Claiming Amelia

by Jessica Blake

  The driver nodded to me. “Have a good day, Miss Wells.”

  I hurried past him and towards the front door. The Hollywood Hills street was quiet enough that most of the traffic was from residents, but I didn’t feel like pushing my luck. Someone I knew driving by and seeing me perform a walk of shame in last night’s dress, even if I was in my own front yard, was not something to be desired.

  After rummaging through my purse, I located my keys in the very bottom and let myself in. The whirring of a vacuum cleaner came from somewhere in the right wing of the house, meaning LuLu the housekeeper was there. Too spent to talk to anyone, I headed for the stairs.

  The Asian inspired house had been a part of my life for as long as I could remember. With a main section plus two wings that wrapped around the swimming pool and a massive loft on the second floor, it overlooked most of the city below. After petitioning my dad for several years, he’d finally taken the exercise equipment down from the loft and let me move into the space. At the top of the landing was a short hallway, one end of it housing a bathroom and the other end opening up to the massive room I called home.

  My cell phone rang as I pushed the door to my sanctuary open. Sighing, I dropped my purse on the floor and pulled it out. Unlike my keys, my phone had its own little side pouch it lived in, ensuring I never lost track of it.

  “What’s up?” I asked Rainy, walking to the bed and falling flat on my back.

  “Hey.” Her voice sounded weird, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on what the strange tone suggested.

  I sat up, suddenly feeling much more awake. “Hey, yourself.”

  “Have you seen the news?”

  “No.” Did she know who she was talking to? It’s not like I’m a dumbass and didn’t know what was going on in the world, but I had better things to do in the mornings than sit down with a black cup of coffee and study the day’s headlines.

  Although the coffee part sounded good...

  My temples throbbed, and I reached up with my free hand to rub at them. “Aren’t we meeting later?”

  Rainy sucked in a sharp breath. “There’s something on the news about your dad.”

  “What?” My heart started pounding, and a dozen visions of my dad dying in various ways flashed through my mind. Heart attack. Car accident. Murder. “What are you talking about?”

  “I mean about Pet Hop.”

  I exhaled sharply. “Jesus Christ, Rainy. You scared me.”

  “Sorry.”

  I fell back down on the bed, thinking about chastising her more but also not having the strength to do it. Unlike me, Rainy still had both her parents. Unlike me, her mother hadn’t died when she was a baby, leaving her to be raised by babysitters and nannies. Unlike me, she didn’t live with the constant painful knowledge that the things she cherished most could be quickly and inexorably taken away from her.

  “So what is it?” I asked.

  She didn’t say anything.

  “God, Rainy.” I was starting to get irritated. “What is it?”

  “Everyone is saying Pet Hop is closing,” she said in a rush.

  I absorbed the information. “Which one?”

  “All of them.”

  I scoffed. There were hundreds of them. There was a location in every major city in the United States and like half a dozen in L.A. alone.

  “I’m not kidding, Grace.” Her voice was quiet. Serious. More serious than I’d ever heard her.

  A thick ball formed in my throat. “It’s just a rumor. Why would my dad close them? That’s stupid. Come on, you don’t really believe that, do you?”

  “The news says that the company is declaring bankruptcy.”

  I stood up, unzipping the back of my dress and shimmying out of it while I talked. “Well, that’s not happening.”

  “Okay,” she said, though I couldn’t tell whether she believed me or not.

  “It’s not,” I stressed, kicking off my ballet flats. They ricocheted off the wall’s baseboard and landed on the carpet.

  “I said okay.”

  I stomped over to the closet and yanked the door open, then grabbed a yellow maxi dress off a hanger. “Look, I’ll text you in a little bit. We can go to Eau Claire. Or The Ivy.”

  “K. See you.”

  “Bye.”

  As soon as she hung up, I called my dad. The phone rang and rang and when he didn’t answer, I threw it on the bed. Gritting my teeth, I pulled on the sundress and found my Louis Vuitton slides.

