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Authors: Melissa Francis

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Diary of a Stage Mother's Daughter: A Memoir (37 page)

BOOK: Diary of a Stage Mother's Daughter: A Memoir
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Even for Mom, this was off the reservation. I could imagine her, looking at the check for the sale of the house, hands shaking, deciding she couldn’t possibly share it, convinced it was hers.
Tiffany shook her head. I kept looking from my sister to my father, waiting for one of them to say this was a joke.
“Wasn’t the check made out to both of you?” I asked my father. Now none of us was eating.
“It’s been cashed. I called the title company. She forged my name. She’s broken the law,” he said.
That was sort of the least of it, I thought.
“How do you know she’s just not managing it like always? Or buying another house? Or maybe it’s a scheme she’s cooked up to not pay taxes. It’s not like she’s running off with it to Mexico,” I tried.
They looked at each other.
“I mean,” I tried to collect my thoughts. “Do you think she plans to cut you out and run off or something? Why?”
“And she wrote a huge check to herself from my corporate account, and forged my name to that, and cashed that too, draining the company’s operating cash. Why would she do that if she wasn’t planning on not seeing me, or us, again?”
I looked from Dad to Tiffany, and back to Dad, soaking in what they were telling me, but still not absorbing the magnitude of Mom’s pure, unfiltered greed. There was no denying this was her idea of a divorce settlement. Either that or the ultimate bank job.
“That’s definitely illegal,” I said.
“When I went down to the bank and pointed out that they’d honored a forged check from my corporate account and had broken about fifty laws, they reversed the transaction, putting
that
money back, at least. But I don’t know where she put the balance of our joint accounts.”
“What did she say when you confronted her?” I asked. “Did she think you’d just let her steal everything and live down the street at Marilyn’s?”
“She screamed into the phone some nonsense about every wrong I’ve ever heaped upon her, not addressing the situation at all, saying she wanted a divorce, and then suddenly hung up, slamming down the phone.”
“Yes, I’ve been on the other end of some of those conversations. When did this happen?” I asked.
“The day of Wray’s party,
before
she came up to see you.”
 
 
Wray was at work still, and I wasn’t sure how I was going to tell him any of this. I was mortified to be related to someone who would steal from her own family.
We’d made a plan that morning to grill chicken kabobs on the roof when Wray got home, so once Tiffany, Dad, and I got back to my apartment from Sam’s, I invited Tiffany to go to the store with me, angling for a few moments alone with her.
We walked down the staircase to the garage on the first floor of our building. Now painfully thin, Tiffany moved down each step gingerly. She seemed drained of energy. I’d noticed at lunch that she didn’t have much of an appetite. All of the fight seemed to have gone out of her.
When we got into my silver-blue Saab, she sighed.
I drove slowly down Chestnut Street. “I can’t believe it,” I said to her now that we were alone.
“I know,” she responded. “It confirms what we always thought about Mom stealing and hoarding any dime that came in. But you still don’t want to believe your own mom could do this.”
“Yeah. We’re related to her. It’s so embarrassing. I don’t know how I’m going to tell Wray,” I said.
“On the other hand, as long as she has the money, she’s going to stay far away so she doesn’t have to give any back,” she said.
“But Dad can’t just let her keep it. There are bills to pay,” I said.
“He says he can make more money. I don’t know what he’s going to do,” Tiffany said, pulling down the mirror on the visor and playing with her hair.
“How are you feeling?” I asked.
“Okay. Well, not really. I can’t eat anything. Anything with fat in it makes me feel sick. I spend a lot of time with doctors,” she said, her voice thin.
“I’m sorry. I love you. I wish there was something I could do,” I said. She didn’t respond. “At least Mom isn’t bugging you. Maybe you and Dad can live alone in peace for a while,” I offered.
“Yeah, that’s a plus. But . . .”
She got quiet, and when I looked over at her at the stoplight, I saw a tear tumble down her face and land in her lap. She was half the size she’d always been. She looked like a little girl.
“You know, I was lying in the hospital last time and in the middle of the night I was just in so much pain. And . . . so scared.” She paused, and took a gulp of air, trying to steady herself.
The car behind me honked, and I waved my hand out the window, signaling for him to go around us.
I put my hand on top of hers as my own eyes filled with tears that spilled over.
“All I could think was, it would be so nice to have a mom,” Tiffany whispered.
I waited until Dad and Tiffany left San Francisco to confront Mom myself.
I had walked home from work early, wanting to be alone in the apartment to make the call. I’d thought all night about what I wanted to say to Mom, my anger and outrage festering and feeding on itself.
I sat on my couch and looked out the oversized windows at another stunningly beautiful day in San Francisco. Blue and white sailboats crisscrossed the bay in the distance, as groups of people walked back and forth on the water’s edge, looking so carefree.
I dialed the number.
I had built up such a head of rage, my hands shook as I pushed the digits, forcing me to grip the phone to hold it steady.
“Hello?” she said.
“I know you took the money,” I said.
“What money?” she said plainly.
“
All
the money,” I replied steadily. “From the house. From the company account. I know everything. And then you came up here and pretended that you hadn’t done anything.”
“Your father’s a liar! They both are. They laughed at me. They were going off without me, they were going to leave me with nothing, in the street, after all I’ve done for this family! I’ve given my life to this family, to you! To them! Your father would be nothing without me! An engineer. And your sister! A drunk! Your father too!”
“Enough!” I shouted.
She was quiet for a moment.
I gasped for air. “Everything is gone. It’s in the past. I will forgive it all, forget it all, anything that’s ever happened. It’s gone. We can never mention it if you like.” My voice was shaking. I knew exactly what I wanted to say, and I didn’t want her to miss a word.
“But you
cannot
have a relationship with me, at all, going forward, if you don’t return the money. You have to treat all three of us like adults, with decency, from this day forward.”
“What are you talking about?” she spat.
“You cannot throw them away, throw Tiffany away like trash, your daughter who is sick, who is scared, and needs you, has always needed you. You are her mom. You cannot throw her away like she’s worthless, and have a relationship with me. Or Wray, or my children in the future. I won’t do it.”
She was silent.
“All the craziness. It ends with me. I swear it, once and for all. One way or the other. It’s your choice
how
it ends.
But it ends with me.
”
She slammed down the phone.
 
