wanted to fall to the road and tear at her hair and cry.
But if she did that, her father would only tell her to quit being such a fucking embarrassment.
Ashley looked for the lake, but she couldn’t find it. She closed her eyes.
Behind them, she saw Roman.
You, sweetheart, are not other people, he’d told her.
He’d said it with so much affection—as though her weirdness, her hopeless confusion, was totally okay.
As though it was just part of life, this struggle, and he didn’t mind sitting with her on the lawn, talking her through it. He understood.
I could take care of this for you, he’d said, because he saw her fear and wanted to help.
Ashley squeezed her eyelids more tightly shut and held on to Roman like a talisman.
Twelve days ago, she’d chained herself to a palm tree with a hurricane coming because she was afraid of losing the last thing she understood—what it felt like to be loved by her grandmother, to be seen and cared for by the one person in the world who seemed to think she was worth something.
She’d been afraid because her grandmother had left her alone without a guide, but when she’d sat alone at night by the palm tree, she hadn’t needed a guide. The wind had scoured her clean, and the road she’d traveled with Roman since then had given her a sense of purpose.
Roman’s trust, his allegiance, had given her confidence.
Ashley knew who she was, and she knew what mattered. She didn’t need her father to tell her. She didn’t need anyone to. She knew.
“Dad—” she said, but he cut her off again.
“You’re my daughter,” he repeated. “And I’ve tried to be a good father. I send you money. I got you that job in Bolivia, thinking you’d finally found something to do with your life that wasn’t completely selfish. And now this.”
This. As though the indignity of this were a foregone conclusion.
Ashley fisted her hand around the invisible feeling of what it was to believe in this. Her quest. Her right to do as she pleased, take to the road, claim Roman, fight for a future.
She squeezed her fingers tight around the memory of how it had felt to rest her head against the palm tree and sing to the stars.
“Do you have any idea,” her father asked, “what it’s like to meet other people’s daughters? I talk to them about their careers and their children. I see their fathers’ pride, and I think of you. My daughter, the perpetual teenager. Why can’t you just be normal?”
“I am normal, you self-important prick.”
Her father pointed an accusing finger at her. “Watch what you say. I’m your father, whether you like it or not.”
“I don’t like it. You’re being condesc
ending and pushy, and I don’t like it one bit.”
“Yeah, well, get used to it. I’m the only family you’ve got, and you have nowhere to live and no money and no better options. I’m taking you home.”
“You’re not taking me anywhere.”
“You’re going to get in that plane with me, and I’m going to fly us both back to Florida so you can tell those protesters to call off this insane stunt.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Your swamp people.” She must have looked as baffled as she felt, because his gaze sharpened. “Your friends. The Georgia people, the protesters at Sunnyvale.”
“There are people from Okefenokee at Sunnyvale? Who?”
“How should I know? Some kind of bottle-and-can man broke into the office, and he called all these hippies, and now they won’t leave.”
Ashley laughed. “Really?”
Gus? And Mitzi? A deluge of hippies, video on the Internet—and her father was beside himself.
Mitzi had been busy.
“Stop smiling,” he said.
“It’s not my fault,” she said. “I had nothing to do with it.”
She wanted to skip. To sprint. She wanted to move.
When she was a girl, he would make her sit at the dining room table, and he would pick her apart until she couldn’t stand it anymore. She’d have to kick her leg, jiggle her knee, drum on the tabletop—and then he would make her stop.
He made her sit with his disappointment, take in her faults, bear it, and he never let her move.
But she was twenty-four years old. She could walk away from this conversation whenever she wanted to.
She did.
Ashley walked away, eyes focused on the spot where she would see Roman when she got close enough to have a view across the lawn.
She listened to her feet hit the pavement. The slap of her foam sandals against her skin.
She didn’t listen to her heart, because it hadn’t slowed down yet. It beat out the familiar rhythm of her panic, her inadequacy, a lifetime’s conditioning, but she didn’t have to listen.
She didn’t listen to her father. Not until he said Roman’s name.
“You care about that man? Roman Díaz?”
Ashley stopped.
“If you care about him, you’ll think about what you’re doing. Because you’re ruining that man’s career. You’re putting everything that matters to him at risk.”