“What’s he like?” I ask. But really, I know. I just want to hear her say it.
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
We’re quiet for a moment. Then she breaks the silence.
“My father grew up rich,” she says. “Old money,” she says and then tells me: his family’s always had money. For generations. They have more money than they know what to do with. “Enough to feed a small country,” she says, but they don’t. They keep it all to themselves.
She tells me how her father’s career is high-profile. I know this. “People know him,” she says. “All this goes to his big head. My father’s never-ending desire for more money has made him corrupt. I wouldn’t put much past him—accepting bribes, for one. He’s just never been caught.
“Image is everything to him,” she says. Then she tells me about her sister. Grace. She says that she, like her father, is pretentious and hollow and hedonistic. I give her a look. Grace is not the only one who’s all these things. She’s the daughter of a wealthy bastard. Her life’s been delivered on a silver platter.
I know more about her than she’d like to think.
“Think whatever you want,” she says. “But my father and I are different people.” Very different, she says.
She tells me that she and her father never got along. Not when she was a child, not now.
“We don’t talk much. Occasionally, but it’s all a ruse. In case someone’s keeping tabs.”
Grace, a lawyer, is her father’s protégée. “She’s everything I never was,” the girl says. “She’s his mirror image. While my father never financed my college education, he put Grace through both college and law school. He bought her a condo in the Loop, which she could have paid for herself. Myself, I pay eight hundred and fifty dollars every month in rent and most months, that about breaks the bank. I asked my father to donate to the school I work at. Start a scholarship fund, maybe. He laughed. But he has Grace working at a top firm downtown. She charges clients over three hundred dollars for an hour of her time. Within a few years she’ll likely make partner. She’s everything my father ever wanted me to be.”
“And you?”
“I’m the other one, the one whose mistakes he had to cover up.”
She says that she was never of interest to her father. Not when she was putting on an impromptu show at the age of five. Not when she was hanging her first piece in a gallery at the age of nineteen. “Grace, on the other hand, her very presence could change his mood. She’s bright, like him, and articulate, her words wrought with efficacy rather than—as my father liked to call it—delusion. These grand delusions I had of one day being an artist. My mother’s deluded sense of reality.”
What pisses me off is that she talks like she got the short end of the stick. Like her life is full of hard knocks. She doesn’t have a fucking clue what tough luck is like. I think of the mint-green trailer home, of sitting out a storm in a makeshift shelter while we watched our home blow over. “I’m supposed to feel sorry for you?” I ask.
A bird begins to warble. In the distance, another returns its call.
Her voice is quiet. “I never asked you to feel sorry for me. You asked a question. I gave you an answer,” she confides.
“You’re just full of self-pity, aren’t you?”
“It isn’t like that.”
“Always the victim.” I’m unsympathetic. This girl doesn’t know a damn thing about tough luck.
“No,” she hisses at me. She thrusts the fishing rod into my hands. “Take it,” she says. She unzips the coat and cringes at the cold air that envelops her. She drops it to the ground beside me. I let it lay there. I don’t say a thing. “I’m going in.”
And she walks past the dead fish whose eyes stare at her with contempt for letting it die.
She’s not twenty feet away when I say, “What about the ransom?”
“What about it?” she snaps. She stands in the shade of a big tree, her hands on her hips. Her hair whirls around her in the cold October air.
“Would your dad have paid the ransom?” I ask. If he hates her as much as she makes believe, he wouldn’t pay a penny for her return.
She’s thinking about it. I know she is. It’s a damn good question.
If her father didn’t pay the ransom, then she’d be dead.
“I guess we’ll never know,” she says, and then she goes. I hear her feet smashing the leaves on the ground. I hear the squeal of a screen door opening in the distance. And then I hear it slam shut. I know that I’m alone.
Gabe