Chapter Fourteen
“You don’t have a serious boyfriend, you don’t cook and you obviously haven’t cleaned this place since you moved in.” Whitney’s mother clipped around her condo, her heels echoing off the hardwood with an ominous sound made possible by borrowing her daughter’s favorite shoes. She spun on one of the tall black heels. “What do you do with all your free time?”
Her dad, who had found the remote control and lodged a permanent place in the corner of her couch, looked up from under bushy gray eyebrows. His face was craggy and weathered in ways that worked like a balm on Whitney’s psyche. “She works, dear. Doctors are very busy and important.”
“Thank you, Daddy.” Whitney leaned over and kissed his cheek, which was scratchy and papery and just the way she remembered. “You see? I’m far too successful to bother with the mundane details of life.”
Her mother’s brow arched—well, as much as it could arch, anyway. Her mom loved free Botox as much as the next plastic surgeon’s mother. “Oh, sweetie. If you consider a man a mundane detail, you’re doing it wrong.”
Her dad guffawed. “Or she’s doing him wrong.”
Behind her, her parents high-fived.
Oh, dear Lord. She couldn’t take thirteen more days of this. Having sexually liberated parents wasn’t the awesome party it appeared on the outside. By day three, her dad would be comfortable enough in the new setting to default to his standard wander-around-the-house-near-nude form, and her mother would take to filling her fridge with strange French cheeses and her underwear drawer with strange French undergarments.
“It just so happens I am kind of seeing someone,” she said defensively, the words slipping out before she remembered the long-term ramifications of such a confession.
Her mother kissed her forehead. “John doesn’t count, dear. You’ve tried passing him off as a boyfriend, what is it, three times now? We might live in the suburbs, but we’re not stupid. We know all about the gays.”
“It’s not John—and I never tried passing him off as anything.” Really, there’d just been that one time, and John had deliberately sabotaged her by bringing a date. The nerve.
“Well then, Peanut.” Her dad patted the seat next to him. “Why don’t you tell us all about him? Is he coming over later? Do your mother and I need to find something to entertain ourselves for a while?” He waggled his eyebrows suggestively.
Whitney sat and sank into her father’s arms, which were open and waiting. For all her grumbling, there was something timeless about her parents being near, as if she was once again a little girl and all it took to put the world back on its axis was a hug and a comforting ear. Her eyes watered, and she let herself bask in the scent of him, cloves and antiseptic soap.
Funny. She hadn’t even known she was upset.
“I’ll make coffee,” her mother announced, taking the pair of them in at a glance. “You two look like you could use a little chat.”
Unfortunately, her mother was as adept in the kitchen as Whitney, and she rattled around for a few seconds before heaving a sigh. “I don’t understand why this thing has so many buttons. Whatever happened to hot water and a can? Why don’t I make a coffee run instead?”
“There’s a café called Java Rocket around the corner,” Whitney called from the comfort of her father’s chest. “I’d love a cappuccino.”
“Make it two,” her father said. “And a muffin.”
“Mmm. Good idea.” Whitney nestled further. “Or some scones.”
“Of course, my loves,” her mother returned, her voice dry. “Keep ordering. I’ll carry it all down the street on my head.”
The moment the clack of Whitney’s Louboutin heels—which she was pretty much guaranteed never to get back now—could be heard careening down the front steps, her dad pulled away and chucked her chin, forcing her eyes up. “Okay, Peanut. Spill. Who’s the jerk and how soon should I make a call to your cousin Vito?”
Whitney sniffled and laughed, and a strange choking sound escaped from the base of her throat. “It’s not fair to invoke poor Vito every time you want to make an idle threat. He can’t help that Aunt Paulina gave him that awful name.”
The laugh and redirect didn’t work. Now that his wife was out of the way, her dad would do what it took to get to the bottom of this—and Whitney knew there was no escape.
“I mean it, Whitney. What’s up?”
Most of the time, it was wonderful being Daddy’s Little Girl. She and her father had always been close, always been pitted against her mother on every issue of importance. By virtue of the family democracy in which they carried the lead, the two of them had made the decision where to go on vacation each year—almost always somewhere tropical and expensive—whether or not her dad should take the job in another city, what to eat for dinner each night.
Her dad had also been the only one to defend her when she quit Make the World Smile, the one who picked her up from the airport when all of her belongings were shoved into a pair of dirty duffel bags and she was being detained by airport security because she’d forgotten her passport when she hightailed it out of Guatemala.
It wasn’t that her mom wouldn’t have done any of those things, of course. But Daddy was always there first, and he always made things better. And he was much easier to talk to when her mom’s overbearing concern wasn’t in the room with them. She had a tendency to overdramatize things a little.