 
And I never heard from her again.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
 
I
t had been a terrible week. The Internet company where I’d spent the last two years was teeing us up for massive layoffs. I called it the curse of an opulent new building. Anytime a company builds a flashy new headquarters, they inevitably jump the shark and have to downsize.
But now I was worried that the impending layoff was a sign. Maybe it was time to move back to New York. The dot-com bubble had burst, soaking my prospects for another job in the area.
It was the Fourth of July, and Wray and I hadn’t bothered to stay out long enough to see the conclusion of the fireworks. Our worries weighed too heavily on us for our spirits to be lifted by patriotic celebration. After looking for more than a year, Wray and I had bought a sweet jewel box of a house on the waterfront in the marina at the foot of the Golden Gate Bridge. I unlocked the door and assessed the living room, worried that we had decorated too hastily.
Wray closed the door behind us and fell onto the couch. As I slid off my jacket and removed my phone from my pocket, I noticed I’d missed a call.
It was my dad. I dialed his phone.
“Melissa . . . ,” he said into the phone. He usually answered with what we called his radio voice, a rich, warm baritone that would have been perfect for broadcasting. But this time his voice was paper-thin.
“I have something really terrible to tell you.”
He was crying. I think I’d only seen him cry twice—when his father died and when Tiffany was flown by medevac to Holy Cross Hospital after the truck accident in high school.
“Tiffany is dead. She’s dead,” he cried.
I slid down the wall of my cheery yellow kitchen, crumpling into a heap on the pine floor, not knowing I was replicating her final motion.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“I just found her in the corner of the bathroom. Against the wall. In her bathrobe. I thought she was taking a shower. But instead, she was dead. In the corner,” he sobbed.
“Oh, no,” I cried.
Seeing me on the floor, Wray rushed over to lift me up.
“You have to come. Right now,” Dad said, choking.
The phone clicked and I just shook my head, staring blankly in front of me but saying nothing.
“What?” Wray said fifty times.
“She’s dead.”
A tsunami of grief washed over me, and as it receded, I realized a lifetime of worry had ended. Just like that.
 
 
I got in the blue Saab with Wray and we drove through the night to Westlake. As we got closer, I felt more and more panicked. I was terrified of the scene we were going to find. I had no idea who he had called, or if he’d even moved Tiffany’s body. I didn’t want to ask.
Wray drove but neither of us spoke, except for the few times Wray kept saying he was so sorry.
We pulled into the driveway of the small, one-story home they’d been renting. It was only the second time I’d been there. I swallowed so I wouldn’t throw up.
I knocked on the solid brown door, and my father answered, still hunched over and weeping, hours and hours later. Tears and snot poured down his face, but he didn’t wipe any of it away. It was as if he didn’t even notice his own disarray.
He wrapped his arms around me and clutched me, crushing my bones with his grief, soaking my hair and my shirt with his tears.
Then he grabbed my hand, his whole arm trembling violently, and pulled me through the doorway.
“Here. Come back here,” he said, dragging me through the narrow hallway that led to the back of the house. We took a left into the master bedroom and walked toward the bathroom.
I shut my eyes, terrified to see my sister’s lifeless body.
“There!” he said, pointing and shaking.
But when I opened my eyes, all I saw was Tiffany’s bathrobe on the floor. The white, monogrammed bathrobe, the one Mom had had made for my wedding, lay in a heap in the corner.
“Right there,” he said, as if Tiffany were still there. “That’s where I found her. She was already gone.”
I wasn’t sure why I had to stand there and look, or what I was supposed to see. My eyes drifted from the worn robe to the twisted trail of shampoo and conditioner on the floor of the shower. There must have been a dozen or more bottles, standing up or spilling over. That was Tiffany. She couldn’t leave the grocery store without spending fifteen minutes in the beauty aisle, sniffing shampoo. Now that jumble was left, but the paramedics had taken my sister away, saying there was nothing more they could do. She was gone.
BOOK: Diary of a Stage Mother's Daughter: A Memoir
12.93Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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