A Girl's Best Friend

by Kristin Billerbeck

  “San Francisco is a happening place, am I right?”

  “You are.” I agree.

  “It’s like New York—if you can make it here, you can make it anywhere.”

  “True, but obviously I can’t make it here, so are you suggesting I move? Maybe look for something in Iowa?”

  “You really don’t know what you’re good at.” He says this with just the right amount of flirtation, and I feel myself becoming more uncomfortable.

  “I’m good at buying shoes and spending my father’s money. But it’s a funny thing, I can’t really do anything with that skill. And neither of those brings in a lot of cash.”

  Nate just shakes his head, clearly frustrated with me. “You know the in’s and out’s of the city, where the chic people go, where the ‘yesterday’ restaurants are, and where they wouldn’t want to be seen. That’s a gift.”

  “But not really a marketable one.” I start to imagine what God would want from me, and how He loves an unselfish heart. “Do you think I’d make a good missionary?”

  Nate is not a Christian, and yet this makes him laugh. “You’d make a fine missionary to wealthy people. I’m not so sure if you’re ready for the streets of Calcutta just yet.”

  What I love and envy about Lilly (even when I’m annoyed with her) and her friends is that they tell you the truth. Their version of it, anyway. In fact, just try and hold her nana (who raised her) back from telling her the truth. My father, in contrast, has always blindly encouraged me, so it never dawned on me I wasn’t actually perfect for each and every station of life. Until now.

  “So I’m not cut out for the mission field.” I cross my arms in front of me, pulling my sweater around my chest. “What is my graceful gift good for, exactly, Nate? Is there a place out there that cares if I type prettily?” Truthfully, I don’t know why I’m listening, other than I want a friend to sit with me until the cab gets here. Nate couldn’t dole out career advice any better than Martha Stewart.

  “When you came into my apartment this morning, what’s the first thing you noticed?” he asks.

  “You have a lot of computer equipment.”

  “Hah!” He points at me. “That’s not what you noticed. You noticed the smell of my dog, just like everyone does. He stinks.”

  Which begs the question, Why doesn’t Nate have a Lysol fetish?

  I nod subtly. It is what I noticed. It’s horrible.

  “His ear drains. He wouldn’t survive the operation, or I’d fix it.” Nate explains. “You never said a thing when you walked in. You just coyly handed me back the coffee cup before excusing yourself.”

  Yeah, and running for my life. “Your point? I didn’t want to be rude.”

  “Did Lilly ever think about being rude? About wiping VapoRub under her nose before entering? Or passing it around like a party favor?”

  I laugh, picturing Lilly and her freakish scent issue, sticking out her jar of Vicks like it’s a fine champagne at a wedding.

  My cab pulls up in front of the building and Nate stands, leaving his groceries on the stoop. As he’s walking to the cab and opening the door for me, he says one last thing. “My point is you could be a stylist and tell people what to wear, a hotel concierge to tell people where to be, or an event planner to showcase what you wealthy people buy. There are any number of options. You just need to think outside the box and stop looking for things beneath who you are. Embrace who you are. You’re the daughter of San Francisco’s Jeweler; your mother is the infamous Traci Malliard. One does not come by successful genes like that for nothing.”

  As I slide into the cab’s seat, Nate shuts the door and taps on the window, which I roll down. “Thanks, Nate.”

  “People aren’t reading about you in the papers because you screwed up, Morgan. They’re reading about you because you’re a fascinating human being, and if I may say so, you’re hot like your mother. Being fascinating and hot is marketable all by itself. Your father knew it, and now it’s your turn. And if you tell Kim I said any of this, I’ll deny every word.”

  As the cab starts to roll away, I look back at Nate picking up his groceries, and I smile to myself. You know, when the fog of life is closing in, strangling you with its soupy presence, a word of encouragement is like a ray of California sunshine. Even from a charming engineer who is full of garbage. There are people in life who do nothing more than show up. Nate is one of those people, I think. He enters stage left, plays the nice guy role, and then quietly slithers away.

