Cannie Shapiro 02 Certain Girls (26 page)

I asked Debbie's permission--she was on the phone again, and gave me a quick thumbs-up without missing a word of her conversation. We found popcorn in the kitchen, kernels in a jar, not the microwave kind. Cara studied the jar suspiciously, unscrewing the top and sniffing it, then taking out a kernel and rolling it between her fingers.

I took the jar back and read the directions out loud. "We'll need a big pan with a lid..."

"I got that." Cara pulled a pan out of a drawer with a flourish and a bang.

"Oil..."

"Top cabinet. I can't reach."

I stood on my tiptoes and got it. "Salt and butter."

"Here and here," she said, slamming the first and setting the second down on the counter beside me. I poured oil in the pan, flicked on the burner, and waited for it to get hot while Cara stood beside me, bouncing impatiently from foot to foot.

"I did popcorn like this one time, at camp last summer, only that was in a pan over a fire," Cara said.

"Did it work?"

"Yeah, it was really good."

When the oil was spitting, I let Cara toss one kernel into the pan. She squealed when it popped out and flew right at her face. "Ow! Hot," she said, brushing at her cheek.

"Be careful," I said. I made her wear an oven mitt to pour the rest of the kernels into the pan, and then I found a stool so she could stand in front of the stove, holding the handle and shaking it. I melted butter in the microwave, dumped the popcorn into a bowl, and poured the butter on top. Cara shook the salt. I found paper napkins and a pitcher of some kind of juice and a tray to put everything on. We carried it all into the den. Cara rummaged through a stack of DVDs and found
The Little Mermaid,
which I'd watched when I was little, and we sat down on one of the couches with the bowl between us. Ursula the sea witch was just starting her big number when Cara spoke.

"Harry."

"Huh?"

"That's my brother's name. Harry."

"Oh."

"Now I admit that once or twice / Someone couldn't pay the price / And I'm afraid I had to rake 'em 'cross the coals," Ursula sang.

"It's totally stupid," Cara said. Her eyes were still focused on the TV, the blue glow of the movie flickering across her face, her hand dipping automatically into the popcorn bowl and lifting fistfuls of kernels to her mouth. "He doesn't even have any hair anymore." I turned my head away because I thought she might have been crying, and I thought there should have been something for me to do about that, but I couldn't think of what.

And then I did. "Hey," I said. "Do you want to try on the most beautiful dress in the entire world?"

B
y the first Friday in June, the weather had turned freakishly cold. Some kind of low-pressure air mass had blown down from Canada overnight, dropping the temperatures from the eighties down to the fifties, half killing the petunias in my window boxes. Green leaves skittered down the sidewalks and iron-gray clouds scudded across the sky. I could already feel the beginnings of a cold--the scratchiness at the back of my throat, the dull ache behind my eyes. I chugged down a pint of water and a mug of rose-hip tea, popped vitamin C tablets, and looked up my beef stew recipe. If I hustled, I could get a piece of chuck at Chef's Market, a baguette and salad greens and a blueberry tart for dessert, get the stew simmering, then pick Joy up from school.

I tucked a basket of clean clothes against my hip and carried it up to Joy's room, noticing as the door swung open that, angry as she was, she was at least keeping her bed made and her clothes off the floor. That was good. Not good enough to offset the fact that she'd barely spoken to me in the past two weeks, but still, not nothing. I'd tried to bring up the topic of
Big Girls Don't Cry,
telling her that if she ever wanted to talk to me, if she ever had any questions, if there was ever anything that concerned her...I'd let my voice trail off, and I'd waited, tense, barely breathing, as Joy looked at me blandly and told me everything was fine.

I set a stack of folded underwear and shirts on the bed and opened her closet to hang up her jeans, and there it was. Pink. Spaghetti-strapped. Sparkly. Except the dress was gone. The week before, Elle had picked it up and brought it back to New York.

I stared for a minute, trying to make sense of what I was seeing--how the dress, like the cat of the old children's song, had come back. When I lifted the hanger off the metal bar, I realized that this was actually a different dress, not from Bergdorf's but from Macy's, an almost identical version in pink with silver sequins.

It took me about thirty seconds to figure out what had happened, another ten to find the telephone. Bruce Guberman didn't answer his office line or his cell phone. Emily answered at his home.

"It's Candace Shapiro. Is Bruce there?"

"What is this regarding?" asked Emily.

Oh, the night your husband and I had sex on the basement stairs while his parents put Passover dinner on the table
was right on the tip of my tongue.
You know, the good times!
I managed to restrain myself, managed, even, to cut short the memory of how, for years after, the taste of
charoset
made me horny. "Joy," I said. "It's about Joy."

