by Kathi Barton
Amy was delightful. Throughout their entire meal, she would tell something about herself or Booker that would have them all laughing. A couple of times, she’d mention her sister or mom, but mostly it was about the two of them becoming friends. Dad asked her how she’d met Booker. Booker laughed and told Dad he’d tell him later.
“Oh, now we all have to know. What did you do to her?” Booker asked him how come he thought he’d done something to her. “Because I know you well enough to know you’d have to be the guilty one. If she’d done it to you, I also think she would have told us straight up without having to put it off until you were alone with us.”
“I met him on a bus. We were going to this house, as a class, to see the classic design. It was a masterpiece. The most exciting thing about it was that it had been ordered completely from a Sears catalog. Every piece was marked as to where it was to go. There were even diagrams on the instructions.” Booker laughed as she explained how she’d been off the bus first, while he’d been last. “When I’m standing back, looking at the house to get a good photo of it for later reference, Booker comes up behind me and lifts me right off the ground. I mean, he lifted me about three feet up. I took the picture, turned around, and kneed him in the groin.”
Booker took over from there. “She makes it sound like it would have been a recoverable wound she hit me with. Christ, I couldn’t piss for a week. I had to ice down my groin nightly so I could wear a pair of pants the next day. When someone tells you they felt it in the back of their throat, that is not just an expression. Amy can and will do that to you without a moment’s notice. I’ve seen her use it on others too.” Booker took her hand into his and kissed the back of it. “After that, we became good friends. She told me when I didn’t retaliate, that made me the best as far as she was concerned.”
“You two, are you dating?” Booker said no, and Amy said no way in hell. North asked them why not. “I mean, you seem to get along well enough. You even finish each other’s sentences. Why are you so set on not dating?”
“We tried it once after I recovered from the kneeing. But it was all wrong.” Dad asked him what he meant. “I don’t know. But when the date was over, it was like kissing a sister or something like that. We’re friends, not a couple. I know that makes very little sense, but it’s never gone beyond the two of us just being what we are. Good friends that love to hang out together.”
“Not to mention, he’s afraid of me.” Dad laughed with them, but North was studying the two of them. “Also, you’ll not believe this, but neither of us drink, smoke, or do anything like other friends do. We’re just good for each other.”
North had no friends of the opposite sex. Nor did he have many friends that weren’t related to him. No one that he could call on when he just wanted to talk something over. In that moment, he envied Booker and his relationship with Amy.
When dinner was over, Dad picked up the check. He said he’d not had this much fun in a long while and appreciated them letting him hang around with the younger crowd. Amy kissed his dad on the cheek and told him she enjoyed hanging around with him as well.
“I needed this. More than I can tell you.” Dad hugged Amy and told her he did as well. “Thanks. I’ll have to say my goodbyes here, however. I’ve decided to head back to work in the morning, and that means I have to find someplace to wash up my laundry.”
She was gone before any of them could offer their home to do her laundry. Dad looked at North when they pulled up in front of the house they were going to buy. North waited for him to speak, as he’d noticed that Dad was a thinker before he spoke.
“Do you think they’ll ever be more than friends?” North said it didn’t look like it. “You should find her and ask her out, North. She’s a nice girl, and I think the two of you could have some fun together too.”
“What brought that on?” Dad said he didn’t know, but he did notice how he’d been looking at her all night. “Looking and dating are two entirely different things, Dad. She’s a beautiful woman, and I can and do appreciate that when I see it. Besides, I don’t need an entanglement with a woman in my life right now.”
“Entanglement or not, she’d be a good woman to have around when you need someone to lean on. Or not. What do I know? I married a bitch from hell.” Dad was laughing when he got out of the car. When he leaned back in, he looked ready to cry again. “I could have done a lot better with my life had I found someone like her. I’m only saying that to have someone like her, not necessarily her, in your corner, son, it makes the bad things seem so much easier to cope with.”
North found himself thinking about that all the way to his condo. As soon as he arrived, he decided to call Booker and thank him for letting them join them for dinner. But what he ended up doing was asking for Amy’s phone number so he could talk to her too.
~*~
Phoenix had seen Amy twice while she and her mom were in town today. Twice she’d tried to ignore her, and both times she wanted to run over to her and bash her head in. Not really, but it would have been fun to hurt her again. But there were three men around her all the time, and that just wouldn’t do for her to get away with it. Phoenix was nothing if not cautious of getting her hands dirty when she didn’t have to.
“Have you tried to call your dad today? You should tell him you’re out of the rehab place and see if he wants to have dinner with you. For the sake of our family.” Phoenix said she’d left him three messages. “Well, it’ll do you no good to leave him any more. He’s changed his number or something. I can’t believe he did this to us. Left us with nothing more than a month’s stay in this cheap hotel. Whatever gave him the idea he needed to have someone following us around taking pictures? I have to admit, I’m ashamed of how I looked in those photographs. Why didn’t you tell me I’d put on some weight? I hate that I looked like your mother in those shots of us.”
