The Rock Star's Daughter (20 page)

It took a few moments for this to register
for me. My mother's parents? I had written them the postcard back
in Huntsville, but after waving goodbye to them at my mother's
wake, I never thought I'd see them again.

"Really? This evening?" I asked. It was
already nearly evening. I wasn't going to have time to mentally
prepare. These were the people who had raised my mother, and it was
fair to presume that they would be studying me, judging the success
of their daughter as a mother by my behavior.

Even though Jill told me I didn't have to go
if I didn't want to, I agreed to meet them. They were picking me up
at the hotel at seven and I imagined they would take me to some
old-fashioned restaurant. I dressed in an outfit that I hoped would
be acceptable to them; I didn't have many dressy options with me,
so I wore a white sundress and sandals.

"Where are you going?" Kelsey asked as she
watched me brush my hair in the mirror over our hotel bureau.

"Out to dinner with my grandparents," I told
her.

"Can I come?" she asked hopefully.

I told her she couldn't because she would be
bored, and experienced the odd sensation of wishing I could spend
the evening at the hotel with her and Jill instead of having dinner
with strange old people.

At five to seven, my father called Jill on
her cell from the lobby of the hotel to let her know that my
grandparents had arrived.

"Have a good time," Jill encouraged me on my
way out the door of the hotel suite. "Remember, they love you."

I rolled my eyes as I pushed the button to
summon the elevator. My mind was racing with possible conversation
topics I would want to have handy once I was alone with my
grandparents as I stepped onto the elevator.

And that's why I was utterly taken by
surprise to find myself looking directly at Jake.

"Oh my god!" I exclaimed, so shocked to see
him.

We couldn't have done a better job of
planning a moment alone together if we had tried. Jake said
nothing, just pressed me against the wall of the elevator and
kissed me hungrily. There was no time for questions or niceties, we
only had about ten seconds to make out wildly as the elevator
descended eight floors. It was thrilling to taste his salty mouth
again, to feel his firm biceps beneath my fingertips. I ran my
hands through his sun bleached hair, and couldn't believe that it
was actually him, there, with me.

Neither of us had the bright idea to pull the
emergency brake on the elevator to prolong our time together.

Jake pulled away and breathlessly said, "God,
I missed you."

"I missed you, too," I said, pulling my hair
back from my face and straightening my skirt just as the elevator
doors opened.

My dad, who was standing all the way on the
opposite side of the luxurious lobby, noticed us instantly. Luckily
we had taken a few steps away from each other before the elevator
doors parted, and to anyone other than my father, we looked like
complete strangers. But my dad raised an eyebrow in our direction,
causing both of my grandparents to follow his gaze.

"Detroit?" Jake said quietly as I stepped off
the elevator.

"Yes," I assured him.

My head was spinning and heart was beating so
fast as I crossed the lobby toward my grandparents, clutching my
blue Coach bag tightly to my side, that I didn't listen to a word
my father said as he reintroduced us.

"Bye, Dad, see you later," I said, following
my grandparents out of the hotel's front doors. I was distracted
completely by the desperate hope that I'd catch a glimpse of Jake
in the parking lot before I got into my grandfather's Lincoln Town
Car. But I hadn't noticed which way he'd gone after he stepped off
the elevator, and I didn't see the gold Saturn anywhere in the
parking lot.

"So are you enjoying your summer, Taylor?" my
grandmother asked from the front seat, where she kept fidgeting
with the air conditioning vent in the dashboard.

She looked quite a bit like my mother, the
same wide-set blue eyes, cupid nose that turned up at the end. My
mother had gotten her height from her father. Grandpa Bill was over
six feet tall; he towered a good foot over Grandma Marjorie when
they stood next to one another. Now that I was a little more
coherent than I had been at the wake, I observed that they really
weren't that old at all. Allison's mom had already turned forty,
and I guessed that my grandparents weren't too much older than
her.

"I guess," I said, still so jostled by what
had happened in the elevator that I wasn't entirely mentally
present in the back seat of the car. "It's been a lot to take in,
you know? A lot of changes to get used to."

