My Fair Aussie

by Jennifer Griffith

  Monique-Noelle’s fiery tone iced over.

  “I have no intention of letting you tell me what to do with that child. Just like I have no intention of letting you get in the way of my relationship with Henry Lyon here.” Her eyes narrowed at me, aiming like lasers. “The hot, rich husband having an affair with the nanny is so common it’s almost a proverb, so I propose the clear solution of getting rid of the nanny—and getting rid of the child.”

  I gasped so loud my throat and lungs hurt.

  “You wouldn’t hurt Sylvie!”

  “Unless you think giving her to her father completely would hurt her, no. I’m divorcing him, and when I do I’m severing parental rights. He and his nanny—who he’s been carrying on with all these months on the mainland, going to dirty theme parks and public beaches and taking the urchin—can have her. See? I don’t need you. And neither does Sylvie.”

  That last barb pierced me to the very core.

  “Now, shoo, Eliza. Take your things from the bungalow behind the Banbridge mansion tout de suite. Henry and I have things to discuss. Like where we should get married. Here on San Nouveau? Or a destination wedding? Iceland? New Zealand? See, Henry, honey? I don’t mess around. When I want something, I get it.”

  She strode toward him, a she-panther with a water buffalo in her sights.

  “He thinks he owns the bus station!” It came blurting from my lips before I could stop it. I jumped in front of him now, returning the human-shield favor. “He’s a homeless man.”

  This badly expressed fact didn’t seem to register with her at all.

  “Of course he’s homeless. He’s house hunting.” Her slow, predatory glide toward him bore down, and she reached out with the flat of her hand, as if to shove me aside. “I’m going to show him what his new home looks like. Come along, Henry. Don’t waste time. I’ve already filed my divorce papers. Bainbridge won’t dispute. I’m practically an unmarried woman, so you can give me what I’ve been waiting for.”

  Now she did push my shoulder, and I toppled a little, but I didn’t lose my footing. Fear and disgust propelled more words from my lips, words I’d never intended to hurl at her this way, especially not in front of Henry. I’d never meant to shame Henry. But they came from a deep place of pain in me, erupting out like a long-dormant volcano of hurt.

  “Monique! He’s a hobo! I picked him up at the bus station a week ago. He was homeless and dirty. I cleaned him up, got him some fancy clothes, and told him to tell you he was rich.”

  She jerked to a halt.

  “You’re not rich?”

  Henry didn’t answer.

  “In certain moments he might think he is. He’s not always lucid. Like so many homeless, fact and fantasy blur for him.” Even as I spoke the words, I knew they weren’t nice to be saying right in front of Henry, as if he weren’t there, and as if he hadn’t been lucid for the entire day he’d just spent with me. Nevertheless, they churned out.

  “Monique, he thinks he owns the bus station I found him at. He even gave it a name: Cherrington Downs.”

  “That’s a nice name.”

  “It would be, but it was actually the nastiest bus station in East L.A.” I still remembered the fetid smells there. “You wouldn’t like it.”

  “But Henry has a family. I heard him talk about them.”

  “Yes,” I said, knowing Mo-No was right. “He was raised by a good family, I’m sure, but the first day I met him, he told he me owned the bus station, that he needed an international phone, and that he was afraid of helicopters who wouldn’t come down and pick him up to save him from the coyotes.” I hated myself so much for this spew of terrible facts. But it was my only choice.

  Monique, who had been eyeing me with skepticism, now whirled on Henry.

  “Is it true?”

  “I wouldn’t say I’m afraid of helicopters. But I was a little fizzed that none would pick me up when I was walking through the desert. And yes, I did lose my international phone, and I agreed to come help Elizer here in exchange for one.”

  “Help her what, exactly?”

  “I don’t know. Teach you a lesson, I guess. About valuing people. About loving your child.”

  “That child has nothing to do with this, with you and me.” But she caught herself. “You told everyone you’re a cattle baron. I read it in the tabloids. You told the San Nouveau islanders that you were here in the United States on business for cattle breeding, from Australia.”

  The magnitude of my fib started to settle on me, like a lead blanket.

  Now Monique-Noelle turned her venom on full blast.

