Then, as an army of waiters trotted out our standard chocolate mousse desserts, the gala chairs introduced Kirk and me, heaping praise on us for our commitment to this charity and so many others. I sat up as straight as I could, feeling a bit nervous as I heard So, without further ado…Nina and Kirk Browning.
As the crowd applauded, Kirk and I rose and made our way to the short staircase leading up to the stage. With my hand in his, we ascended the steps, my heart pounding with a rush of adrenaline that came from being in the spotlight. When we reached the podium, Kirk stepped forward to take the microphone while I stood at his side, pressing my shoulder blades together, a smile plastered across my face. When the applause died down, Kirk began to speak, first thanking the co-chairs, their various committees, our fellow patrons, and all the donors. He then got to the reason we were here tonight, his voice growing somber. I stared at his strong profile, thinking how handsome he was.
“My wife, Nina, and I have a son named Finch,” he said. “Finch, like some of your children, will be graduating from high school in just a couple of months. In the fall, he will be headed off to college.”
I looked past the bright lights into a sea of faces as Kirk continued. “For the last eighteen years, our life has revolved around him. He is the most precious thing in the world to us,” he said, then halted, looked down, and took a few seconds to continue. “And I just can’t imagine the horror of losing him.”
I lowered my gaze, nodding in agreement, feeling a stab of overwhelming grief and compassion for every family devastated by suicide. But as Kirk went on to talk about the organization, my mind guiltily wandered back to our life, our son. All the opportunity that stretched ahead for him.
I tuned back in to hear my husband say, “So, in closing, Nina and I are so honored to join with you in this important cause….This is a fight for all of our children. Thank you so much. And good night.”
As the crowd applauded once again, and a few of our closest friends actually stood for an ovation, Kirk turned and gave me a wink. He knew he’d nailed it.
“Perfect,” I whispered.
Only things were actually far from perfect.
Because at virtually that very moment, our son was across town, making the worst decision of his life.
Call it father’s intuition, but I knew something bad was happening to Lyla before I actually knew. Then again, maybe my gut feeling had absolutely nothing to do with intuition, or our close bond, or the fact that I’d been a single parent since she was four years old. Maybe it was simply the skimpy outfit she’d tried to leave the house in just hours before.
I’d been cleaning the kitchen when she slinked past me wearing a dress so short that you could see the bottom of her ass—a part of her anatomy that her eight hundred Instagram followers had come to know well, thanks to countless “artsy” (according to Lyla) bikini shots she’d posted before I instituted my bright-line social-media bathing-suit ban.
“See ya, Dad,” she said with practiced nonchalance.
“Whoa, whoa,” I said, blocking her path to the door. “Where do you think you’re going?”
“To Grace’s. She just pulled up.” Lyla pointed out the front window of our house. “See?”
“What I see,” I said, glancing out the window at Grace’s white Jeep, “is that you’re missing the bottom half of your dress.”
She rolled her eyes and hitched an enormous tote bag over one shoulder. I noticed that she wasn’t wearing any makeup. Yet. I wasn’t a gambling man, but I’d bet a hundred bucks that by the time Grace’s car was at Five Points, the black shit Lyla put around her eyes would emerge, along with boots to replace her untied sneakers. “It’s called fashion, Dad.”
“Did you borrow that fashion from Sophie?” I asked, referring to the little girl she regularly babysat. “Although it might even be too short for her.”
“You’re hilarious,” Lyla deadpanned, staring at me with one eye, the other covered with a mane of curly dark hair. “You should do, like, stand-up.”
“Okay. Look, Lyla. You’re not going out of the house in that.” I tried to keep my voice low and calm, the way a psychologist had advised we speak to our teenagers at a recent lecture at Lyla’s school. They tune us out when we yell, the lady had said in her own monotone. I’d glanced around the auditorium, amazed to see so many parents taking notes. Did these people really have time to consult a notebook in the heat of the moment?
