“Of course. I’ll go back in and get you one,” I promised numbly, leaning low to kiss her cheek, but she turned away from me, so that my lips grazed her braid instead. I knew that she’d turned away on purpose, and I could deal with that. But nothing had prepared me—nothing possibly could have—for my sudden demotion from Daddy to virtual stranger. To a man I’d never known in relation to my child: a man named Michael.
Standing helplessly beside the car door, a thin rivulet of sweat rolled down beneath my shirt collar, and although I itched to blot it away, I didn’t. Instead, I thought of Katie Hathaway, a girl I loved in high school; the only girl I think I ever truly loved. When she dumped me after Basic Training, she left me standing in a Greyhound bus station in Columbia, South Carolina, my whole body nervous and damp beneath my crisp, impressive uniform that I’d thought she would like so much. Katie took a bus for seven hours just to tell me goodbye, then got on the very next one back to Virginia.
Andrea never spoke again that whole day, not all the way home from the hospital, not on the drive to Santa Cruz, where we were heading to bury Alex. She just stared out the window beside me, silent. I kept cursing myself for feeling so helpless—and swearing that she’d only made a slip, calling me by my first name that way. If I’d had any idea then that I would spend the next year aching to hear her call me Daddy again, I think it would have broken what little was left of my heart.
“Michael, any last questions?” our therapist asks, and I get the idea that this isn’t the first time he’s asked me that. Must’ve drifted so deep into my head that I missed it the first time.
Just one question, but I won’t voice it out loud, not now. So I shake my head, and he rises from his desk, reminding me of my Friday appointment.
Yeah, I have a burning issue all right, Dr. Weinberger. I wish someone would tell me why it is, with Allie gone and the father count reduced by one, that I can’t be Daddy to my little girl anymore.
Chapter Nine: Rebecca
My radio’s blaring before I’m even off the lot: Elton John, the perfect party music for my Wednesday afternoon. The sunroof’s cranked back, the smoggy late spring air making me feel younger than I have in forever as my hair blows loose and wild and free. I feel free. Speeding a little too fast through the studio gate, the security guard shakes his head at me, grinning disapprovingly at the blurring blonde banshee with “Bennie and the Jets” booming through her open windows.
Pulling onto Melrose, my cell phone vibrates against my hip. It’s Cat Marino, my good girlfriend and former co-star on About the House. We played spunky fellow soccer moms for thirty minutes every Tuesday night on our predictable sitcom. You know the kind. Big problems, easy thirty-minute solutions, the antithesis of my own life.
“You’re seeing someone.” I open my mouth to protest, turning down my radio, but Cat cuts me off. “I know it. I know it, because I also know that Jake called you the other night, and if you haven’t called me to dish about that, then there’s only one answer.” She draws a breath. “You’re seeing someone. So no denials, because I know.”
Laughing in disbelief, not only at what she “knows”, but also at how much she assumes, I ask, “So are you and Jake in league now?”
“No freaking way,” she exclaims loudly into the phone, forcing it away from my ear. “It’s a protection racket, my friend. Me protecting you from Jake. I’m running interference.”
“Okay, then tell me why’s he calling?”
“Well.” Again I hear her suck in a preparatory breath, and know she’s about to unleash a stream of rapid-fire, Spanish-accented sentences. “Apparently Darcy dumped him? So now he’s gone all nostalgic on us, thinking about the good old days and all that, when the only thing he’s really nostalgic about is his pitiful career. Gone, gone, hasta la vista, baby!”
“Darcy dumped him?” I’ll admit that this gives me a little thrill of triumph, imagining Jake on the receiving end of his own treatment.
“Well he did that pilot, you know? The one for NBC where he played that future cop?”
“Yeah.” I remember how depressed I felt, reading about it in Variety last summer. “Slater Cops a Good One,” the campy headline read.
“Darcy says he took it really harsh when the show didn’t get picked up. That he’s been drifting ever since. No good calls, no auditions, nada.”
“Wow, I wonder what it’s like to be me?”
“Forget Jake,” she says, remembering herself and her mission. “I want to know who you’re seeing.”
“Well,” I begin tentatively. “There is this one guy.”
“Name? Name? I need a name.”
“He’s someone I met down at the lot.”
“What show?” Cat asks.
“He’s not on a show,” I explain. “He’s over in the electrical construction department. For the whole studio.”
“Oh,” she answers in a flat tone, not bothering to hide her disappointment that Michael’s not part of the Hollywood glamour train. “But has he been on a show? Or worked on any good features?”