“Mother, are you even listening to yourself? You’re complaining about how you looked in those pictures when that is what got us into trouble with Dad. What do we do to make him take us back?” Mom told her she’d been thinking on that, but her divorce decree had come today. “You mean he’s actually going through with it? I thought you told me you had it in the bag. That you nearly had him saying how sorry he was that he’d not trusted you.”
“I guess I overestimated my hold over him.” Phoenix looked at her mother, and decided if she was going to ever get back in the house, she was going to have to do things on her own. “Besides, you don’t know him like I do, Phoenix. Once he sets his mind to something, there is no budging him. But then he does have Amy around. Did I tell you I saw her at the house the other morning? Going in the back door like we trained her to do. I tell you, she was a great source of fun when she lived there.”
“She never liked me. Did you know that?” Mom told her she’d not cared for her sister either. “Yes, that’s true. I nearly had a stroke when Dad asked me to make a place for Amy to be at my wedding. Christ, why? When I asked him, he told me she was my sister and that family is all a person has. Whatever. She was never anything to me but a pain in the ass from the moment you brought her home from the hospital.”
“I sort of enjoyed her as a baby. She didn’t carry on very much. Not like you did. I think you were born spoiled. Amy didn’t get into much trouble at school, either. At least nothing that I had to pay to get her out of. You cost me thousands.” Phoenix told her mom she’d been born to party. “Yes, well, you certainly did enough of that in your last years of high school. Do you suppose Amy went on to college? She was certainly smart enough. But I never heard a thing about her after she left home.”
While her mom talked about how precious Amy had been as a child, Phoenix tried to think of ways to get back to her life. Her dad had kicked her to the curb when he had Mom. Why, she didn’t know. I mean, she was still his daughter. No one could dispute that. Wives were a dime a dozen. Children were forever.
“
I wanted to let you know that the phones have been canceled as of today. I don’t know if you tried to use yours or not, but mine is offline.” Phoenix told her she only used it to take pictures. Thinking her dad would do something like shut off the phones, Phoenix was glad now that she’d written down the phone numbers she had stored in it. “Speaking of which, your wedding photos came today. Your dad must have had them forwarded here for you. I didn’t open them, but I’m sure they’re a mess. Did you ever find out who took the pictures of us at the house?”
“No. But I have an idea it was that cook. Lulu, of all names, must have told Dad about our afternoons. It’s the only thing I can think could have happened. She was forever bitching about how much work we were creating for her by having guests over several times a day. The old biddy. I had no idea she knew what was going on up there until this.”
Mom handed her the large envelope. Phoenix opened it and let the pictures slip out onto the table. “Those are all you got? My god. You’d think for as long as she was there, she could have gotten a few more pictures of me.”
“Mom, it was supposed to be my wedding. Not you getting some photos of you.” She looked at the pictures and realized not one of her bridesmaids had even called her after Dad had told them it was over. “I need to make a few calls. I’m sure that with me not living at home, Bitsy or any of my other close friends have not been able to contact me. It would be just like the staff to simply tell them I’m not at home anymore. I wondered why they’ve not made any attempt to call me.”
“I’m going out in a little bit. Why don’t you wait until then to call them?” Ignoring her mom in favor of doing what she wanted, Phoenix called Bitsy first from the phone in the hotel room. She was always a good friend when the chips were down. “What are you going to tell her about the wedding being off?”
Before she could tell her mom to hush, someone answered the phone. “I want you to get Bitsy on the phone now. Tell her it’s Phoenix Hamilton.” The man, whoever he was, cleared his throat. “Surely you can do that some other time, can’t you? That’s revolting. Put her on the phone before I tell her what a jerk you’re being.”
“Miss Bitsy has left strict orders not to put any calls from you through to her.” She told him her name again. “Yes. I heard you the first time. She’s not going to speak to you. We were told that if you were to call, we’re to tell you to fuck off. Not my words, but hers, you see.”
“You’re lying.” The man said he wasn’t, and then hung up on her. “Mom, he hung up on me—the nerve of some people. I’m betting her parents are doing this. You just wait until I tell Bitsy what they said to me.”
“Darling, there was that large article that told every detail of the scandal we were in. Her name was mentioned, as well as the other girls you know. Perhaps her parents are doing this to make sure she has a good marriage coming her way too.” Mom laughed. “She’ll need to be walking around with a brown paper bag over her head to have a man take a second look at her. Did you see how broken out her face was? My goodness. I was thinking then that she needed to be doing something before the wedding. That would have been a disaster.”
That made Phoenix smile. But after calling the other girls she’d spent most of her childhood with, she found that they were not taking her calls either. Getting the numbers wasn’t all that easy, either. Having to look them up in the phone book was difficult enough. Phoenix had to remember their addresses in order to make the correct call.
“This is just stupid. I don’t know why they’re all pissy with me. I didn’t do any of this. Had Dad stayed out of it, as he usually did, I’d be on my honeymoon and living it up with Don.” Mom reminded her that her husband to have been was Doug. “Whatever. It’s not like I had any plans of staying married to him forever. He was just my test dummy like they use in those wrecking cars. Now I have no one to outlive and get all their money.”