"Your father said you were in Chicago a few
days ago. That must have been exciting. Your mother wanted to go to
college there, to Northwestern," Grandpa Bill told me.

"That's weird," I said. "She told me she
didn't want to go to college."

"Oh, she was accepted," Grandma Marjorie
said. "But she deferred her admission for a year because she wanted
to go to L.A. and start a rock band. I guess the rest is
history."

These were two strange revelations; not only
had my mother once considered going to college, but she had also
wanted to start a band. No wonder she always pushed me to try to
learn how to play guitar. Why had she gone so far out of her way to
make me think that she had always been an airhead? My gut hunch was
that she was maybe ashamed of how her life had ended up, and it was
less shameful to pretend she never had any greater ambitions in the
first place.

"She was accepted? She told me she was never
really any good at school," I said.

"Your mother was one smart cookie," Grandpa
Bill corrected me, merging into the left lane on the highway. "She
was a good student until her senior year of high school, when she
got it into her head that she wanted to get a record deal."

Had I been paying attention back at the hotel
when my father was talking to me in the lobby, I wouldn't have been
so surprised when my grandparents drove through a residential
neighborhood and pulled into the driveway of their home instead of
into the parking lot of a restaurant.

"Here we are, home sweet home," Grandma
Marjorie announced, unbuckling her seatbelt.

"This is the house where your mom grew up,"
Grandpa Bill told me. "We thought you might like to see it."

The house was a square two-story brick home
with white shutters. A plaster lawn gnome cackled near the cement
staircase leading up to the front door. Carefully pruned bushes
lined the base of the house.

"We had always hoped Dawn would bring you for
a visit, but the timing just never worked out," Grandma Marjorie
told me wistfully as we waited for the garage door to lift.

The inside of the house was as suburban as
could be. An overstuffed plaid sectional couch took up most of the
living room, facing a large-screen television. A hand-knitted quilt
was thrown over the back of the sofa, and a small brown Dachshund
snoozing on the Ottoman looked up to address us.

"That's Dottie," Grandma Marjorie said. "You
can go ahead and say hi, she doesn't bite."

Dottie sniffed my palm for a second and then
decided she was not interested in me and went back to sleep. I
stroked the top of her head anyway before following my grandparents
into the kitchen. The house smelled like savory meat – meatloaf
perhaps, and Grandma Marjorie turned the oven light on to check
dinner's progress.

"I hope you like pot roast," Grandpa Bill
told me.

A staircase led to the second floor, and it
was lined with framed photographs of my mother over the course of
her life. I began climbing the stairs, taking in the pictures of my
mother as a gap-toothed first grader with braids, a sixth grader
with feathered hair, an eighth grader with a retainer. There was a
photograph of her in full stage makeup beneath the stage lights in
what looked like a high school production of a musical.

"White Christmas," my grandfather informed
me. "Your mother had the Rosemary Clooney role right here at our
town high school. She had a beautiful voice."

I couldn't disagree; she had certainly gotten
enough backup singing jobs for commercials over the years to
support the claim that she had a great voice.

"Come on upstairs. I'll show you her room
while your grandmother finishes dinner."

"Don't call me that," Grandma Marjorie called
after us. "I don't feel old enough to be anyone's grandma!"

At the top of the stairs, a door was open to
a bedroom covered in old rock posters. A white canopy bed stood in
the center of the room as an oddball in the rest of the room's
décor. Three thick wooden shelves hung on the wall, each covered in
trophies for track and field. Pictures of my mother, when she was a
teenager with her hair sprayed high, hung on a corkboard over a
white lacquered antique desk.

I thought, as I stepped into the room, that
perhaps I'd sense my mother's presence in this room. It was
unbelievable to think that she had slept right there, in that bed,
when she was my age, no doubt dreaming up the very escape to Los
Angeles that had led to my own birth. I had always imagined,
largely from what she had told me, that my mom was kind of a dead
beat in high school. Maybe kind of a slut. A girl who was far too
interested in her own torn jeans and eye makeup to pay attention in
class or do homework. So it was a little odd to find that wasn't
actually true. She had been on the track team. She had starred in
plays.

