Dangerous Ladies (2 page)

 

E
leven-year-old Brandi sat in the open door of her bedroom with the floaty princess curtains and the pretty canopy bed, and listened to the sound of her mother’s hysterical voice.

“But I don’t know how to write a check.”

“It’s time you learned.” Her father couldn’t have sounded more disgusted.

“But you always did that for us.”

“That’s right.” Daddy was sort of stomping as he packed. “I’d come home from a hard day’s work at the office and I had to sit down and pay the utilities and the house payment and the credit cards and all the other bills. I had to make the reservations anytime we traveled and arrange to have someone mow the lawn. Taking care of you was a damned pain in the ass.”

“But you wanted it that way!”

Daddy must have recognized the justice of her statement, because he sounded a little nicer. “It’s not hard, Tiffany.” Then he was back to impatience. “For Christ’s sake, my secretary can do it.”

“It’s her, isn’t it?” Mama’s voice shook with suspicion. “It’s Susan. That little slut is the one you’re leaving me for.”

“She’s not a slut,” he snapped. Then he took a long, audible breath. “And I’m leaving you because you don’t do anything except . . . groom.”

Brandi imagined her father waving his big hands at her thin, blond, immaculately coiffed and manicured mother.

“What do you want me to do? I can do whatever you want.” Mama sounded panicked.

Brandi knew Mama
was
panicked, because Brandi was scared, too.

“You
can’t
carry on an intelligent conversation. You
can’t
discuss my business with me. The reason you always get picked for jury duty is because you don’t know a damned thing about current events.” He snorted. “A man like me needs an intellectual challenge, not an aging doormat.”

Brandi had to know what was going to happen—to her parents, and to her.

Brandi’s mother gasped. “I’m thirty-two!”

“As I said.”

Why was he being so mean? Tiffany was beautiful. Everybody said so. All Brandi’s friends at ballet envied her for having a mother who looked like a movie star. Brandi didn’t think it was so hot having people talk to her all the time about Tiffany and ask if she was proud to have such a pretty mother, but she always smiled and nodded her head, because then they always said, “And you’ll look just like her when you grow up!”

“You never wanted to talk to me about your business before.” Mama’s heels clicked on the hardwood floor as she followed Daddy around their bedroom. “You said you left Jane for me because she was always talking about that stuff when all you wanted was a peaceful home where you could relax.”

Daddy grunted.

“Look around you. I’ve consulted feng shui experts and brought in decorators to make this a home that you could be proud of—”

“And I paid through the nose for that fool Japanese guy—”

“Indonesian!”

“And for some idiot decorator to change my curtains in my office four times a year.” Daddy was getting hostile.

“Drapes. They’re drapes. And you bring clients into that office, Gary, and we had to get them right!”

Brandi loved that when it came to something she really cared about, Mama got in Daddy’s face.

“Besides, our house headlined in the Frontgate catalog—”

The spread in Frontgate catalog had been Mama’s pride and joy, and had given her great cachet among her friends.

“That catalog brought you a lot of work. The Dugeren murder case and”—Mama’s voice quavered—“that high-profile divorce case. . . .” She was right.

So Daddy attacked from a different direction. “Do you think I don’t notice the bills to the dermatologist and the plastic surgeon? Your discreet little visits for your facial buffs and your body peels?”

“What’s wrong with that?” Honestly bewildered, Mama asked, “Don’t you want me to be beautiful?”

“I want something more than an empty shell who smiles vacuously and babbles about how Vicky at tennis has to do something about the cellulite on her thighs! And your daughter’s just as bad.”

Brandi wanted to cover her ears, to not hear her own father disown her by saying
your daughter,
but it was like listening to a car wreck—the insults and the rejection commanded her attention as surely as the screech of brakes and the crumple of metal, and for one wild moment she wondered if she would come out alive.

“All that girl does—”

“Brandi.” Mom took a deep breath, and Brandi pictured her squaring her shoulders. “Her name is Brandi.”

“All Brandi does is take ballet and gymnastics and cheerleading classes. She’s a mini-you. Why couldn’t she be more like Kimberley?”

Kim was his first daughter, his daughter with Jane.

“Kimberley plays softball, and she does it damned well.” His voice rang with pride. “She’s got a sports scholarship to UT. She’s going to be an engineer and make something of herself. Not like that kid of yours. Brandi is stupid.”

Stupid. Daddy thought she was stupid. Brandi closed her eyes to try to contain the anguish, and when that didn’t work she put her fist against her mouth and shoved, holding back her shriek.

She wasn’t stupid. He was.
He was.
She wanted to go down to her parents’ bedroom, stomp her foot, shout and rail at her father for throwing her and her mother away as if they were trash.

But Brandi didn’t make scenes. Brandi followed the rules in the hope that being good would somehow make everything okay.

Everything was not okay, but if she just tried a little harder . . .

“She is not stupid!” Mama said.

“How would
you
know?”

Brandi gasped. How could he be so cruel to Mama?

“She’s your daughter as much as Kimberley. She’s smart, too. She’s never had anything but straight As, even in math.” Mama didn’t pay a bit of attention to Daddy’s insult to her, but leaped into the fray to defend Brandi.

Of course, Mama’s strengths weren’t taught in school. She was really good at making their house pretty and knowing the right thing to wear and smiling at men so they got flustered and turned red.

“Brandi’s probably going to be some kind of freaking English major and a drain on my wallet for the rest of my life.” He sounded so disgusted, as if being good in English were a waste.

