Pretending to Dance

  “Oh, Aidan,” I say. My voice is a quiet wail.

  “What, babe?”

  “I just feel for her,” I say. “Whoever that girl—or woman—is.”

  His smile is sad as he leans over to take my hand. “I know,” he says.

  “I don’t like this. I feel as though we’re trying to do a sales job on her.”

  “We’re not. We’re working toward a mutually beneficial relationship.”

  I say nothing, still picturing that frightened young woman riffling through the pages of ninety-two letters.

  “She’s going to pick someone, Molly,” he says. “It might as well be us.”

  “Then…” I say, “I know you think we need to appeal to her youth and be very contemporary, but that’s not who we are. We want the letter to truly reflect us, don’t we? Are we so deadly dull that no one will pick us if we’re honest about ourselves?” I can hardly believe those hypocritical words just came out of my mouth.

  Aidan looks at me for a long moment. “You’re right,” he says finally. He opens a new document on his screen. “Back to the drawing board.”

  We write the letter. It takes us all weekend and we barely stop to eat. It’s only two pages long, single-spaced, but it’s a gripping story of our struggle to have a child, our love for each other, and our passion for our work. We write about San Diego and all it can offer a child, and last but absolutely not least, we share our belief that we can provide a stable and loving home for her baby. We slip the letter in an envelope, seal it, place it in our mailbox and send it on its way, with all the hope we can muster.

  11

  Morrison Ridge

  When Stacy and I got to my house the morning after our night in the springhouse, we found the kitchen packed with people. Aunt Claudia and Uncle Jim—Dani’s parents—sat on one side of the big kitchen table, and Aunt Toni and Uncle Trevor sat on the other. Mom was feeding Dad at the head of the table and everyone was laughing when Stacy and I walked in the room, but there was a weird, tense undercurrent to the sound. Or maybe I felt weird and tense. I was afraid Stacy would say something about seeing Daddy and Amalia together. I wished I’d told her not to, but I was still busily acting like it was no big deal, so I supposed saying anything to her about it would have blown that façade.

  I introduced Stacy to everyone and we sat down at the opposite end of the table from my parents, where someone—my mother, most likely—had set plates and glasses for us. I reached for the pitcher of orange juice and poured some into Stacy’s glass.

  “What time is your mom picking you up, Stacy?” my mother asked as she gave my father a sip from his coffee cup.

  “Between nine-thirty and ten,” she said.

  Aunt Claudia held a basket of muffins out to Stacy and me. “Fresh baked blackberry muffins, Molly,” she said.

  “Cool,” I said, taking the basket from her and offering the muffins to Stacy.

  “Delicious with butter,” Aunt Toni said, sliding the butter plate down the table toward us. Aunt Toni had very short, very dark hair with a stripe of gray that ran from her left temple back over her ear. That stripe of hair always reminded me of a skunk. She was tan and very fit and played tennis year-round.

  “Aunt Claudia’s a really good baker,” I said to Stacy as we broke the muffins apart on our plates.

  “Thank you, Molly.” Aunt Claudia beamed. She was forty years old, four years younger than Daddy, but where Daddy was slim and dark-haired, Aunt Claudia had a doughy sort of build and she wore her copper-colored hair in a pixie cut that was way too short for her round face. Ever since I was a little kid, her face had reminded me of a pumpkin. She was nice, though. I could never figure out how she ended up with a bitchy daughter like Dani.

  “We saw Dani yesterday while we were riding our bikes around Morrison Ridge,” I said to her now.

  “Oh, poor Dani’s at loose ends this summer,” Aunt Claudia said.

  “She needs to get a job,” Uncle Jim said.

  Aunt Claudia ignored him. “She doesn’t have many friends left in the area since she’s been going to Virginia Dare,” she said. “She likes it there, though. It’s a tolerant school. They don’t try to make a child fit some sort of mold.”

  Which was a good thing, I thought, because Dani was never going to fit into anybody’s mold.

  “I hear you girls stayed in the old springhouse last night,” Aunt Toni piped in. “Hope you didn’t have to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night.”