  LuLu had killed the vacuum cleaner, and there was the soft talk of the radio coming from the kitchen. I veered away from that part of the house, heading for the side door that led to the garage. My dad’s silver Corvette was missing, but my yellow Hummer sat in its usual spot. I unlocked it, thinking of heading straight for the Pet Hop offices downtown.

  I knew I probably looked like shit, what with last night’s mascara still on my face — albeit in the wrong location — but I was determined to figure out why such an awful rumor was going around. Pet Hop filing for bankruptcy just didn’t make sense. It was the leader in pet supplies. Last I’d heard, my dad was even talking about opening some stores in Canada.

  I climbed into the Hummer but then froze as a familiar engine revved up the drive. A few seconds later, the garage door opened up. My dad pulled the Corvette into the spot between my car and his Jaguar convertible, and I climbed back down onto the concrete floor to wait.

  His brows furrowed as he climbed out of the car, though the tense expression on his face could have meant any number of things. The man’s not exactly what you could call easy going — even a little thing like the mail man arriving thirty minutes later than usually could set my father off if he’s already in a sour mood.

  As he looked at me and pursed his lips, though, I could see something was different. Something big was going on — like, much bigger than having your newest order of paperbacks from Amazon arrive half an hour later than you hoped they would. His forehead glowed with sweat, a couple drops trickling down from underneath his sandy blond hair. He pulled out a handkerchief from the front of his suit and wiped his brow.

  “Where have you been?” he demanded.

  His cutting tone made me draw back. “At Rainy’s Fourth of July party. I told you. Remember?”

  “That doesn’t explain why you didn’t answer your phone. What about a party could be so distracting that you forget about the rest of the world?”

  Oh, Dad. You do not want to know the answer to that question.

  Immediately, I began to humorously play out exactly what the scene would look like if I were to tell my father about the drugs and sex on the yacht. Whatever his reaction might be, it would likely provide my friends and me with a story to laugh over for years.

  “Didn’t you see my missed calls?” he pressed.

  “Well... yeah.” There had been several missed calls from him when I’d woken up that morning, but no messages.

  He stomped past me and pushed open the side door leading out of the garage. “I assume you’ve at least been on Twitter, so you know something about what’s going on.”

  That one actually hurt. For the most part, my dad and I lived separate lives. And even though he could be distanced and preoccupied, very rarely did his treatment of me ever actually come close to scathing.

  “You don’t have to be so mean to me,” I said, trying to quell the shake in my voice. “Just because of some stupid rumor...” I followed him up the little stone walkway to the left wing of the house.

  He spun around to face me. “It’s not a rumor, Grace.”

  I stared at him, not doing much else but blinking and breathing. Even my mind, completely devoid of thoughts, suddenly became incapable of functioning. From somewhere above us a bird trilled, its song out of place in the dour moment.

  “B-but,” I sputtered, not entirely sure where I was going with the conjunction.

  He sighed and looked at the ground. “I’ve been trying to hide it from you for over six months. I kept thinkin
g that things would get better, that I would be able to pull the company through.” He continued to gaze at the grass. “But that’s not going to happen.”

  I opened my mouth to speak, but only a croak came out. I took a deep breath and tried again. “What are you going to do?”

  Finally, he looked up at me. “I’m going to New York to see if I can work something out with some shareholders there.”

  “Oh,” I said, relieved. “That doesn’t sound so bad. How long will you be gone?”

  All I need is one weekend to throw a kickass house party and make all these worries float away.

  He shook his head bitterly. “I don’t know. As long as it takes. I don’t know what will happen, Grace.”

  My fingers were twisting together and I forced myself to stop. “It’s okay.”

  He studied my face. “Grace, the company isn’t just filing for bankruptcy. I am too.”

  “Okay.” I got the sense there was more to what he was saying, so I stood there, waiting for the other shoe to drop.

  “Everything will change. We have to sell this house... and the one in Massachusetts.”