Okay. A lot. It was a family trait.
“Nothing is up.” Whitney shifted out of his grasp. “It’s not a big deal.”
“How long have you been dating?”
“Well...we’ve been seeing each other about two months.” Technically, it was the truth. “And he’s nice—really nice. He teaches kindergarten.”
Her dad laughed out loud. “You’re funny, Peanut. Who is he really?”
“I can’t date a teacher?”
“Is that a rhetorical question?”
“I’m serious. He’s a teacher and he wears sweater vests and he drives a really awful car. One that’s so out of date you can’t even buy parts for it anymore.”
“I had one of those once,” he said, nodding. “A Yugo. What a clunker, always breaking down in the strangest places. I’m pretty sure you were conceived in the back seat, now that I think of it. Your mother and I were on our way home from this party, and she had on these tight little shorts—”
“Omigod, Dad. Stop.” Whitney slapped her hands over her ears. “I do not want to hear this.”
“What? Your mother has always had such a nice round figure. We were more forgiving of that back then.”
“It works just fine now too,” Whitney said defensively. She and her mother were built the same way, though she happened to think she dressed herself better. Her mom liked capri pants and embroidered blouses. No amount of persuasion would get her to realize that high-waisted pencil skirts were much more flattering to their signature generous hips. “But that is so not the point. Daddy, can we please make a promise not to talk about boys while you guys are here? Let’s just have it be us for a few weeks. No boyfriends. No ghosts.”
“If that’s what you want,” he said, though the words were so drawn out it was clear he didn’t mean them. “But I don’t see what harm meeting the guy could do. We’ll be good. I promise.”
Her father’s definition of good could mean acting like the decorous lawyer and housewife they really were, or sneaking off in the middle of dinner to have a quickie in the bathroom stall. With her parents, it could go either way.
“I’m not ready.”
“Not ready for what?” Her mother blasted open the front door and directed a petite woman, who Whitney immediately recognized as one of the baristas at the café, to the kitchen. “Right in there, sweetie. That was so nice of you. You tell your boss to give you a raise, okay? Oh, and wait right there. Marshall? Marshall, surely you have something nice to give this young lady.”
Her dad reached into his pocket and extracted his wallet, fat and frayed at the edges. “Give this to your mother. And say nothing about the situation with your young man. You know how she gets.”
As he stressed the final sentence with awful clarity and deliberateness, her mother and the barista both caught every word.
“Oh, don’t say you broke up with Matt?” the barista asked, looking innocent despite her numerous tattoos and the long blue-black hair she wore cut in a killer Bettie Page style. “You guys are so cute together. And he’s such a sweetheart—he always buys an extra coffee for that old man who sits in the corner with his journals.”
“Does he now?” Her mother reached into the wallet and extracted a twenty, pressing it firmly into the woman’s hand. The barista looked at it, wide-eyed, and tried to give it back.
“No, no,” her mother urged. “You earned it. Tell me more about this Matt character.”
“Well...” The barista shifted from foot to foot. She’d caught a glimpse of Whitney’s intense look of warning. The question was, where did her loyalties lie—with the woman pushing a twenty into her hand, or the woman who regularly left tips in her Free Tibet and My Credit Card Debt jar? “I don’t know much else, actually. But he’s nice. There just aren’t that many nice ones out there anymore, you know? The kind with no ulterior motive at all.”
The answer must have satisfied her mother, because she nodded and released her hand—and the money. She walked the woman to the door and waved happily, her fingers trilling a cheerful farewell.
“This is your fault, Dad,” Whitney muttered as her mother turned her eyes, glittering and determined, on her little family. Whitney grabbed one of the to-go coffee cups and buried her face in the little plastic lid, but it was a ridiculous attempt at a barrier. Her mother wouldn’t stop until Matt’s entire list of virtues was unfurled at her feet. Her father, she knew, wouldn’t stop until he had the same thing in the form of all his vices.
“You know, this puts me in mind of something I’ve been meaning to ask you,” her mother began, her tone not unlike that of a parent about to disclose the truth about Santa Claus. “Your father said you guys might be having some financial difficulties with the spa.”
Whitney was confused. “What does this have to do with Matt?”
“We talked about it, and there’s simply no way for us to lend you any more money, sweetie. Not even for partial ownership. We need to be liquid right now. We’ve taken up cruises.”
The disclosure didn’t come as a complete surprise. She and Kendra and John had begun filling out applications at a few larger banks, but it had seemed prudent to cover all the other possible bases first. “It’s okay, Mom. I understand. But I still don’t see where Matt comes in. He’s a divorced schoolteacher with about twenty dollars in his savings account. And I would never ask him anyway.”