“Da-ad,” Lyla whined. “I’m just trying to go study with Grace and a couple other people…”
“Studying on a Saturday night? Seriously? What do you take me for, anyway?”
“Our exams are coming up…and we have this big group project.” She unzipped her backpack and pulled out a biology textbook, holding it up as proof. “See?”
“And just how many boys are in your study group?”
She fought a smirk and lost.
“Change. Now,” I said, pointing down the hall toward her bedroom, my mind filled with the horrifying possibilities of the real-life biology lesson she could get in that outfit.
“Okay, but every minute I waste debating this with you is, like, a percentage point off my grade.”
“I’ll settle for a C and a longer dress,” I said, then resumed my cleaning to indicate the conversation was over.
I could feel her staring at me and, out of the corner of my eye, saw her turn and stomp down the hall. A few minutes later, she returned in a potato sack of a dress that only worried me more, as it confirmed that she’d be changing clothes—right after she spackled on the makeup.
“Remember. Be home by eleven,” I said, even though I had no real way of enforcing her curfew when I wouldn’t be back until much later than that. I was a carpenter by trade, but to make a little extra cash, I also drove a few nights a week for Uber and Lyft, and Saturday was my best night.
“I’m sleeping over at Grace’s. Remember?”
I sighed, because I vaguely recalled giving her permission, though I had forgotten to call Grace’s mother to verify the plans. I told myself that I had no reason to distrust Lyla. She could be rebellious on the margins, testing the boundaries the way teenagers do. But for the most part, she was a good kid. She was smart and studied hard, which was why she’d ended up at Windsor Academy after attending public school through the eighth grade. The transition had been difficult for us both. My challenge was around logistics (she could no longer take a bus to school) and economics (tuition was over thirty grand a year, though fortunately, more than eighty percent of that was covered by financial aid). Her stress had more to do with the intense academics and an even more intense social scene. In short, Lyla had never before been around so many rich kids, and it had been a bit of a struggle to keep pace in their polished, privileged world. But now, nearing the end of her sophomore year, she had made a few friends and seemed happy overall. Her closest friend was Grace, a little spark plug of a girl whose dad worked in the music industry. “Are her parents home?” I asked.
“Yeah. Well, her mom is, anyway. Her dad might be out of town.”
“And Grace has a curfew?” I asked, feeling sure she did. I’d met her mother only a few times, but she seemed to have a good head on her shoulders, though her decision to give her sixteen-year-old a brand-new Jeep was, in my book, suspect.
“Yes. And it’s eleven-thirty,” she said, looking smug.
“Eleven-thirty? For a sophomore?”
“Yes, Dad. That’s everyone’s curfew but mine. Or later.”
I didn’t believe this but gave in with a sigh, having long since learned to pick my battles. “Fine. But you have to be back at Grace’s by eleven-thirty sharp.”
“Thanks, Dad,” she said, blowing me a kiss on her way out the door, just the way she used to do when she was little.
I caught it in the air and pressed it to my cheek, the second part of our old routine. Bu
t she didn’t see me. She was too busy looking down at her phone.
* * *
—
FOR SOME REASON, it was that air kiss that I thought about as I returned home around one-thirty in the morning, poured a Miller Lite into the frosted mug I kept in the freezer, and heated up a plate of two-day-old chicken tetrazzini. It was the last communication I’d had with Lyla—not a single text or call since. That wasn’t all that unusual, especially on nights I worked late, but it still nagged at me, along with a weird feeling of unease. Nothing catastrophic or doomsday, just fear-of-her-having-sex kind of worry.
A few minutes later, my phone rang. It was Lyla. I felt simultaneous relief and worry as I answered and said, “Are you okay?”
There was a pause before I heard another girl’s voice in my ear. “Um, Mr. Volpe? This is Grace.”
“Grace? Where’s Lyla? Is she okay?” I asked, panicking as I suddenly pictured my daughter in the back of an ambulance.
“Yeah, yeah. She’s right here. With me. At my house.”
