“They’ll be fine. It is what it is.”
“I don’t even know what that expression really means. I think it means nothing.”
“I’m telling you, they’ll be okay. But your bosses? That might be another story, right?”
“Sadly, yes. I think you’re right. Franklin McCoy will not be pleased.”
“Spencer might get a little grief from management for booking the girls,” Philip said. “Well, not for booking the girls—but for booking the girls from someplace sketchy. He didn’t use the service we usually use.”
“There’s such a thing as a service you usually use?”
“I love how innocent you are, my older brother,” Philip said, stressing the word older in a way that was both loving and condescending. “Yes, we do have our go-to girls for this sort of thing.”
“Okay, then: Why didn’t Spencer use them?”
“He was trying something new. Not completely new. He’d used the service that offers girls like Sonja and whatever-her-name-was—the one you did—once before, and it was awesome. The girls were wild—but wild in a yeah-I’ll-do-that sort of way. Not wild in a I’m-going-to-jump-on-your-back-and-cut-your-head-off sort of way. And he wanted something wild for me. For you. For us.”
“His heart was in the right place.”
“It really was. How was he to know they’d send over two batshit crazy strippers? How was he to know you’d wind up with a couple of dead guys in your living room and front hall?”
“I gotta go,” Richard said suddenly, surprising even himself. He’d dreaded talking to his younger brother, and the few minutes on the phone had been worse than he had expected. “Kris will be back any second.”
“Say hi for me.”
“I will,” Richard lied. “I will.”
…
Melissa sat on the plush carpet in her grandmother’s living room and matched up her new tights with her new skirts. Her grandmother sat in the yellow easy chair beside the fireplace and read a biography of Amelia Earhart. Cassandra, unused to this new environment, was gazing down at the world a little warily from the top of the back of the couch. Occasionally her grandmother would speak, sharing something about the aviator’s life that she had just read or commenting yet again on how unusual or clever the tights were, and Melissa had figured out the pattern: her grandmother spoke the second after they had heard her mother sobbing or her father raising his voice in desperation. Not anger; more like panic. Incredulity. Disbelief. Her parents were down the corridor and behind the closed door of the guest bedroom, but still the sound traveled. Melissa thought of the girls and boys she knew whose parents had gotten divorced. Sometimes the children had moved away; sometimes not. They lived in multiple homes, spending some nights with one parent and some nights with the other. Occasionally they fell behind in their schoolwork. The boys “acted out.” (That was the expression her teachers used; her own mother had used it on occasion, too.) The girls grew quiet.
She ate one of the chocolates her father had brought her and looked at the tights with the face cards. Kings and queens and jacks. A harlequin. She thought of fairy tales and wondered why there wasn’t a card with a princess. There should have been. It didn’t make sense. It was always the princesses that people cared about. She couldn’t name a single Disney prince, but instantly she could count on her fingers seven or eight of the princesses. She had met three of them at Disney World a couple of years ago, and now she rolled her eyes when she recalled how she had actually believed at the time that she was meeting Cinderella, Belle, and Snow White.
“This biographer thinks she and her copilot crash-landed on a reef and survived,” her grandmother was saying. “They were on this little island for weeks and could have been rescued. Can you imagine?”
She didn’t want her parents to get divorced. She wanted only to go home. In her mind she saw a picture from one of her thick books of fairy tales—a book that was so old it had once belonged to her grandmother’s mother—of an ominous house in the woods. The second-floor windows were eyes, the French front doors a mouth. In the story, the house was described as brooding. She would have called it hungry.
She told herself she would be brave, if only because she hadn’t a choice. But she was scared. She was, she realized, scared for the first time in her life.
A few minutes later her parents emerged from the bedroom. A few minutes after that, her father left for the night. He held her and promised that he would be back in the morning.
Alexandra