Another minute passed, and then Bruce was on the line. "Cannie," he said. "What can I do for you?"

Bruce Guberman and I had loved each other once. Then we'd done our best to destroy each other: him with his magazine article, me with my book, hurling words as if they were arrows with deadly poison at their tips. What we had now was the thin crust of good manners laid over the bittersweet mess of our history...and Joy. We had Joy.

"Sorry to disturb you at home," I said formally. "But we need to talk about this dress you bought Joy."

"I didn't buy Joy a dress." He sounded confused. Then again, Bruce frequently sounded confused.

"At Macy's? Last Sunday? There's a dress in her closet with a price tag on it. You took her to the mall. She had to have bought it there. And Bruce, this dress is completely inappropriate."

"I don't know anything about a dress. Joy went shopping when I took the boys to the movies--"

"You left her alone?" I asked sharply.

Bruce sighed. "For ninety minutes in a shopping mall. We were right across the street, and she had a cell phone with a GPS locator."

Never mind that for now,
I told myself. "She must have bought the dress while you were at the movies."

"Does she have a credit card?"

I forced myself to breathe. "No, Bruce, my thirteen-year-old daughter does not have a credit card."
You stupid pothead,
I thought...except I guess I said it instead of thinking it, because Bruce replied in a very dignified voice, "I haven't smoked pot in more than ten years."

"Wow. Congratulations." Not that I believed him. If Bruce had truly given up weed, the entire East Coast's black-market economy would have collapsed. Dealers would have been wandering the streets, rending their garments and weeping. "But that doesn't explain how Joy got the dress. If I didn't pay for it, and you didn't pay for it..."

"You think she stole it?"

I squeezed my eyes shut. No. There was no way. I looked at the dress, and my heart unclenched. "There's a receipt in the bag. She used a MasterCard. You definitely didn't give her a credit card?"

"I gave her five bucks so she could get a pretzel and take Max on the train. I..." He paused. "Hang on a minute."

He set the telephone down. I sank onto my bed with my eyes closed. A minute later, Bruce was back on the line, and his voice was grave. "I think she might have taken one of my cards."

"No way," I said reflexively. "Joy wouldn't..." I swallowed hard.

"My MasterCard is missing from my wallet."

"And you're just noticing now?"
Idiot,
I groaned in my head. "Why don't you call the company to see if there've been any recent charges? If there were--if that's what happened--I'll speak to her. See if I can figure out what's going on."

"Okay." Bruce paused. I sat there, burning with fear and with shame. How had my beautiful, solemn, good-hearted little girl turned into a thief?

Bruce cleared his throat. "I was hoping I wouldn't have to tell you, but Joy may have overheard something at Tyler's bar mitzvah."

"Overheard...at...Wait, she wasn't at Tyler's bar mitzvah!"

Bruce sighed. "We weren't expecting to see her there, and Emily didn't react very well. We were having a discussion at the party--"

I spoke slowly and clearly, so that there was no chance that he could miss a word or mistake my meaning. "Joy wasn't at Tyler's bar mitzvah!"

"She was," Bruce said. Now he was the one to sound bewildered. "I thought you dropped her off."

"She told me she didn't want to go." My hands were gripping her sheets so hard that I could feel my fingernails through the fabric.
Joy,
I thought.
Oh, Joy.

"Huh," said Bruce. "Maybe she took the train. Or got a ride with someone. Or--"

"I'll call you later," I said, and hung up the phone and sat there, stunned and sick and not very surprised when Bruce called me back to say that, yes, there was one new charge on his card, from Macy's. "Hey," he said, not unkindly. "I'm sorry."

"Me, too," I croaked, and told him I'd find his card and call him back.

They say that nothing is more delicious than food cooked with love. My beef stew that night would have proved them wrong. I got out my cutting board and my heaviest cleaver and decimated an onion, three carrots, three potatoes, and an entire can of plum tomatoes. I rocked the blade of my knife over garlic cloves until they were pulverized to a paste. I wrenched the lid off a frozen container of beef stock that I'd yanked out of my freezer, jerked the cork out of a bottle of wine, hacked the beef into oozing red ribbons. I browned the vegetables, deglazed the pan, dredged the meat in flour, and adjusted the seasonings, flinging brown sugar, bay leaves, molasses, and more garlic into the pot. Then I slammed on the lid and sat at the table, fuming, trying to figure out how and when my daughter had turned into a stranger. Joy stealing credit cards! Joy on the train! By herself! Without anyone knowing where she was!
Anyone could have talked to her,
I thought.
Anything could have happened.

At two-forty-five I got behind the wheel. Driving up Lombard Street while the wind whipped against the windows, I rehearsed arguments in my head--only where would I start? With the dress? With the train trip? With her lying to me about not wanting to attend Tyler's bar mitzvah?