  But he thinks I’m hot. That is most certainly encouraging.

  chapter 11

  My pulse races as I come to my street and the Russian Hill neighborhood I call home. Or did before this weekend, anyway. Like the red dirt of Tara, the stained cement of Hyde with its cable-car tracks in the street sustains me. I am beckoned home by its power, the grunting chains in action beneath the asphalt, the clanging bells like a symphony to my ears. Polk’s gleaming shops and bistros are begging for my return. I am home. Where good food is plentiful, and my view of the Bay awaits me. There is no guilt, no pain of failure; there is only the sparkling promise of life within my co-op.

  I roll into my comfort zone, and the cabby stops the car. A doorman I don’t recognize opens the cab door.

  “Who are you?” I ask.

  “Dylan.”

  “I’m Morgan Malliard, and I’ll need my cab fare covered until my father can repay you.” I step out of the cab and notice the doorman pause. Snap, snap. Let’s go.

  He looks at me awkwardly. Most likely he has no tips lining his pockets because he is not good at what he does. “Miss?” He touches the tip of his cap.

  “Cab fare,” I state plainly. “I don’t have any money on me. There should be some in the till in the lower drawer of your office. If you’ll pay the man, my father will see to it there is twice the money in your paycheck.” This is how the system works. Hello? “How long have you been here?”

  “No one said anything about money. I’m here as a job, to earn money, not to put it out.”

  Looking at this poor man’s expression, I wonder how many men just like him I walked over without thought to their humanness. Here in the garage of my building along with the cab driver and the doorman, it dawns on me for the very first time that these people are working jobs. Someone is paying them for their services.

  Which is more than I can find someone to do for me. “I’ll be back,” I say to the cabbie. I start for the elevator.

  Dylan holds his palm up. “Just a minute. I’ll handle this.” And he gets on his closet phone, trying to appear official. When in actuality he’s probably scared to death he’s going to make a mistake. Nobody stays here long without learning that people who live in this co-op are short on “nice” when it comes to cold, hard cash.

  I wait beside the cab as the driver taps the steering wheel to the hip-hop beat of Jay Z. The doorman comes back out, shaking his head back and forth.

  “You’ll have to hold on,” I say into the cab, and I go to the doorman’s phone and buzz my father.

  “Yes?” Mrs. Henry answers, her telltale aloofness putting the fear of the devil into children everywhere. I hear that witch music from The Wizard of Oz as I picture Mrs. Henry riding a bike. I’ll get you, my pretty.

  “Mrs. Henry, it’s Morgan. I’m downstairs and there’s a new doorman.” I turn away rather than let him hear my conversation about his ineptness. “I need cab fare, and I don’t have any cash.”

  “Your father has guests.”

  “And I have no money. Put my father on, please.”

  “He’s asked not to be disturbed.”

  “So they’ll disturb him later when I make my one phone call from the pokey. Is that a better option? I’m sure he won’t appreciate the headline in the morning’s paper.”

  Click.

  Now the cab driver is getting annoyed, and he’s turned the radio up so it sounds like a downtown barrio in the parking lot, which infuriates the doorman, who has completely lost control of his bu
ilding. And I’m just standing here in painful, ugly shoes wondering what to do next. This whole scene would be tolerable if my feet were happy.

  “I’ll be right back.” I head to the elevator and put my card in for the penthouse. Upstairs, the doors open with a ding, and I see my father sitting at the oval dining room table with two men I’ve never seen before and a woman. Not a normal Richard-Malliard-San-Francisco’s-Jeweler type woman, either. There are blueprints rolled out in front of them.

  “Daddy? I need cab fare.”

  He stands up and reaches into his pocket, pulling out twenties, but my appearance seems to garner no emotion whatsoever. Is it any wonder I take the money and run in this life? I grab three of them and slide back into the elevator. By now I’m sort of wishing I’d just stayed at Lilly’s and had some Cup O’ Noodles. It would have been far less disconcerting. Who on earth are those people? And what is my dad tearing apart now?

