“He just left? Just like that, no goodbye?”
She paused. “Kind of. He said, ‘Goodbye, sweet girl,’ and I said, ‘Where are you going, Daddy?’ and he said, ‘I have to see a man about a horse.’ And then he left. That was the last time I saw him.”
She went about her morning business and I felt horrible. Here I was dragging up her emotional baggage just to satisfy my own stupid ego. I apologized as she plopped on the bed to put on her socks.
“I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have gotten so personal about your dad.”
She laughed. “My father lives a few blocks from here with my mother and has since the day I was born. You are so gullible!”
I pushed her onto the bed and we rolled around wrestling for a blissful moment or two. I wanted more than anything to kiss her, but the thought of her rejection kept me in check. She didn’t have daddy issues. She just didn’t find either Jeremy Madison or Stanley Trenton attractive. I decided I would meet her on Wednesday for the shoot and then never see her again. If I wanted this kind of rejection, I could go back to auditioning.
CHAPTER 6
The Inception of the Ostrich Detective Agency
By Andie Rand, Private Detective
Age: 39
As I hung up the phone after speaking with the woman who I was confident would become our one hundredth client, I couldn’t help but smile to myself. Sure, things hadn’t turned out exactly as planned, but they had turned out well. I was proud of the life I had created after my other life imploded, proud of the role model I’d become for the twins. A lot can change in three years.
It was three years ago to the day that I called an emergency meeting with my three best college friends at an out-of-the-way coffee shop just off the West Side Highway. When you admit to yourself that your storybook, love-at-first-sight, ten-year, honey-you-stay-home-with-the-kids-and-I’ll-make-a-ton-of-money marriage has fallen apart, you don’t want to discuss it at great length and varying volumes in your own ’hood. This felt particularly true when said ’hood was the Upper West Side of Manhattan, though my guess is that jilted ladies from Chappaqua to Chattanooga feel the same. Once out, a cat like infidelity is particularly impossible to get back in the bag. But holding it all inside was eating me alive, so I’d called my college roommates. We didn’t see each other that often, but we found ways to stay connected. I knew they would travel to the ends of the earth for me, or, in this case, a diner on Eleventh Avenue that looked like it had been dropped there from suburbia circa 1969. It even has its own parking lot, which is unheard of in Manhattan, except for Tavern on the Green and a McDonald’s somewhere in Hell’s Kitchen.
Allison was the first to arrive but not to speak. At least not to me. She entered mid-call and unpacked the entire contents of her briefcase on the table. She was looking for a file and began handing me things one by one in a very chaotic process of elimination that I remembered well from college. The drill came right back to me, as I had spent hours and hours helping her tear through our room for a paper or her birth control pills or whatever it was that she was desperately searching for. She found the file she was looking for and I recognized that calm smile of hers as relief. She spoke with authority.
“In the documents marked January eleventh it clearly states that Mr. Ackerman was out of town on that weekend.”
The person on the other end of the phone spoke, but Allison stopped listening. A large plushie plopped down in our booth, and both of us were momentarily distracted from our respective trains of thought—Allison from whatever case she was arguing, me from the end of my life as I knew it. If you had had a young child or grandchild in the past decade, you would immediately have recognized this plushie as Dora the Explorer. Knowing that didn’t make it any less insane that a life-sized stuffed toy had squished its way into our narrow booth. Allison said, a little rudely, “Excuse me, maybe you don’t see well in that thing, but this booth is taken!”
Dora pulled off her stuffed head. “Hola, ladies.”
It was CC, our other college roommate. Clearly I was not the only one with troubles.
“Gotta go,” Allison said into the phone, and hung up. “What the hell, CC?” she shouted, as if Dora’s presence alone weren’t enough to draw attention our way.
CC shrugged. “Brett’s been out of work for six months,” she said matter-of-factly. “I needed a job.”
“You graduated magna cum laude from Wesleyan, for god’s sake—this was all you were qualified for?” Allison was still in outraged-lawyer mode.
I came to CC’s defense. “She was a Spanish major.” Allison didn’t have children; she stared at me blankly. “Dora’s Spanish.” I smiled.