“Is she hurt?” I asked, unable to think of another reason Lyla wouldn’t be calling me herself.
“No. Um. Not like…that.”
“Like what then, Grace? Put Lyla on the phone. Now.”
“Um. I can’t do that, Mr. Volpe….She can’t really…talk….”
“Why can’t she talk?” I said, growing increasingly frantic as I paced around our small kitchen.
“Um, well,” Grace began. “She’s kind of out of it….”
I stopped pacing long enough to put my shoes back on. “What’s going on? Did she take something?”
“No. Lyla doesn’t do drugs, Mr. Volpe,” Grace said in a steady, firm tone that calmed me just a little.
“Is your mom there?”
“Um, no, Mr. Volpe. She’s out, at a benefit thing…but should be back soon.” She continued to babble an explanation of her mother’s social itinerary, but I cut her off.
“Dammit, Grace! Could you please tell me what the hell is going on?”
“Um, well…Lyla just drank too much….Well, actually, she didn’t drink that much. She only had a little bit of wine and, like, one drink…at this party we went to…after we studied….But she didn’t really eat dinner. I think that was the problem.”
“Is she…conscious?” I asked. My heart raced as I wondered if Grace should hang up with me and call 911.
“Oh, yeah. She’s not passed out….She’s just really out of it, and I’m a little worried, and just thought you should know. But honestly, she didn’t do any drugs or even drink that much…as far as I know….But we were apart for a little while. Not that long—”
“Okay. I’m on my way over,” I said, grabbing my keys as I tried to remember the exact location of Grace’s house. It was somewhere in Belle Meade, where most of the Windsor kids lived, but I’d dropped Lyla off there only a few times. “Text me your address. Okay, Grace?”
“Okay, Mr. Volpe. I will,” she said, then resumed her disjointed mix of confessing and downplaying.
Somewhere between the door and my car, I hung up on her and started to run.
* * *
—
AFTER RETRIEVING A semiconscious Lyla from Grace’s, Googling “alcohol poisoning,” and talking with Lyla’s on-call pediatrician, I concluded that my daughter wasn’t in any immediate danger. She was just run-of-the-mill-dumb-teenager drunk. So there was nothing for me to do but sit with her on the tile floor of her bathroom while she moaned and cried and repeatedly slurred, “Dad, I’m so, so sorry.” Occasionally she even referred to me as Daddy—my former name, which, sadly, she’d dropped a few years back.
Of course she was wearing the dress I’d told her not to wear and her eyes looked like a panda’s, ringed in black. I didn’t bother to lecture, knowing she likely wouldn’t remember anything anyway. I did ask her some questions, though, hoping that the booze would act as truth serum, and that I could get enough of the story to be able to effectively cross-examine her in the morning.
The conversation was fairly predictable, going something like this:
Did you do drugs? No.
Did you drink? Yes.
How much? Not that much.
Where were you? At a party.
Whose party? A boy named Beau.
Does he go to Windsor? Yes.
What happened? I don’t remember.
And that was all I got. Either she really didn’t remember—or she was just telling me she didn’t remember. Regardless, I was left to fill in the blanks with less than pleasant imagery. Every so often, she’d crawl back to the toilet and puke while I held her tangled hair out of the way. When I felt sure nothing was left in her stomach, I fed her sips of water with a couple Tylenol, helped her brush her teeth and wash her face, then got her into bed, still wearing that dress.
As I sat in the armchair in her room and watched her sleep, I felt waves of all the predictable anger, worry, and disappointment that come with being the father of a teenage girl who has just fucked up. But there was something else nagging at me, too. And as hard as I tried, I couldn’t stop myself from thinking of Beatriz, the only other person I’d ever taken care of like this.
Of all people, it had to be Kathie Parker to tell me what Finch had done.