  “We did,” Stacy said. She looked at my father. “That latrine thing was gross, and I wasn’t going to use it, but your crazy daughter made me pretend that I loved it.”

  “Oh, she did, did she?” Daddy asked. I thought there was an amused sort of pride in his expression. “So, did pretending work?”

  “Well, I did use it,” Stacy admitted.

  “I hated that latrine with a vengeance,” Aunt Claudia said. “Remember the copperhead that lived in there that one summer?”

  “Copperhead?” Stacy shuddered.

  “Trevor planted that thing to scare the girls,” Daddy said to Stacy. “You had nothing to fear.”

  “I did not plant it,” Uncle Trevor said as he reached for the coffeepot on the table. “Swear on a stack of Bibles.” His forearm was big and meaty and I watched the muscles and tendons move beneath his tanned skin as he poured coffee into his cup. He worked out constantly in the gym in his house, plus he was a contractor, so he was always in great shape, especially when you looked at him next to his brother—my skinny, calorie-counting father. But his face was full of wrinkles from working outside all the time. He was forty-six, two years older than my father, and he always complained that Daddy got to go to college while he had to stay home and help my grandfather with his carpentry business. It really irritated me that he could look my father in the eye—my father who could barely move a muscle—and complain that Daddy had it better than him. He drank a lot and I’d seen him drunk a few times. He scared me when he was drunk. That mixture of brawn and booze felt dangerous to me.

  “What did you do all night out there?” Aunt Claudia asked Stacy and me.

  We looked at each other and smiled. “Talked,” Stacy said. She wasn’t going to say anything about Amalia, I thought, relieved. It would have come out by now.

  “Only teenaged girls could spend a whole night talking,” Aunt Toni said.

  “So, back to the conversation we were having, Graham,” Uncle Trevor said. He was clearly not interested in Stacy and me. “I’ve run the numbers backward and forward, and I can tell you, we’re sitting on a gold mine here. It’s ridiculous to let the land rot beneath our feet.”

  Daddy smiled the sort of indulgent smile he gave me when I was trying his patience. “It’s hardly rotting, Trev,” he said. “And now’s not the right time to discuss this.” He nodded toward Stacy, or maybe toward both of us.

  “You’re always so overly dramatic, Trevor,” Aunt Claudia said. “Even as a kid, you were just ridicu—”

  “Forget about what I was like as a kid,” Uncle Trevor snapped at his sister. “I don’t know why I can’t get the four of you to see logic. You have kids to get through college. Don’t you want to be able to put them through without them being strapped with loans once they get out, the way we were with Samantha and Cal?”

  God, this was not only boring but embarrassing. Stacy chewed her muffin, her gaze out the window toward the mountains in the distance. We’d have to make a break for it as soon as we could politely excuse ourselves.

  “That’s true, Graham,” Aunt Claudia said to Daddy. “Danielle’s not going to qualify for any big scholarships. I’m about to get laid off from the blanket factory. And Jim’s beer-making enterprise isn’t exactly bringing home the bacon.”

  “Yet,” Uncle Jim said. I knew he was trying to get out of the trash-hauling business by making beer in his cellar, an enterprise my father thought was a waste of time and money.

  “Right.” Aunt Claudia patted Uncle Jim’s hand. “N
ot yet, anyway.”

  “Are you wearing makeup, Molly?” Mom asked suddenly.

  I’d forgotten. I’d brushed my teeth that morning, but hardly glanced in the little mirror above the sink. I was probably a smeared mess by now.

  “I made her up,” Stacy said. “Don’t her eyes look awesome?”

  “Very pretty.” Mom nodded.

  “Makes your eyes really stand out,” Daddy said.

  “I didn’t let Danielle wear makeup until she was fifteen,” Aunt Claudia said.

  I knew for a fact that Dani started wearing makeup when she was twelve years old. She’d put on her black eyeliner the second she got on the school bus, then take it off again on the bus home. I’m sure she did whatever she pleased once she started going to her boarding school.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Daddy said. “I think, especially if you have to wear glasses, you should be allowed to wear makeup so your eyes pop.”

