I Got You, Babe (24 page)

“It’s nice to meet you, Alice,” Dave said after John introduced her. Then he turned to the baby. “And this is Ashley.”

At the sound of her name, the little girl turned in his arms and gave him a huge, dimpled smile. She was about a year and a half old, with a riot of dark, unruly hair and the biggest brown eyes Renee had ever seen.

“Hi, there, Ashley,” Renee said, tickling her arm at the same time. The baby giggled a little. Dave grinned at Ashley, then gave her a big, smacking kiss on the cheek, which made her giggle even more.

From the light in Dave’s eyes when he looked at his daughter, she was going to grow up being the center of his existence. As she watched them, Renee felt something stir deep inside her that she thought she’d buried a long time ago—the unbearable ache of loneliness and worthlessness that had shrouded her own childhood. She’d grown up with the feeling that not a solitary soul in the world truly cared whether she lived or died, including her own mother. It had been a long time since she’d dwelled on that, because the road that led her from insufferable teenager to mature, responsible woman was one she couldn’t have traveled if she’d allowed the accident of her birth to continue to control her life. Still, as she looked at Dave and Ashley right now, for just a moment the random unfairness of it made the pain feel as sharp as if it had all happened yesterday.

“Come on, Ashley,” Dave said, smiling at the baby. “Let’s go see what Aunt Louisa’s got cooking.”

They disappeared into the kitchen at the same time more people came through the front door, this time Brenda and Eddie.

Eddie was a blond, bookish man who looked as if he’d be right at home in the musty back stacks of a nineteenth-century library, poring over English literature texts. The criminologist. Typecasting at its best. But how good was he at his job? Could those sharp, intense, lie detector-like eyes of his see right through her? For a disquieting moment, she expected him to fling the casserole dish he held to the floor, point an accusing finger at her, and declare her a fugitive from justice. Instead, he merely smiled and introduced his wife, Brenda. Central casting had hit the nail on the head again.

Brenda, sharpshooter extraordinaire, was a short, compact woman of about thirty with dominance oozing out of every pore. Her black hair was cut stylelessly short, her unsmiling lips thin and bland, and when she slid her dark sunglasses off her face with a stealthy sweep of her hand, her narrow brown eyes pierced Renee like a pair of bayonets. She looked as if she’d be more at home shoveling in K rations on a marine drill somewhere in the Middle East than eating Aunt Louisa’s pot roast. Fortunately, it didn’t look as if she was armed, and she seemed no warier of Renee’s presence than her husband had been.

Then Eddie introduced their daughter, Melanie, who held Brenda’s hand and blinked shyly up at Renee. She was a girl of about five with sea-green eyes and dainty blond hair, who seemed as fragile as dandelion fuzz. Renee glanced at Brenda, then back to the child. She’d never seen such a clear-cut case of a stork screwing up a delivery in her entire life.

After introductions all around, Brenda put a hand on her hip, sizing up Renee. “So you’re John’s girlfriend, huh?”

“Uh...yeah.”

She turned to John. “You’re getting closer. This one actually admits it.”

John gave her a deadpan stare. “There’s beer in the kitchen, Brenda. No bottle opener, though. Just gnaw through the cap with your teeth.”

Brenda’s mouth quirked in an almost-smile. “Like that’d be a challenge?”

Brenda strode into the kitchen, taking the angel child with her, and Eddie followed close behind. Renee turned to gauge John’s reaction to Brenda’s smart-mouthed retort to his sarcastic remark, but he’d already turned his gaze out his front door again, where Grandma was toddling up the sidewalk clutching a pie plate. John stepped out onto the porch, took the pie from her, then offered his other hand to help her up the steps.

Rosy-cheeked and bespectacled, Grandma wore a dainty rose-print dress and radiated the sweet-faced look of a television grandmother from the 1950s. Renee felt instant relief. She could probably spend her time listening to stories about Black Sunday and the stock-market crash and how they just didn’t make presidents like Herbert Hoover anymore, and in doing so she could avoid talking to the rest of the family.

Then Grandma saw Renee and stopped short, that sweet-faced expression falling into a wary frown.

“I don’t know you.”

“No, Grandma, you don’t,” John said. “This is Alice.”

“Alice? I had a cat once named Alice. Got a skin disease and all her hair fell out.”