  Before I can escape, Daddy pulls me out of the elevator. “No, no. You stay here.” He hands the money to Mrs. Henry, who is hovering nearby. “Go take this downstairs for Morgan.” He pulls me towards the table, and the men stand.

  The woman remains seated, checking me out like I’m a piece of meat in her local butcher shop. Let’s just say it looks like she’s never met a pork chop she didn’t like. She has an angry line in the center of her forehead that points to a bulbous nose that is red from too much drink, but she has freshly sanded skin from professional dermabrasion (I’d know the look anywhere) and a waddling neck that is completely out-of-sync with the plastic complexion. She should have had the neck done, too, I think. She looks as though someone stuck Barbie’s head on Mr. Potatohead.

  “Morgan, this is Gwen.”

  To my horror, he reaches out to Mrs. Potatohead. Oh no, no, no, Daddy. She doesn’t even know to stand up when introduced. This cannot be my forthcoming stepmother. She is missing grace, decorum, and she’s wearing cheap shoes! And she has hired two straight men to decorate. (How do I know they’re straight? Well, first off, I do live in San Francisco. Second, one is wearing a wrinkled shirt and the other has sandals on with socks. There’s not a gay man in the city who would be caught dressing like a tourist or in wrinkles, unless they were currently fashionable.) This does not bode well.

  I don my favorite plastered smile, “Gwen, what a pleasure to welcome you into Daddy’s and my home.”

  “It’s going to be our home soon enough. I want to introduce you to Sven and Jackson. They’ll be redesigning the penthouse to be more conducive to married life.”

  “Conducive?” I ask with sickly sweetness.

  “We will be newlyweds, darling. We’d like to see the master suite expanded, since—” She raises her eyebrows at my father. “—well, since we’ll be newlyweds.”

  Eww.

  I give a hollow laugh. “Right. Well, what will you be doing exactly?” I realize I’m about to get a detailed bedroom explanation. “With the house designs, I mean.” Here Sven and Wren, or whatever their names are, swing into action and unravel the blueprints.

  “We’ll be leaving your room, honey,” my father assures me.

  “As a guest room, and you’re welcome anytime,” Gwen chimes in.

  “Actually, I live here, Gwen. Hasn’t my father told you that?”

  “Well, of course you do, honey, but in every chick’s flight, there’s a time to leave the nest.”

  And sometimes, there’s a time to pad it with another layer of living. Bring on the down feathers.

  “Daddy and I thought fifty might be a good age.” I giggle again, falsely, but I’ll tell you if Daddy had a plan to keep me in my bedroom until I died of old age, here she is. I grind my heels into the hardwood floor. Currently, I have absolutely no intention of going anywhere. Not for my agreement with Lilly, not even for a date with Johnny Depp himself.

  “We’ll be moving the bedroom into this hallway and giving them the panoramic view of the Bay. Your room will be moved over here where this—” Sven pauses. “Where this coat closet currently stands.”

  Oh Gwen, this is the best you’ve got? Honey, you don’t know my father from Adam. “Daddy, won’t that drastically reduce resale value? To have such a large master suite without a living area with the view?”

  Gwen swoops up the plans. “We were just discussing how we might rework the spaces.”

  “Well, I hope you rework it to take advantage of the views, because that’s what adds the zeroes to the property value. Sven and Jackson, do you have architects working with you?”

  “We prefer to work alone,” Jackson says with a fake British accent. Dude, this is San Francisco—like we don’t know a fake accent when we live in one of the world’s most international cities.

  “You may prefer it, but this building has very strict codes, and all changes must be approved by the co-op board. I can tell you, you’d never get these plans past the co-op board.” And if we have any luck at all, Daddy will never get his new fiancée past the board. But alas, they have no jurisdiction there.

  I don’t know why I don’t like her. Daddy’s had girlfriends before, but they always made sense to me. They were either scandalously young and beautiful or some social mogul’s widow who could provide entry into a new circle he hadn’t yet broken. There’s always a reason my father does anything, and this particular girlfriend doesn’t give me that reason. She’s not wealthy, or I would have heard of her, and the fact that she has a real job makes this whole scenario completely intimidating. I don’t think my father is actually capable of true love, so it can’t be that.