She’d been doing that a lot lately, just breaking down in tears at the strangest things. But she’d been thrown a curveball. Her life was nothing at all like it had been before. All her dresses were at the house. There was no one waiting on her all the time—cleaning up her messes, driving her around town. The most she’d been able to get from the house that day was a bag of her makeup, not even the good stuff. Just the stuff she wore when she was not expecting to go out or for anyone to come around.
“This is just mean.” Mom agreed with her. “We have to make this right, Mom. I can’t live like this. And what are we supposed to do when this month is over? I’m not going to get a job. I will not mess up my hands by doing anything menial. Dad has to see that he’s ruining my life by having this little bit of a tiff with you.”
“I don’t think he’s any happier with you, Phoenix. Nor do I think he cares at all if we have a job or not. Even our credit has been cut off.” Mom shook her head as she looked around the hotel room they were sharing. “This is so below what I’d gotten used to by being married to Shelton. There has to be some kind of law that says he can’t just dump us because of a silly affair.”
“Silly or not, he’s done a very good job of it if it is against the law.” Phoenix looked out the window and saw Amy again. “There’s that bitch now. Damn it. I wish I knew what the fuck she’s doing back in town. I thought we made it perfectly clear that Dad and the two of us didn’t want her around anymore.”
“I thought so as well. However, as you can see, she listens as well as Shelton does. Do you suppose she’s been given everything we had taken from us? That would really piss me off if she dared trying to use anything that belonged to me.” Phoenix didn’t point out that nothing her mom wore was anything anyone would want but opted for keeping the peace. She watched as Amy looked up and waved, then blew her kisses.
Jumping back from the window had her knocking the table over, along with the two chairs that had been brought in for them. The things on it rattled to the floor. The pictures that she’d been sent were spread out like a nightmarish rug, overlapping one another until she was nearly sick with the display. She noticed then that the shots from her bachelor party celebration were there, as well as a note from That Woman asking her to contact her if she wanted prints made of the pictures.
Screaming didn’t make her feel any better, but it did startle her mom enough that she jumped back and fell too. Christ. Would this shit ever end? Phoenix decided right then and there that she was going to have a long talk with her dad and set the record straight, without her mom there. If she had to throw her mother under the bus, then so be it. It was war, and she wasn’t going to lose this battle.
Going into the tiniest bathroom she’d ever been in, Phoenix fixed her makeup and hair. One of the things her dad could never ignore was how beautiful she was. Practicing a bit on how to look pitiful, Phoenix was ready to go. Getting there might have been a problem, but she knew how to get rides from people. Show a little cleavage, and she could have them eating out of her hand. Picking up her purse, she looked at her mom when she spoke.
“Where are you going?” Phoenix told her mom to mind her own business. “If you’re going to see your father, I’m going with you. I want to get back home more than you do.”
“I’m going to see him, but you’re not going. I want to see if he’ll take me back without you.” Mom asked her what the hell she was talking about. “If only one of us is able to play him again, you know I’ll be the one that wins in this. Once I’m in there, it’ll be just a few days for me to bring you in too, don’t you think?”
“I don’t like it, but I think you might be right.” Phoenix told her she was right. “You’d better not be saying this to keep me from going home too, darling. Remember, I know everything there is to know about you.”
As she was going down in the elevator, Phoenix smiled. There wasn’t any way she was going to be helping her mom out. If she got in, she knew she’d have her dad all to herself. And that suited her just fine.
Chapter 3
“I owe him an apology.” Lulu told her she did. “Are you going to be nice to me? I got something for you the last time I was in Paris. Do you want it now, or do you want to bash me around a little more?”
“You need it at times.” She did but handed over the large tin when Lulu sat down. “What did you get Hank? You always get us something from wherever you go. What’s he—? Oh, Amy. Oh, Amy, this is too much.”
“No, it isn’t. Here, let me help you get it open.” Once she had the dark chocolate opened, Amy put several of the small chunks of it on Lulu’s plate. “The lady that makes this is a good friend of mine now. I might have made her day by agreeing to take a bunch of photos of her granddaughter’s birth. She’s the cutest little thing. Anyway, I was there, so I also took pictures of the family gathered for the event. I’m rambling. So she asked me what it was I liked in the way of sweets. I told her I wasn’t much into candy or things like that, but I had this wonderfully amazing cook that loved dark chocolate. She’s mailed a box of them here for you.”
“That’s not necessary. You should have had her send you something.” Amy explained to her that she owned a sweet shop. “Oh, well, then I will use this for you. Amy, this is wonderful.”
Taking a taste of the dark rich treat, Lulu moaned. Amy had tried it and had decided right then that she was glad she didn’t care for chocolate. It just didn’t sit well with her on a great many levels. But mostly it was the bitter taste it left in her mouth when she was finished.
Her dad walked into the kitchen while Lulu was telling her about the hot cocoa she was going to make.