"Look at this," Grandpa Bill pointed to a
framed certificate on the wall. "Your mother won first place at the
Minnesota State Junior Engineering League for drafting."

My jaw dropped. "I didn't know she knew
anything about drafting."

"She didn't," my grandfather laughed. "She
really wanted to be on the team so that she could spend the
competition weekend at a fancy hotel in Minneapolis. They needed
someone on the team who could take the test for drafting and she
studied all of the tests from the previous ten years. Memorized all
the answers. She could do anything she put her mind to."

I sat down lightly on her bed, and looked
around. I picked up a ratty-eared stuffed dog that was missing an
eye. There were bottles of perfume still on the desk whose contents
had evaporated years ago, but there they remained; Love's Baby
Soft, Calvin Klein's Eternity. I wanted very badly to feel my mom's
spirit in this place, but I just felt like I was in a weird
carpeted museum.

"Your grandmother wants to renovate this room
now and make it more of a guest room. She's got this crazy idea in
her head that she wants to have a foreign exchange student from
Africa come stay with us," my grandfather told me. "All these years
of us waiting for Dawn to come home… she thinks it's time for us to
move on."

My heart ached a little for them. I knew how
careless my mother could be about other people's feelings when she
was hell-bent on doing something. I imagined her at the age of
eighteen packing her bags for Los Angeles and promising to be back
to visit at Christmas time. And then Christmas coming and going and
her making flimsy excuses, constant assurances that she'd visit
soon, and then suddenly seventeen years had passed and she had
never once been back to Minnesota.

"I think that's a great idea," I said.
"Inviting a student from Africa to stay with you? You'd be offering
them a once-in-a-lifetime chance to see the United States."

"Ah, well, I don't know," my grandfather
replied. "But I am glad you got to see Dawn's room before Marjorie
redecorates. She's got red paint picked out. Shanghai Rouge, it's
called."

My grandmother served a pot roast with
carrots and potatoes, and I lovingly recalled my mother complaining
to me once that pot roast was the only real dinner her own mother
ever made. I was grateful for the home-cooked meal. It was
certainly more effort than my mom ever put into one of her
microwave dinner specialties.

"So have you been to many cities this
summer?" Grandma Marjorie asked me.

"Sure. Virginia Beach, Atlanta, Chicago," I
rattled off the list. "I don't actually get to see much of the
city, though. There's a lot of work that goes into each of my dad's
shows."

My grandparents exchanged loaded glances.

"We were a little worried that life on the
road was going to be a bit much for you after what you went through
in June," Grandma Marjorie said. "We thought it might be in your
best interest to come and spend a quiet summer here with us."

No one had told me that my grandparents had
offered for me to come and stay with them. Sure, in the aftermath
of my mother's death I was opposed to the general idea, but it made
a difference knowing that they had actually wanted me.

"Oh," I said, feeling dumb, "no one told me
that."

"Well, your dad really wanted to spend some
time with you," Grandpa Bill told me. "We had a difficult time even
getting through to him to find out about the wake and funeral, what
with all the lawyers and managers and agents we had to talk to just
to track him down. By the time we were able to get him on the
phone, he had already secured custody, and that was that."

I was a little embarrassed by this. Now that
I was part of my dad's traveling entourage, it had never occurred
to me how hard it must be for someone on the outside to even place
a phone call to one of us without knowing our cell phone
numbers.

"I have to say, I am a little concerned about
the example that's being set for you," Grandma Marjorie told me.
"I'm sure you see the gossip magazines, too. I am not convinced
that living with a rock band is the best scenario for a young girl
such as yourself."

Now I cringed. My face turned beet red and I
dared not look anywhere other than directly into my plate. The
structure of my grandparents' relationship had been revealed; my
grandfather was the peacemaker, my grandmother was the fire
starter. My mother must have grown up in the middle of their polar
dynamic.