Harry Ribb arrived home later than planned, seven forty-five. At least Ruby would be there to put a meal together for Lizzie and get her ready for the disco. As he pushed his key into the front door lock, he heard a mad panic and rush from inside the apartment. In the hallway, he hung his leather coat on the hanger, then headed for the living room.
Ruby and Lizzie were nowhere to be seen.
"Hello?"
"Daddy, don't come in. I'm not ready yet." Lizzie shouted, from her bedroom.
"Harry, wait a minute," Ruby said, with a teasing voice. "Grab yourself a drink. We will be out in a minute." In the kitchen, Harry got a cold bottle of Grolsch beer from the refrigerator, and placed it in his Heineken opener, bolted to the kitchen wall, directly above the rubbish bin. He pressed the pedal and the lid shot open. He pressed down the bottle, and a soft hiss emerged. The bottle top dropped perfectly into the rest of the garbage. He took a swig of beer straight from the bottle, one of the things his ex- used to continuously criticize him about.
"Drink it out of a glass," she would moan.
"It's already in a glass," he always replied. "Why would I want to put it into another glass when I can drink it just as easily out of this one?" It was at this stage of his marriage he concluded that women not only had their own logic, but were also wired different.
"Are you going to be long?" He asked, as he made his way into the living room and settled into the sofa. He knew from experience that every new dress or outfit had to be paraded as if it was a fashion show. Lizzie had been doing this ever since she was a little girl. The only thing he could do was sit down and wait patiently.
"Nearly ready," Ruby replied. "Just adding the finishing touches."
He knew all about the finishing touches with Lizzie's mother. He was married to her for fifteen years. Picking the right outfit or matching blouse, pants, skirt, twenty to thirty minutes. Putting them on, ten minutes. Rearranging or exchanging garments or shoes in search of the correct color combination that only she could see, at least another twenty minutes. Of course she would ask for help, or an opinion, but in the end all suggestions by anyone other than God were thrown out the window as being of no taste, disastrous, or just not good enough. Finally, hair and make-up, another thirty minutes.
He eyed the beer in the bottle which was now three-quarters empty, and wondered whether or not he would have to drive Lizzie to the disco, maybe Ruby could take her instead. As he was finishing the last mouthful, Lizzie appeared from her bedroom. The shock made him suck the beer into his lungs, causing him to go into a fit of coughing.
"Oh sweetheart," Ruby cried, as she rushed over to pat him on the back.
She gave him a couple of hard whacks, right between the shoulder blades, which only made it worse.
Coughed up beer spattered over the glass top coffee table in front of him. Ruby turned and rushed immediately out of the room and into the kitchen for a cloth. Apparently that was more important than him choking to death.
Lizzie was dressed in a dress so short he felt acutely embarrassed by it. Her lips were covered in black lipstick and her eyes were highlighted with black and gray red lines that would not seem out of place in an SM film. It took him a number of minutes to recover from the coughing fit, and by that time he had mentally adjusted himself to the risky makeover his daughter had undergone with the help of his girlfriend.
Why he didn't see it coming was a mistake he knew would never happen again. Ruby was extreme, and he should have realized her influence would rub off on his young and susceptible teenage daughter. Ruby wiped down the table then sat next to him on the left, Lizzie on the right. His cough died down, and he took in some deep breaths.
"Are you okay, sweetheart?" Ruby asked. He turned and looked at her straight in the eye.
"What have you done to my daughter," he said, in a barely audible voice. He had known Ruby about three months and had only just introduced her to Lizzie a couple of weeks previously. At first he was worried about how Lizzie would take to his new girlfriend. She was devastated about the breakup with her mother and was continuously trying to get the two of them back together. But this assimilation and transformation was hard to swallow.
"What do you mean?" Ruby said, with a big smile. "She looks terrific."
"She can't go to a disco looking like that." He said firmly.
"Come on," Ruby said, pleading.
"Papaaaaaa," Lizzie whined.
Ribb tried to ignore his daughter and kept his eyes fixed on Ruby.
"She looks like a?' He managed to stop himself just in time. His daughter was going to a teenage disco, yet she looked as if she was about to set up business in the Wallen.
"She's only going to a disco." Ruby said.
"Exactly. She's not going to walk the streets, right?" He blurted out.
"So that's what you think about my clothes?" Ruby screamed.
Oh Christ, his mind roared, he walked blindly into that. "I never said that. No, of course not. It's not personal. It's not about you. You always look incredible. But she's only fourteen."
Lizzie screamed, then rushed into her room and slammed the door.
"Now look what you've done."
"What I've done?" he said, in total despair.
"She's growing up and she's going to do that with or without you."
"Believe me, as a father I'm very aware of her growing up, but it looks as if she just turned from being a young teenager to full adulthood within the space of one day. To me, that is not the way it's meant to be. I might sound old-fashioned, but it's just not on."
"This is the way kids dress these days."
Ribb sucked in a deep breath, then tried to speak in a calm voice. "Listen, I'm a cop, and we deal with all sorts of kids at the station, and believe me I have never seen a fourteen-year-old dressed like that."
The sound of Lizzie crying in her room suddenly rose to a higher pitch. He ran his hands through his hair. Ruby looked at him with her puppy eyes and an over-expressive sad face.
A flash of memory surfaced in his mind; arguing with his father about a t-shirt with holes cut into them and jeans that looked as if they had been trampled by a team of horses in a muddy field then thrown to wild dogs to be ripped to pieces. He took another deep breath and let it out slowly.
"All right," he finally said, "just this once." Suddenly there was a scream of joy from the bedroom. Ruby leaned over, grabbed his head in her hands and kissed him hard on the lips. Lizzie appeared from her room, with not a tear to be seen.
"I better go, otherwise I'm going to be late," Lizzie said, as she sauntered past, heading for the front door. "Hurry up daddy, you have to bring me, now."
"I should have known," Ribb said, as he wearily got up from the sofa. "The bloody daddy taxi again." Ruby wrapped her arms around him.
"Hurry back," she whispered in his ear. His heart suddenly started thumping hard and a thousand butterflies reared up in his stomach. He melted inside, smiled, and gave her a quick peck on the lips.
From the corner of his eye, he could see Ruby in the living room mirror, giving Lizzie a thumbs up. Victory celebrated, and he knew at the back of his mind it would not be the last.
Chapter Fifteen