“That’s terrible!” Renee said.

“Nah. Kept her from gagging up hairballs.”

Grandma took the pie from John, then toddled through the living room and into the kitchen.
Well.
So much for hiding behind a sweet old lady and her reminiscences.

“I think that’s our lineup for today,” John whispered to Renee. “Grandpa and Alex are on a fishing trip. We lucked out.” In other words, he was relieved that round one was over and they were both still standing.

Under John’s watchful eye, Renee ducked into the utility room and finally managed to zip up her jeans, cussing John the entire time. Now she knew what it was like to wear a girdle. A girdle so tight it numbed her crotch. When she sat down, she’d have to have faith in Levi Strauss that the whole back seam wouldn’t explode.

The family had gathered in the kitchen, presided over by Aunt Louisa, a woman as tall and upright as the Washington Monument. She wore slacks and a high-necked blouse with a cameo at the collar, her salt-and-pepper hair wound in a tight perm that clung to her head for dear life. She gave firm orders shrouded in sweetness to everyone present, instructing them to mix this or heat up that. Everyone, that is, except Renee, whom she told to sit at the breakfast room table and look pretty because she was a guest. But next time, Aunt Louisa said, she’d have to pull her weight like the rest of the family.

Renee quickly discovered that being in the midst of John’s family was like sitting on the tarmac at Dallas/Fort Worth airport—an incredible amount of activity, and a noise level that approached the supersonic range. It was hard to think of them as cops and all that other stuff. They just seemed like people. Nice people. But every time she’d start to relax a little as she listened to their conversation, John would shoot her one of his furtive hard-core cop looks and she’d remember the real reason she was here.

A few minutes later they went into the dining room to eat. John pulled out her chair for her in a most courteous manner, though courtesy had little to do with it. Renee knew he was merely directing her to sit right next to him, where he could keep an eye on her.

“So, Alice,” Aunt Louisa said, passing the mashed potatoes. “Tell us what you do for a living.”

She’d already told Sandy the truth, or at least what the truth had been before she’d gotten accused of armed robbery, so she had to go with that. “I’m an assistant restaurant manager.”

“Oh! How nice! Which restaurant?”

“Renaissance.”

Everyone stared at her blankly.

“It’s down in the Rosewood Village area.”

“Oooh!” Sandy said. “That little Italian place! I hear that’s a really nice restaurant. Expensive, too. I saw four little dollar signs beside its review in the paper.”

“Hey, John,” Brenda said. “You lucked out. You can take Alice someplace nice and get an employee discount at the same time. It’s almost like having a coupon.”

“Gee, I hadn’t thought of that,” John said. “Would you like to come along? No, wait—it’s not your kind of place. They don’t let you shoot your own dinner.”

Brenda turned to Sandy. “And you said it was a high-class establishment.”

“I hear they recycle the food at restaurants,” Grandma mumbled. “If you don’t eat it, they take it back into the kitchen and make stew out of it.”

“Mother!” Aunt Louisa said. “Of course they don’t do things like that! Do they, Alice?”

Well, at a place she’d once worked, she’d seen a waiter drop a steak in the kitchen, then scoop it off the floor, wipe it on his pants, and return it to the plate without missing a beat, but she didn’t think that was what Grandma wanted to hear.

“No,” Renee said. “Of course not.”

“And if you piss off the waiters,” Grandma said, “they spit in your food.”

“Mother! Please! We’re eating.”

Grandma shrugged indifferently, then poked around at her mashed potatoes as if she expected to see rat droppings.

“So tell us how you two met,” Aunt Louisa said.

Renee looked at John. He cleared his throat. “We met at a diner. She came up to me and...introduced herself.”

“I like that,” Brenda said, whacking her knife through a piece of pot roast. “A woman with balls.”

Aunt Louisa patted Renee’s hand. “She means that as a compliment, dear.”

“Well, he’s lucky Alice approached him,” Sandy said, “because she’d have probably grown old and gray and died before he’d have bothered to approach her.”

Everyone at the table nodded in assent, as if this were a generally known fact, as if John weren’t even present. And John was clearly trying to ignore all of it.

Aunt Louisa turned to Brenda. “So how is Melanie doing in school this year?”

“She’s brilliant, of course,” Brenda said.