  “And now you’re telling me that sexy British guy isn’t Daniel-Craig-Two-Point-Oh?”

  “He’s Australian.” It was weak, especially since I didn’t know whether it was accurate, although in the past few days, I’d never once heard his accent slip. He must have at least spent a lot of time in Australia. I could tell that now.

  However, I didn’t have any idea what was true and what was fantasy when it came to Henry. All I knew was this whole exchange had to be hurting him at least as much as it was me.

  “Whatever. It’s all places where they eat stuff that’s not avocadoes, so I don’t care.”

  That strangely made sense.

  “In fact, I don’t care if you’re foreign or from a bus station. You’re a liar and a hustler and a peon. You’re probably just dating Eliza for her connections here on San Nouveau and for the piles of cash she’s making for babysitting, because there’s nothing else that could possibly be attractive about her.” Her scowl of scorn could fry electronics.

  “She’s a nice girl, Monique. And you’re not.”

  “Well, I never claimed I was nice.” Smugness dripped from her words. “Frankly, I don’t need you, Henry Lyon. I’m still divorcing MacDowell and trading up, which direction you definitely are not, and you’ll be the one suffering if you mistakenly decided to care about her.” Next she swiveled her gun sites at me. “Because I’m not just going to fire Eliza Galatea and make sure she never gets another job as a nanny—or a dogsitter.” Mo-No’s eyes narrowed to slits. “I’m going to make sure she never makes it as a linguistics expert, either.”

  “That’s persecution!” Henry stepped forward, squaring his shoulders and placing himself between me and the witch. “You can’t possibly stop her from becoming a linguistics expert.”

  “How did you even know I’m a linguist?” It was probably the wrong question for the moment, but it was the one I wanted to know most. Mo-No knew nothing about me, cared nothing about me. It seemed impossible she could identify how to skewer me where it would hurt most.

  “From your résumé when you applied to be Sylvie’s nanny, of course.” Malice dripped from her words. “I know who I employ, of course.”

  I wish I didn’t know who employed me. I knew her far too well, the fake she was, and the stunts she’d pulled to get to her current standing. Up to now, for Sylvie’s sake I’d never mentioned what I knew, but she might be forcing my hand.

  “If I can’t block your career alone, trust me, I can pay enough people to do it. You’re toast,” she spat. “Without avocado slices.”

  She pulled out her phone and started dialing, but Henry reached over to stop her. She jerked her phone away from him.

  “It’s no use trying to stop me.” Monique’s eyes zeroed in on Henry, and she gave a hard, dry laugh. “You did this charade? For a phone?”

  He gave a single-shoulder shrug, as if to say, what of it? Monique-Noelle sighed one of her huffs of exhaustion that I’d heard ten thousand times during my stint in her employ.

  “I could have given you a phone, Henry. With shoulders like yours, I would have given you everything.” When that didn’t create the desired pathos from Henry, she aimed her guns at me—a fifty-gauge. “Guess who I’m calling. My lawyer.”

  “For a rush on your divorce?”

  “No. To get him to file two lawsuits against you, Eliza Galatea.”

  “Lawsuits!”
r />   “You, young lady with the stupidly long legs and face devoid of makeup, are being sued for fraud. How much is that worth these days? One million? Two?”

  That was the last thing I’d expected to hear from her. However, knowing Mo-No, it should have been my first leap of logic, if I’d been considering her personality at all.

  “Oh, and not just for fraud.” Oh, dear. She wasn’t finished dragging me behind her speeding car of doom yet. “In bringing your dirty hobo pal to this island, you’ve no doubt violated contractual confidentiality agreements that you signed. With your name. On the dotted line.” Mo-No hung on the word line.

  And I’d had it with her threats, with her belittlement, with her snide comments. I’d had it with Monique-Noelle.

  She was going down.

  “Put that phone away, Monique. Or should I say, Tammy? That’s your real name.” I’d known this for months. Thanks to Polly’s dad’s criminal background checks via the Navy, I’d been fully aware of the background of the woman I was working for right up front. San Nouveau might not want to take any risks with who they let come aground, but Polly hadn’t let me start working in close proximity with an unknown quantity, either. “There’s nothing less French than Tammy. Be the all-American girl you should have been. You’re the one who needs to quit perpetuating a fraud.”