“No one said you ought to, dear.” Whitney’s mother shook her head and began passing out the baked goods. “But I wanted to let you know that I’ve been talking to a few interested parties. I might be able to get a potential investor to head down to take a look at the facilities later this week.”
“Really?” Whitney wrapped her arms around her mom’s waist. “That would be so wonderful. You didn’t have to.”
“You can repay me by telling me all about this young man of yours.” She kissed Whitney gently on the forehead. “Tell me—does he golf?”
Golf. Ugh.
She’d almost rather they start talking about their sex life again.
* * *
“It’s not a big deal, Matt. Just lunch.”
Matt hid a smile, though he didn’t know why he bothered. He was, for the moment, alone in his apartment. When he’d answered the phone, the last thing he’d expected was Whitney’s voice, resigned and dry. It was only two days into her hiatus of shame. She was breaking already.
And begging.
“Well, now,” Matt drawled, propping his legs up on his coffee table, littered with books on coping with ovarian cancer. The ladies at the library had almost burst into sobs when he’d lugged every book they had on the subject to the checkout counter. “How your tune has changed. I thought I was forbidden from participating in the time-honored parent parade?”
“Don’t be mean. It was wrong of me to shut you off like that, and I’m sorry. I realize now that there is simply no way to pretend you don’t exist. My parents know me too well, and you...” Her voice grew quiet.
“And I?” he prompted, his pulse leaping. Say it, Whitney. Say I matter. Say I’m more than a temporary fix.
She paused. “It’s a small town, Matt. Word gets around.”
Disappointment hit him like a blow to the stomach, leaving him shaky and breathless. “So what happened?” he asked, resigned.
“Maybe I just want you to meet my parents.”
“Or?”
“Maybe I decided you were right and I was wrong.”
Sure. He tried again. “Or?”
“Or maybe I let it slip that I was seeing someone and they won’t leave me alone.” She sighed into the phone, and Matt couldn’t tell if it was because she was being forced to ask for his help, or if she was afraid he might say something to her parents that he wasn’t supposed to. “They might even think we’re more serious than we really are.”
“Whitney...”
“I didn’t use the word dating, I swear. But there’s a teensy tiny possibility it got implied.”
Unbelievable. She refused to admit to herself they could be more than a rebound, refused to admit to Matt that she cared. But her parents? They got the full, idyllic bliss of nondisclosure.
“So I’m supposed to what, exactly?”
“Come to lunch. Smile. Be charming. That’s all.”
“What if they ask me about my intentions?”
“They won’t. They aren’t those kinds of parents.” She paused. “Please? I know it’s not fair of me to ask, but they’re driving me crazy. You’re my only hope. I need you.”
No joke—those words were almost guaranteed to make a man feel good. And this particular man? Hilly was right. Matt loved nothing more than being asked to come to the rescue.
“I’m good at moms and dads,” he offered. “If you’re worried, I mean. They love me.”
“I’m sure they do. You’re every mother’s dream come true.”
But not Whitney’s. The words weren’t said, but they lingered there just the same. He suddenly felt very tired, and very old, and very fed up with maneuvering his life around what women seemed to need or want for the moment. What about him? How much longer was he supposed to give before he finally broke?
Soon. He had a feeling it was soon.
“So you’ll do it?” she prodded.
“Of course I will.” Before he made the mistake of adding something sentimentally horrifying like I’ll do anything you want, his call waiting beeped.
Laura.
His heart thumped with a dullness he’d come to associate with the phone number he once called his own. “I’ve got another call, so I need to run. But I’m looking forward to meeting your parents, and I promise to be on my best behavior.”
“That’s what I’m afraid of.” She rattled off the lunch details until the call waiting beeped again. Then, quietly and with an undertone of steel, “It’s her, isn’t it, on the other line?”
He didn’t know what to say. Whitney would never be the president of the Laura Fuller Fan Club. He wasn’t feeling all too keen on his own membership these days, but there didn’t seem to be much else he could do.
“I’ll see you tomorrow, Whitney.” Avoiding the subject—that always worked. A deep male voice boomed through the other end of the phone, and Matt heard Whitney call something back about the need for pants and sanitation standards for her leather couches. “Tell your parents I can’t wait to meet them.”
It was true. Knowing that Whitney had parental expectations and a normal life outside Pleasant Park filled him with hope.
He was sorely in need of that hope, he realized as he pressed the call waiting button and braced himself to face Laura’s tears.
There was a shortage of that stuff going around lately.