“She’s the best in her class in gymnastics and ballet.”

“A bunch of skinny little girls in tights!”

Brandi gritted her teeth. She wasn’t skinny or little anymore. She had a figure, and at five-foot-ten she was an inch taller than Mama and four inches taller than any of the rest of the girls in her class. But around the house Daddy hardly glanced at Brandi, and he had never bothered to come to her recitals.

“Kimberley plays real sports,” he said. “Competitive sports.”

In a prissy tone, Mom said, “If you ask me, Kimberley is a lesbian.”

With a soft groan, Brandi dropped her forehead against the wall. It was true. Of course it was true. Kim had told Brandi herself. But Daddy was homophobic, and he sure didn’t want to know that his sports-inclined daughter was gay. Mama had just messed up big by telling him.

Daddy shouted, “Why, you jealous little—”

Mama gave a little cry of fright.

He was going to hit Mama.

Brandi started to her feet, picking up her beloved ceramic dragon to use as a weapon.

She heard the sound of glass shattering.

Heart pounding, she ran into the hallway, dragon upraised.

In a guttural tone Daddy said, “For Christ’s sake, Tiffany, don’t be stupid.”

“I’m not stupid!” Mama stomped her foot. “I just think things like manners and pleasure are important, and you shouldn’t have broken that vase.”

Brandi skidded to a stop.

Mama continued, “It took me months to find the right vase for that table!”

Slowly Brandi lowered the dragon. She crept back toward her room. If they knew she was listening they’d make her shut her door, and no matter how her stomach churned, she had to know whether her daddy had destroyed their lives.

“That’s the problem,” Daddy said. “You always cared more about vases and manners than about ideas or work—or me.”

“That’s not true!” Mama whimpered like a kicked puppy.

It
was
true, but to Brandi’s childish eyes, it had seemed that that was all he required of her mother. Only in the last year had he grown restless and contemptuous.

Mama’s quiet sobbing must have made Daddy uncomfortable, for he tried cajoling her. “C’mon, Tiff, you’ll be all right without me. Jane is doing just fine.”

“B-but J-Jane had a prenuptial agreement. Y-you didn’t want me t-to get one.”

“That was your mistake.”

Brandi recognized that tone in her father’s voice. Guilt was hotly prodding him—and he blamed Mom.

“Y-you said . . . you said you’d take care of me forever.”

“For shit’s sake, would you stop blubbering? It’s disgusting.” He slammed his suitcase closed. “I’ll have my lawyer call your lawyer.”

“I don’t have a lawyer!”

“Get one.” Daddy’s heels slapped the polished hardwood floor as he walked down the hallway.

Brandi tensed as she waited to see if he would stop to hug her before he left.

But he passed without a glance in her direction.

Brandi swallowed her disappointment. She knew how. She’d done it for years.

Mama ran past her and after him, crying with ever more desperation. “I don’t have a job. How will I support Brandi? We’ll starve!” She caught him as he opened the door, grabbed at his arm, and tried to hold him back.

Even Brandi recognized high drama at its best.

Quietly she shut herself into her bedroom and left them to it.

Her stomach hurt, roiling with distress. She absently rubbed the pain and looked around her bedroom. Mama had decorated it with white-and-gold furniture and pink-and-gold upholstery. When Brandi was young she had felt as though she were living in a Barbie dream house, and she’d loved it.

Now that she was older she felt as if she were living in a Barbie dream house, and she wanted it changed. But she hadn’t wanted to hurt Mama’s feelings, so she’d added a few touches herself. A stained-glass window done in shades of blue that looked like her favorite print in
The Hobbit.
Her shiny green dragon with sparkling gems for eyes. Three black-and-white posters of the Hadrien Boys from England. But peering through the stained glass, running her fingertips
over the dragon’s scales, and looking at the boys did nothing to ease the ache in her chest. In her heart.

She opened the window and looked out at the soft green unfurling in the trees. Nashville was beautiful in the spring. Their huge yard was tiered and landscaped and usually the sight made Brandi feel warm and secure. Today it wasn’t working. Nothing was working.

Downstairs she heard the front door slam so hard it shook the house.

Her throat hurt, so she took big breaths of fresh air, desperate to hold back . . . no, not tears. She wasn’t going to cry.

She was going to fix this. Somehow she had to do something that would make it better.

Walking to her painted desk, she pulled out a tablet, one engraved with her name, and at the top she wrote,
Things to Learn.
She drew a line beneath the words and numbered down the lines, and wrote:

Then she tore that list off, set it carefully to the side, and on the top of the clean sheet, wrote:

She frowned at that one and chewed on the end of her pen. No, that wouldn’t do. She wasn’t good at baseball; to Kim’s annoyance Brandi ducked when the ball came in her direction.

Brandi crossed off
Play baseball
and replaced it with
Become a lawyer.

She didn’t know exactly what a lawyer did—a girl who attended ballet, gymnastics, and cheerleading classes in every spare moment learned remarkably little about the real world, especially when her father never talked to her about his job—but she knew he made a lot of money. And her father had required her mother to look beautiful and Brandi to be charming when Mr. Charles McGrath and his wife visited, and Mr. McGrath was an important Chicago lawyer.

That was what she wanted. She wanted to be important. She wanted the power to make her father behave, and the ability to get her mother a prenuptial agreement.

Whatever that was.