I sneezed twice, wiped my eyes, and pulled up to the curb, searching for Joy's face among the crowd of kids clustered around the gates. I raised my hand and waved at Tamsin, who gave me a brief wave back, then tucked her chin into her chest and marched past me. No Joy. Strange. Usually, wherever there was Tamsin, there was Joy. I got out of the car and scanned the play yard. There was a group of big boys squabbling over a basketball, a row of girls in gigantic pink and purple backpacks so heavy they looked as if they would tip their owners over, and there was my daughter, huddling in the school doorway as if trying to keep warm, with her sweater pulled tight around her.

"Joy!" I yelled. She turned around and smiled, the sunny, open little-girl smile that I hadn't seen in months, and she beckoned to me, just the way she had when was three and my sister had bought her a DVD of
Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.
"Come with me! And you'll see!" Joy would say in her husky rasp. "See the world of pure imagination!"

"Hi, Mom! Guess what? I got an e-mail from your father!"

"We'll talk about that later," I said before her words had a chance to register.
My
father? Surely I'd misheard her. Maybe she'd meant Bruce.

"Later?" Joy repeated incredulously. "Mom, this is, like, a huge big deal! He's your father!"

"We have other things to discuss," I snapped.

Joy recoiled. "He says he wants to see me," she said softly.

The words were out of my mouth before I could stop them. "Why, does he need money?" I asked.

Her eyes got huge, and her mouth fell open. I rubbed my temples, wishing I could take it back. I changed the subject instead. "Did you take Bruce's credit card?"

Joy lifted her chin and said nothing. I climbed behind the wheel, and she got into her seat.

"Did you go to Tyler's bar mitzvah?" I asked.

She turned toward the window without answering.

"Why?" I asked. "Why lie to me? Why keep it a secret? If you wanted to go, that would have been fine!"

She didn't answer. I stared at her profile: honey-colored hair, cheeks rosy from the wind, Bruce's straight, narrow nose, and Bruce's rounded chin, only smaller and finer.
A grown-up,
I thought, and on the heels of that thought came another one:
A stranger.

"You stole Bruce's credit card," I said, a judge reciting the charges, "and you bought the exact same dress you got with Elle."

"It's not exactly the same," she muttered.

"Close enough for government work."

"What does that mean?" she asked.

I blew out an exasperated breath. "You lied to me," I said. "You've been sneaking around. You've been stealing. You went out of the state without telling me or your father where you were going."

"You lied, too," Joy said so softly I almost didn't hear her.

"I beg your pardon?"

"You told me my grandfather had never even seen me. You said he never tried to meet me." She reached into her backpack and pulled out two sheets of paper. The first was indeed an e-mail from Lawrence Shapiro at the Beverly Hills Surgical Centre. I scanned it fast:
Sadly, your mother and I have been estranged for years due, I believe, to my ex-wife's attempts to poison my children's minds against me
...

I threw the paper down in disgust. "Oh, please." I shook my head. "Joy, he's lying. Grandma Ann didn't have to try to poison us against him. We didn't need poisoning. All we had to do was see what he did to us! He abandoned us, he never wanted anything to do with us, he wouldn't pay for our educations..."

Her voice was small but implacable. "You told me he never tried to see me, but he did."

My stomach clenched, and I thought for a minute I'd be sick. I chose my words carefully, as if picking my way across a swollen river, looking for the stones that would support me. "Joy, what is going on with you? Why the sudden interest in my father?"

My daughter extracted another piece of paper from her backpack. I knew what was coming even before I saw it: a ten-year-old snapshot from that long-ago bookstore in Los Angeles, a picture of Joy tucked into my father's arms.

"He says he came to a reading and took that picture," Joy said.

"He did." My mouth was so dry it was as if it had been stuffed with straw. "That's true. He showed up at one of my readings, and he..." I forced myself to breathe again. "Look. I can see that you'd like a grandfather in your life, and I'm sorry to disappoint you, but other than that reading, the only time he ever got in touch after you were born was to ask for money."

"You said," Joy repeated, "that he'd never tried to see me. But he did. So you lied."

I swallowed hard, feeling even more dizzy and sick. Had she somehow decided that a reunion with my father was the key to her happiness? My father, who'd never cared about her, never asked about her, had been interested in me only for my money? A man who'd never called, never sent her a birthday card, never asked for a picture, an update, anything at all? "I...I only..." I shook my head and reached for Joy's hands, which she had folded primly in her lap. I should have told her the truth, I realized, even if it hurt her. I should have told her that he was no good. "Joy. Talk to me. I can't help you if I don't know what's--"