  Mo-No’s face melted into a look of horror, reminiscent of that painting where the ghostly-headed, white-faced figured is screaming.

  “That. Is not. My name.” The words came out like they were being ground with a mortar and pestle. “Not anymore. Nobody says the name Tammy. Not around me.”

  “Tammy Berkowitz. From Van Nuys.”

  “No. No!” Mo-No stomped her kitten-heeled foot on the dirt of the stable yard, a puff of dust floating up all around her and coating her legs in their white jodhpurs. “Shut up. I am not that person. I’m not. I legally changed my name. But, if you tell anyone, and I mean anyone—”

  My mind kept ping-ponging back to what she’d said about MacDowell Bainbridge leaving Mo-No for his other nanny. Would that nanny love Sylvie? My soul stretched into a thread of longing for the poor little girl whose mother cared nothing for her.

  That sorry excuse for a mother deserved to be strung up. My volley had struck where it hurt.

  “If I tell anyone, what?”

  “I’ll take you down.” She set her jaw like she was holding a gun at me and needed to brace for its kickback. “You’ll go so far down that you’ll never see light again.”

  “Whatever. I’m already down, Tammy. I’ve got nowhere to go but up. Never threaten a woman who already has nothing to lose. I gave all this to help your Sylvie. And you’ve removed her from the equation. Rookie move.” Channeling my inner Polly Pickering, I aimed my own gun—a full-on bazooka—right back at her. I knew just which silver bullet to forge as a comeback, one that would stop her dead in her tracks from seeking retribution against him.

  “Fine. Then I’ll—” She looked back and forth between us, her eyes hardening further. “I’ll sue both of you. You’re the ones who tried to defraud me. I’m on solid ground. I’ll take down both of you.”

  Suing both of us? Hot terror peppered my chest—until I chased it away with anger. Okay, enough was enough. I’d had it with her threats and games and ridiculous selfishness. The last thing I would let her do was take Henry Lyon to court. He was innocent in this, and Monique-Tammy-Noelle-Bainbridge-Berkowitz-Whoever was the one going down.

  “Are you saying you’d describe putting yourself in the tabloids solid ground?”

  “What tabloids?” A sudden twinkle in her eye showed the idea intrigued her. Oh, but it wouldn’t. Not for long.

  “Yes, the tabloids. All of them, with your big, blond mane splashed over the front covers on the grocery store check stands all over the country.” I could see my line of attack clear as day. My aim centered on where she was most vulnerable: her vanity. “I can see the headline now: Uber-Rich Cheating Wife of Billionaire Sues Homeless Man Over Fraud Romance. Oh, Tammy. You’ll be the laugh of the week.”

  “That’s not what it’s going to say,” she hissed through gritted teeth.

  “Oh, yes it is. You’ll be reduced to a one-liner joke across all social media platforms. But hey, if that’s the route you want to take, it’s up to you.”

  Mo-No stomped her little foot with a growl.

  “And then I’ll have no choice but to tell the world about Tammy.”

  If instant petrifaction were a thing that could happen to a human face, it occurred to Mo-No now. She became a stone.

  Henry jumped into the fray now.

  “Don’t do it. Any of it, Monique. Or Tammy. Be yourself. It’s the only way to find true love.” He tipped his hat at her, and then, for some reason, he shot me a look. When our eyes connected, a string inside the instrument of my soul plucked and resonated, and for a moment its resonance was all I could hear.

  Did he mean he thought of me as his true love?

  Mo-No shuddered, her fists tight and the veins on her neck sticking out. Were they actually pulsating? She stomped her foot again, a little puff of dust coming up from it. I thought she might spontaneously combust, but instead she let out a primal shriek.

  “Who am I supposed to marry now?”

  ***

  Monique-Tammy-Noelle skimmed off in the electric golf cart’s ironic silence. The roar of a muscle car’s muffler would have reflected her rage better, but the golf cart’s nearly soundless whir was more fitting, I thought. My battle with her died with a whimper, not a roar.