  My vision blurred. “Wait. What?”

  “We have to sell the houses. And the cars... the boat. Everything.”

  A strange noise escaped my throat, making me sound like a cross between a rabid fox and a crazy clown. “Not my car. That’s mine.”

  He pursed his lips. “Yes, the Hummer too. I’m sorry.”

  The tears welled up in my eyes, and the anger surged forward, spilling out of my heart and escaping from between my lips. “How could you do this?” I demanded. “How could you let this happen?”

  An expression I’d never seen on anyone settled on his face. I didn’t know exactly what he was feeling, but whatever it was, it wasn’t good. I tensed, thinking he was about to blow up at me.

  Finally, he just ran his hand over his eyes and sighed. “I did wrong by you. I’m sorry... I brought you up, giving you everything you wanted, and now look.” He gestured pathetically at me. “Your mother would be disappointed in me.”

  Pain pricked at my chest. I didn’t know what to say. He hardly ever talked about my mom, and to have him finally mention her in such a shitty moment sucked balls.

  A quick realization hit me like a truck, and I gasped. “If you’re selling the houses, where will I go?”

  I expected him to say Hotel Bel-Air, Rainy’s, or New York.

  “I’ve been thinking about that too,” he said. “And you need to get away for a while.”

  I guffawed, slapping my thigh. “I hardly think this is the time to plan a vacation, Dad.”

  His face became stony, and I shut up. “You stay out late partying. You don’t have a job. You never finished school.”

  I crossed my arms. “You make me sound like an awful person. That’s not all I do.”

  “You tan and go shopping.” He held his palm up to silence my objection. “Like I said, it’s my fault for letting it get this way. I should have put my foot down when you got kicked out of NYU, but I didn’t. I was too busy working all of the time to be a father, and I’m sorry.”

  Some of the tension left my shoulders. The apology was straight out of left field, and I had no clue how to respond to it. How ashamed he seemed of me.

  “You won’t want to be in Los Angeles much longer anyway,” he said, his voice ominous.

  “What does that mean?”

  “North Carolina,” he said, ignoring my question. “I spoke to my brother this morning, and he’s agreed to let you stay with him for a while.”

  My head spun, going a thousand miles per hour, a new question popping up with every mile the tornado of my mind gained. North Carolina, where? And what made my Uncle Joe — who I hadn’t seen since high school — so gung ho to take me in? And what was I to even do in such a hick state?

  “I’m not going,” I gasped. “You can’t make me.”

  He looked at me with sadness. Or was it pity?

  “I think you’ll soon find that going there will be preferable to any other option.”

  What’s that supposed to mean?

  He turned and went into the house, shutting the door behind him. A few seconds later, I followed, immediately running up to my room and texting Rainy before hopping in the shower and washing my clown face off.

  ***

  Ivy at the Shore was just as busy as it usually was on the weekend, but as soon as the hostess saw Rainy and me, she led us to the bar. The spot had been one of our favorite mid-day mimosa stops since both Rainy and I turned twenty-one a year before. Not that we hadn’t drank all the time before that. It had just been more difficult to do at all hours. There were lots of clubs, of course, that looked the other way — and even catered to us once they found out who we were — but restaurants at brunch could be a different matter.

  On a typical weekend, we liked to come in and nurse hangovers while keeping an eye out for A-List celebrities and then acting like we could care less when Kim Kardashian or Brad Pitt settled down a table away from us and ordered an organic omelet.

  This visit, of course, had an entirely different reason and mood behind it.

  The hot, dark haired bartender smiled and nodded at us as we settled into two seats in the middle of the cozy bar. A minute later, our usual cocktails were in front of us. I took the first slow sip, letting the orange juice and champagne seep into my veins.