  “Maybe a little lighter on the eye shadow, at least for everyday,” Mom said.

  I thought of the shoplifted eye shadow and tried to imagine how it would feel to slip something in my pocket and stroll out of a store without paying.

  “You did a nice job, Stacy,” Daddy said. “Are you artistic?”

  “Can we get back to talking about the land?” Uncle Trevor asked.

  “Oh, let them have a little time with Molly and her friend, Trevor,” Aunt Claudia said. Daddy once told me Aunt Claudia had been the peacemaker in his family when they were growing up and that it took a toll on her. Ever since then, I’d noticed that she walked a fine line between everybody’s wants and needs. It made my stomach hurt to think about having to do that.

  “I guess I’m a little artistic,” Stacy said to my father. “I like to draw, but I don’t think I’m great at it or anything.”

  “Did Molly tell you I’m taking her with me on my book tour?” Daddy asked her.

  “You are?” Aunt Claudia reached for another muffin.

  “I was his guinea pig when he worked on some of the techniques,” I said.

  “That’s so cool,” Stacy said, and Uncle Trevor folded his arms across his chest with an impatient sigh.

  “She’ll connect with the kids in the audience in the bookstores,” Daddy said. “Assuming I have an audience. And she’ll be her usual good company.” He looked down the table at me and I filled up with so much love for him. Everyone turned in my direction, and I wondered if the love was visible, like a big red cartoon heart over my head.

  “I’ll teach you how to do the makeup for the book tour,” Stacy offered.

  Daddy looked at Trevor, and I knew he hadn’t missed his brother’s impatient posture. “Trevor,” he said, “here’s the thing. Even if Claudia and Jim and Nora and I wanted to sell off some of our land—which, I hasten to add, we don’t—we can’t do anything while Mom is still alive. It would kill her if we sold any of it. She’d—”

  “She’s only seventy years old!” Uncle Trevor was nearly shouting.

  “Don’t be such a hothead!” Aunt Claudia said.

  “She could live another twenty years,” Trevor said. “Another thirty! We could use that money now.”

  “We need it for our retirement, Graham,” Aunt Toni said. She went on about wanting to travel someday, and I caught Stacy’s eye and nodded toward the living room. This was too boring for words.

  * * *

  We sat on the front steps, waiting for Stacy’s mother. “I love your parents,” she said. “They’re supernice, and it’s like, after a few seconds you completely forget your dad is in a wheelchair, you know?”

  I nodded, barely listening to her. I was waiting for her to say something about Amalia, but it was as if she’d completely forgotten about seeing them together the night before. I was the one who couldn’t get the image out of her mind.

  “I seriously want to fix you up with one of Bryan’s friends,” she said.

  “Cool,” I said, though I was sure my parents would never let me go out with a seventeen-year-old. I didn’t think they’d let me go out with anyone, actually.

  “There’s my mom!” She hopped to her feet as the silver van came around the bend in our dirt road. Stacy leaned over and hugged me. “Thank you!” she said. “I had an awesome time!”

  I watched her climb into her mother’s van, and as they drove away, her mom gave a little toot on her horn. Sitting there, I could still feel Stacy’s arms around me. I’d never had a hugging friend before and I liked that I had one now, even if she was a very different person from me. I liked my life, with my two loving parents and one loving birth mother and my happy innocent fantasies of Johnny Depp, but I had the feeling I was going to like my life with Stacy Bateman in it even more.

  12

  Daddy asked me to type for him late that afternoon. I got everything set up before Russell brought him into the office. That meant I had the computer turned on and Pretend Therapy for Grown-ups—Daddy’s working title for his book—open on the computer. Until a year ago, I also had to stick a floppy disk into the machine, but now we had a new computer and everything was on a hard drive, which was much easier, though Daddy still made me back everything up to floppy disks anyhow. I loved typing and would have done it even if Daddy didn’t pay me. Mom taught me when I was ten years old and wanted to write some stories. “No daughter of mine is going to be a two-fingered typist,” she’d said. I remembered her saying those words almost every time I typed, and this afternoon, I was particularly stuck on the phrase daughter of mine.