  When the dust settled, I stepped closer to Henry. I exhaled, relieved that it was over.

  “Well, that didn’t work out the way I’d hoped.”

  With the sun at its apex, all the insects had gone quiet. The only sounds were the occasional bluster of a horse’s sigh; the only smells the pungent stable and rocky earth.

  “It might be for the best,” he said. We cut across the dirt toward the gates of the stable. “At least you won’t have to protect Sylvie from that…Thing.”

  Mo-No seemed a more appropriate name than ever for her. The Thing. The Thing that Ate Sylvie’s Potentially Charmed Life. The Thing that Stomped On Others. The Thing that Might Never Be Happy No Matter What.

  The Thing I could do nothing to help.

  Residual worry for Sylvie rippled through me, in among the waves of concern for how I was ever going to afford tuition for the upcoming semester, in among the giant rogue wave of fear that Henry would resent me for what I’d put him through. A whole week in the presence of that woman was a resentable experience.

  I resented myself for it already.

  True love. What had he implied? I hated myself for how fascinating I found those words.

  “You gambled.” He led me through the gate, leaving the dusty stable yard behind us. Just as we had when we were atop Trafalgar and Chantilly earlier, I fell in beside him. Our paces matched. “You bet big, just like in that My Fair Lady movie. There was a wager involved there.”

  “For the life of me, I can’t remember if the gambler wins or loses in it.”

  Henry gave a little shrug, one that said he didn’t recall the outcome either.

  “It doesn’t really matter now, does it? Let’s keep in mind, my payment was simply a phone, while you were playing for the happiness of that baby girl. Now who’s looking like the loser? Me, for being selfish.”

  “You weren’t selfish.” I pulled open the package from Polly. “Here.”

  Inside the box lay the phone Henry had requested. I handed it to him.

  “What’s this?” He rested a hand on my arm and watched me pick at the packing tape. One trillion nerve endings in my body activated at his touch: hot, cold, fire, ice, desire, despair.

  “I ordered it the day you agreed to come out to San Nouveau. Today was the soonest I could get it here. Sorry. I shouldn’t have put you through this.”

  “Me?”

  “Well, maybe not Mo-No, either.”

&
nbsp; “Naw, we’re adults. Instead, think of Sylvie. It seems like without her mother in her life, now she has a fighting chance—despite the questionable genetics she’s been saddled with, as daughter of that…” His kindness left that noun’s space blank.

  Well, that was one way to think of it. Maybe my efforts, rather than bringing Mo-No into a realization that Sylvie meant everything to her, had instead propelled her out of Sylvie’s orbit. And perhaps that was, as Henry had implied, a good thing. Maybe?

  I didn’t know.

  “Speaking of genetics,” I said, “did you want to try to call that geneticist?”

  I handed him the phone. It was charged up and ready to dial, just as I’d requested from the company that sent it.

  We headed away from the stables and down the path toward my final hours at the Bainbridge estate, because I’d be packing up all of Henry’s things along with mine this afternoon. This evening I’d be shipping myself and my life away from San Nouveau, away from its beautiful cliffs, its memories made with Sylvie and with Henry, away from Trafalgar, the beautiful horse I’d never ride again.

  A pang of regret made me look back toward the stables where Trafalgar rested. I missed horses. I needed them. I needed to be outside, feeling the wind against my skin and breathing the mountain air. I needed altitude and high country vegetation. I needed the animals—and not the kind obsessed with greed and vanity that surrounded me daily in my life on San Nouveau.

  At least working for Mo-No there had been Trafalgar, or at least the hope of riding Trafalgar, now and again. Now, not only would I have to leave the horse I’d just fallen in love with, I would also have to give up hope of paying tuition to prolong the agony of getting my Ph.D.—because I could never afford to tether things along until the committee actually approved an idea I came up with.

  I sighed, heavy with regret. Now I couldn’t even follow up on Polly’s dubious but approved idea since Henry was no longer going to be part of my life’s landscape.

  And I didn’t want to dig up any other Australian, or wannabe Australian, to take his place. No one could take his place.

  Henry was staring down at the screen of the phone.