  Rainy studied me from the corner of her eye. With her hair piled up in a big bun on the top of her head and a wraparound dress draped across her lithe limbs, she looked like she belonged in a magazine. All of our friends said it was only a matter of time before just that happened. She’d been trying to break out from the shadow of her dad for years, going to film auditions and modeling calls nonstop. Granted, she wasn’t exactly the best actress — that much I could tell — but we all knew you didn’t need to be talented to make it in Hollywood.

  “So,” she said, swishing around the contents of her glass.

  I glanced surreptitiously around us. The seat next to her was unoccupied and sitting on my side were two older men in suits. Even though no one we knew was around, I lowered my voice nonetheless. “It’s not a rumor.”

  Her eyes went wide. “Oh my God.”

  I gritted my teeth. “Yeah. Tell me about it.”

  She stared at me, looking fearful, which totally sucked because I was kind of counting on her to help pull me through the catastrophe. If my best mate was losing her shit, how could I be expected to keep it together?

  “What’s going to happen?”

  I lowered my voice even more. “My dad’s going to New York to try and fix it all.”

  She furrowed her brows. “Like, sell the company?”

  “I don’t know,” I groaned. “I don’t know. All I know is that he wants me to go to North Carolina.”

  “North Carolina?” she shrieked, making Mr. Hot Bartender glance up from the sink to look at us.

  “Keep it down. I don’t exactly want the entire city to know.”

  “I don’t get it. Why there?”

  I nervously tugged at a strand of my hair. Despite the urgency of meeting up with Rainy, I’d made sure not to leave the house without washing and blow drying. I’d been growing my hair out for a few years, and it had just gotten down to my elbows. No matter what was going on, taking the time to look my best was a priority. After all, you never knew what might happen or who you could run into.

  “Grace,” Rainy said. “Why North Carolina?”

  I sighed. “Because my Uncle Joe lives there.”

  “But what will you do there?”

  I shrugged, suddenly not wanting to talk about it anymore. The further we got into the conversation, the more twisted my stomach became.

  “Are you going back to school?” Rainy pressed.

  “Nope.”

  She grinned. “Are you raising cattle?”

  I pursed my lips. “I think you’re getting North Carolina confused with Texas.”


  She shrugged nonchalantly, like it didn’t matter either way. And it didn’t. She was staying in L.A. Everything in her life would remain normal and decent. I, on the other hand...

  “Heeeey,” a familiar voice said.

  From the front of the room, a girl in tight black pants and a crop top sauntered over. Madi pulled her sunglasses off and ran a hand through her short dark hair before stopping between mine and Rainy’s seats.

  “Kick ass party last night, Rainy,” she said about three octaves too loud.

  Rainy nodded. “Yeah, it was awesome.”

  I glanced at Rainy, trying frantically to emote with my eyes how much I desperately needed her to keep her mouth shut about what was happening in my life. Just telling her about it was embarrassing enough — although necessary if I didn’t want to implode from the stress of dealing with the upheaval on my own.

  Madi nodded eagerly, sliding her eyes to me, and I just knew. The way her head was bobbing up and down gave everything away. The question was whether or not she was going to mention the scandal.

  “So,” she chirped. “What’s up?”

  Rainy shrugged. “Just trying to recover.”

  Madi’s thick red lips stretched into a malicious grin. I could practically see the wheels turning as she set her gaze on me. “And how are you, Grace?”

  “Good,” I responded as naturally as I could manage.

  She put on a phony look of sympathy. “I heard a funny thing this morning.”

  “Hm.” I clutched the stem of my mimosa glass tighter.

  She waited for more from me. I didn’t give it.

  Instead, Rainy spoke up. “You guys want to check out that new club in Hollywood tonight? My friend Ricardo is a promoter for it.”

  “I don’t know,” Madi replied, drawing the words out longer than necessary. “Can you go, Grace?”

  I narrowed my eyes at her. Madi and I had never had a beef with each other. We usually enjoyed jokes at other people’s expenses. The fact that she could so suddenly be snarky after years of being friends was downright pathetic.

  And who gets their lips pumped full of collagen at twenty-three anyway?