“And her ballet classes?”

“You mean her tae kwon do classes,” Eddie muttered.

Aunt Louisa raised her eyebrows. “Tae kwon do?”

“It’s one of those kung fu things,” Grandma said.

“We decided martial arts would be better for her,” Brenda explained. “Girls need to learn how to defend themselves.”

“We decided that?” Eddie said.

Brenda rolled her eyes. “Learning to dance on your tiptoes is hardly one of life’s greatest accomplishments.”

“You know, you could try to compromise once in a while.”

“Hey! I compromised! I got her a Barbie!”

“Yeah. Military Barbie.”

“I said it was a compromise, didn’t I?”

“You could think about having a tea party with her once in a while instead of playing Hostage and Negotiator.”

“And maybe get her a kitten instead of a Rottweiler,” Sandy added.

“And take her to the zoo instead of the shooting range,” Aunt Louisa chimed in.

Grandma sniffed. “Kid’s gonna turn lesbian, if you ask me.”

“Oh, all
right
!” Brenda fumed silently for a moment, then turned to Renee. “What do you think, Alice? This is a new century, right? Isn’t it time we redefined women’s roles once and for all?”

Renee froze. This was definitely one of those “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” situations.

“I think,” she said carefully, “that Melanie is a very lucky little girl to have so many people who care so much about her.”

Silence fell over the table.

“Wow,” Sandy said. “Good answer.”

In unison, everybody, including Brenda, nodded and resumed eating.

Renee couldn’t quite believe what was happening here. Where she grew up, this kind of dinner-table dissension would have plunged her and her mother into the depths of animosity for a solid week. Silence. That was what she’d usually experienced during those rare times when her mother actually made dinner. It got to where she preferred the silence, though, because any conversation usually wound up centering on whatever she’d done that day to displease her mother, and if her mother couldn’t come up with anything new, she’d reach back a week or two and haul out something old. Then she’d have another drink and the screaming would start, and Renee would end up leaving the house, slamming the door behind her, and not coming home for days.

But something was different here. These people tossed insults at each other right and left, but the words seemed to be forgotten as quickly as they were said, almost as if they weren’t designed to hurt in the first place.

Renee wasn’t sure exactly what all that meant, except that nobody seemed to hold on to anger, and everyone was eating as if their appetites hadn’t been the least bit affected. Even Melanie seemed totally unaffected by the conversation, her attention turned instead to the task of getting approximately half a stick of butter to adhere to her dinner roll.

And nobody was leaving, slamming doors behind them.

“Well, Alice,” Brenda said, “I gotta say you’re a cut above the last woman John brought to Sunday lunch. What was her name? Debbie? Gawd, what a brainless little twit she was.”

Everyone nodded again. John closed his eyes with a weary sigh.

“She didn’t hang around long, did she?” Dave said.

Sandy made a scoffing noise. “She didn’t even last through dessert.”

“Of course she didn’t!” John said, suddenly coming alive. “Not with Brenda telling her that if she wore just a little more mascara, she could be a televangelist!”

Brenda shrugged. “Can I help it if she looked like Tammy Faye Bakker?”

“Her skirt was too tight,” Grandma said. “I could see her butt cheeks.”

Sandy smiled. “The best part was when Dave started messing with her mind.”

“I don’t recall her having much of a mind to mess with,” Dave said.

Sandy turned to Renee. “Dave asked her if she had any idea why ‘abbreviation’ was such a long word. Poor woman stopped to think about it and never started again.”

“So tell me, Alice,” Dave said nonchalantly. “What do you suppose would happen if you got scared half to death twice?”

Renee shrugged. “Got me. I’m still trying to figure out why we drive on a parkway and park on a driveway.”

Dave stabbed a green bean. “Okay. She’s got my vote.”

“Mine, too,” Brenda said.

“She already had mine,” Sandy added.

John flung his fork down with a clatter. “Well, then. Why don’t we just go ahead and make it unanimous?”

“Nope,” Grandma said. “I’m still not too sure about the spittin’-in-the-food thing.”

“Will all of you cut it out? Whatever relationship Alice and I have is between her and me. Period!”

“Of course, dear,” Aunt Louisa told John, then leaned toward Renee and whispered, “He’s usually not this cranky. I think he’s still upset about the reprimand.”