  Daddy’s office was small and compact, lined with bookcases on two walls. Daddy loved his books. The physical act of reading was no longer easy for him, though. He listened to a lot of books on tape these days, and he had a really clumsy sort of page-turning machine some guy at the university made for him, but every third page or so, the machine would get stuck and one of us would have to help out, which frustrated him no end. Daddy was determined to read, though. He wouldn’t let his inability to turn the pages get in the way.

  His huge desk took up half the room. The desk was actually a long, wide door that he’d kept when the old Morrison Ridge stable had been demolished. He’d had the door refinished and Uncle Trevor attached some legs to it. I knew Daddy liked giving new life to something old and meaningful from the Ridge, and I thought it was ironic that the old door was now topped with a shiny new computer and printer.

  I straightened a few books that had been piled on one corner of the desk and picked up the two pens and one pencil lying loose near the computer. I hunted on the desk for the stained-glass pencil case Amalia had made for my father a few years ago. The case, with its crazy quilt pattern of blue-and-white iridescent glass, would be hard to miss, but it was nowhere to be found, and I set the pens and pencil next to the pile of books.

  “Sorry to keep you waiting,” Daddy said, as Russell pushed him into the room.

  “No problem,” I said.

  “Need anything before I take off?” Russell asked.

  “Could you adjust the head support?” Daddy asked him.

  “This thing’s still irking you, isn’t it,” Russell said as he fiddled with the knob on the side of the head support. Daddy’d had the old head support replaced and he couldn’t seem to get comfortable with the new one. It reminded me of a baseball mitt, the way it cradled his head. “You want me to switch this out for the old one later today?” Russell asked. “I still have it.”

  “Good idea,” Daddy said. “This one doesn’t let me move my head the way I want. I’d like to be able to move the one body part I still have some control over.” He smiled at me but his voice gave away his irritation.

  “I can’t find your pencil case,” I said to him. “Do you know where it is?”

  Daddy looked at the spot on the desk where the case usually sat. “Hm,” he said. “Not a clue. Do you know, Russell?”

  Russell shook his head. “I’ll keep my eye open for it,” he said. “Do you need anything else before I go?”

  “I th
ink we’re good,” Daddy said, and Russell left us alone in the room.

  I wiggled my fingers as though warming them up, then I rested them on the keyboard.

  “Where were we?” Daddy asked. “Read me the last couple of paragraphs we worked on.” I knew he was anxious to get going. He wanted to finish the book by the end of the summer.

  I found the last page of the document and read the paragraphs to him. Then he began dictating and I began typing, and we were off. I made more mistakes than usual, though, because my mind was on the questions I planned to ask him once we were finished working. I wasn’t sure how I was going to dive into the topic of Amalia, but he made it easy for me.

  “Where’s your mind today, Molly?” he asked after we’d been working for half an hour and I’d had to stop his dictating so I could correct yet another typing mistake. “It’s definitely not here in this room,” he said. “What’s up?”

  It was often a mixed blessing that he could read me so easily. Today, though, I was glad.

  I dropped my hands from the keyboard to my lap and swiveled the chair to face him. “There is something that’s bugging me,” I said.

  “Talk to me,” he said.

  I took a deep breath. “Were you married to Amalia before Mom?” I asked. “Or were you married to Mom and you cheated on her with Amalia? Or … I don’t know.” I screwed up my face, uncomfortable with my own questions. “What really happened back then?”

  He looked at me, eyebrows raised, as though he didn’t quite understand what I was asking. “Well,” he said finally, “I wondered when you’d ask. I’d hoped it would be later. Or perhaps never.” He chuckled, then gave me one of his totally attentive looks. If he could have leaned forward, he would have. He had to make his face do all the work someone else could do with his body. “Nobody cheated on anyone, darling,” he said. “Would you like to hear the story of how you came to be?”