In my younger years, I had the occasional frenemy—a girl who found a way to ruffle my feathers and bring out the worst in me. But in my adult life, Kathie was the closest—really the only thing—I’d ever had to a nemesis. On the surface, we were friendly, sharing a social circle, frequenting the same country club, and attending the same parties and girls’ trips. But secretly, I couldn’t stand her, and I got more than occasional clues that she felt the same way about me.
Kathie, who came from old Nashville money like Kirk, always seemed to be looking for ways to take me down a notch. One tactic she enjoyed was to subtly reference my background, asking random questions about Bristol or my family, particularly in front of other people. This was, I believe, her way of insinuating that notwithstanding my in-laws, I, personally, would always be “new Nashville.” (I’d actually heard her use the ridiculous term before.) She was also the master of the backhanded compliment in the “bless your heart” vein. She would say things to me such as “I love your dress—I have a wonderful seamstress who could raise that hem a touch for you.” Or, after peering into the backseat of my car in the parking lot following a spin class, “Goodness, I wish I were as laid-back as you when it comes to clutter!” which could be directly followed by “You’re so lucky you sweat the way you do. It gets out all the toxins!”
Melanie told me to take it as a compliment. Her theory was that with the sale of Kirk’s company, I had usurped Kathie’s status as Queen Bee of Nashville’s social elite.
“I have no desire to be Queen Bee of anything. Besides, you can’t be the Queen Bee if you’re from Bristol,” I said.
“You can if you marry Kirk Browning,” Melanie said. “He’s got it all. Compared to Hunter, for sure.”
I shrugged, thinking of Kathie’s husband. Like Kirk, Hunter was from the landed gentry of Nashville, but he was rumored to have burned through a lot of their family money on bad deals.
“She also resents your looks,” Melanie said in her usual blunt way. “You’re richer and prettier. Younger, too.”
I laughed her comment off but couldn’t help thinking that the “richer” part really did correlate with an increase in Kathie’s jabs. More than that, though, I think Kathie knew that I saw through her two-faced Bible-beating bullshit. To be clear, I have no problem with religion or people who are religious, even those who are outspoken about their faith. What I can’t stand are the judgmental hypocrites—people who talk a big Christian game yet don’t even make a cursory attempt to follow the Golden Rule, let alone some of those pesky commandments. In a Schadenfreude nutshell, Kathie not only thrive
d on the misfortune of others but used tragedies as opportunities to showcase her devoutness. Something bad would happen, and she’d be first on the scene, offering prayers on Facebook, dropping off a casserole, or calling a special session of her Bible study group (which was as exclusive an invite as one to a garden party at Buckingham Palace—perhaps that’s part of why she viewed it as an affront that I always declined to join). To be fair, I’m sure that some of Kathie’s prayers were sincere, certainly in matters of life or death. But I truly believed she relished the smaller emotional setbacks of others and even occasionally rooted for someone’s marriage to fail or kid to screw up.
So she really hit the jackpot the night of the Hope Gala when she found me in the ladies’ room. “Oh, hello there, Nina,” she said in her high, fake voice, joining me sink-side. We made eye contact in the mirror and smiled at each other as I continued to touch up my makeup. “You look so lovely tonight.”
Lovely was her favorite word, and one I had actually excised from my vocabulary as a result. “You, too! Congrats on the Italy trip,” I said—because she had just outbid Melanie during the live auction to win two first-class airline tickets to Rome and a week’s stay at a Tuscan villa.
“Thank you, hon! Melanie wasn’t too upset, was she?” she asked, her voice revealing her insincerity.
“Oh, no, not at all,” I lied out of loyalty to Melanie, who had been infuriated by Kathie’s smug paddle-raising. “I think she was secretly relieved not to win it. Todd hates when she bids on trips.”
“Yes,” she said, nodding. “I’ve heard he’s rather…tight….”
“Oh. It’s not that. It’s just those annoying blackout dates,” I said, walking the line between being an outright bitch and simply raining on her parade. Feeling transparent and maybe a little guilty for stooping to her level, I added a chipper footnote. “Of course, Tuscany’s lovely any time of year.”