  “Morgan,” my dad says gently. “You probably want to freshen up for dinner, and then we’ll discuss this further. Go ahead.”

  I look at Gwen, and then Tweedledee and Tweedledum, and make my way into the bedroom. Oh my goodness, I feel absolute euphoria seeing my room, its view, and the six hundred-knots-per-inch rug my father bought me. May I never take it for granted again, I think as I bend down and kiss it. Then I rush to my bed, tear off the covers, and touch my sheets. Oh, it’s heaven to feel a real thread count. Oh Auntie Em, I had a terrible dream.

  The lights below are just starting to flicker on one by one, twinkling against the deep violet sky. That’s another thing I’ve taken for granted. In Lilly’s neighborhood, the sun disappears so quickly, but on Russian Hill it slowly descends behind the mountain, putting on a light show for all who care to watch. Being at the edge of the ocean, we are some of the last to bask in the daily sunshine.

  In my bathroom, I see my sunken tub with its city-lights views calling out to me, and I run the tap to fill. Normally, I’m a shower girl, but something about this day calls for decadence and the luxury of a bubble bath. I find some bath gel that’s been imported from Italy to sit on display and pour it lavishly into the streaming water. The scent of lavender and honey fill my senses, and I feel as though I’m dreaming. Have I always lived like this? Because today it feels like I never actually noticed.

  There’s a knock at my door. With the way I’m feeling, I’m just certain it could be Johnny Depp. But I open the door to Mrs. Henry, her face pinched, clearly upset that she had to schlep downstairs and pay the indigent cabby. She sees such jobs as beneath her. I suppose I did, too.

  “Yes?” I ask kindly. The fact is Mrs. Henry has the answers I need about my mother, so this is my first attempt at making nice. I think about the threat my father made about Saturday night and sniff the bubbles, knowing all I’ll have to give up if I don’t answer to him. And Gwen.

  “Dinner is nearly ready. I wanted to give you fair warning,” Mrs. Henry says.

  “What about your room? Where will it be? In the elevator shaft?”

  “Miss Morgan, I can’t really say.” She pauses, composing herself from her true emotions. “It’s your father’s home and if he and the future Mrs. Malliard choose to remodel, that’s their private business.”

  I laugh. “If you think I’m going to sit back and let this woman take over our home, you haven’t learned a thing a
bout me in all these years, Mrs. Henry.”

  “I know you have enough of your mother in you to fight.” She gives the slightest smile. “This is a phase. An infatuation. Your father has had them before.”

  I look out the door and watch Gwen rub her hand along my father’s arm. “What can he possibly see in her?”

  Mrs. Henry crosses her arms. “She’s bossy. He likes them bossy. Always has. The more they kick him to the curb, the more attractive they are to him. I think he likes to see himself as a professional bull rider who can last longer than the eight seconds.”

  I laugh out loud. “I’m sure there’s a Freud story in there somewhere. But in the meantime, I think I’m going to need your help, Mrs. Henry.”

  What Mrs. Henry lacks in warmth, she more than makes up for in work ethic. I don’t ever remember her missing a day of work or being sick. The Mrs. part of her name is a little misleading. She divorced early on, but she kept the missus-nomer because she thought it gave her more credibility.

  Occasionally, I see what my mother must have seen in Mrs. Henry. I see a friend and a confidante, and an ally who will not let my father go down without a fight.

  Mrs. Henry leaves me to my bath and I sit and ponder the situation. The one thing that really doesn’t add up is Gwen’s lack of beauty. My father deals in beautiful, sparkling goods, and he once held my shimmering mother in his case for all to envy. Gwen Caruthers has something I’m missing, and I’m bound and determined to find out her appeal. It’s not that I care that she’s homely—hey, if that’s what he wants, I’m all for it. It’s just so completely outside Daddy’s nature.

  I may be working on separation anxiety for myself, but that does not mean I’m leaving my father with a faulty piece of Velcro, either.