—
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.