A Girl's Best Friend (7 page)

My first thought is to flee. To run back to my dad’s and ask Mrs. Henry to make me something to eat. But one look at Lilly and I think about all she’s accomplished with so little, and I just can’t let her down. She has hired homeless women, taught them to sew, and rented out an empty warehouse in the fashion district and become a part of that neighborhood with her business. All in two months time and with very little start-up money. I, on the other hand, bought three new pairs of shoes last week that would pay the women’s salaries for a month. I’m not proud of it, but there it is in all its ugly glory.

This—living with Lilly—is like moving to Kenya for me. A completely different culture, and just as foreign.

“Let’s go,” I say.

“Let’s.” Lilly grabs a can of Lysol and stuffs it in my oversized canvas—yes, canvas—bag. Gone is my pebbled leather and carefully-stitched Hogan in favor of a black canvas bag that reads, “Got Milk?”

“What are you doing?” I pull out the can of antiseptic.

“The bus driver won’t let me bring Lysol on the bus. He knows me.”

“There’s a reason for that. Do you think I’m going to smuggle contraband on the bus? It’s my first ride. Like I need any more humiliation. Getting kicked off Muni would be the final straw, don’t you think?”

Lilly purses her lips and grabs it out of my hands. “Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

I’ll admit it: ten minutes later I figure out that we should have taken the Lysol. What can I say? Did I know that part of humanity doesn’t
believe in antiperspirant? There seems to be a rather large contingency of them who ride the bus.

Wait, maybe that could be my ministry and life’s purpose! Buying Right Guard for the underworld! Lilly tells me sometimes it’s cultural, but I have yet to meet the culture who wants to stink. Although, maybe they have a point—they got the seat to themselves on the bus. Lilly and I are crammed onto one seat, hugging my “Got Milk?” bag and dreaming of Lysol. Lilly’s fetish is starting to make sense to me, and that’s just frightening. I can see myself getting older, crocheting rhinestone Lysol cozies and inviting people into my home with the plastic-wrapped sofas and fruit-shaped refrigerator magnets.

The bus spits us up outside the church like Jonah landing on Nineveh’s shores, its doors closing before I’m officially out, giving new meaning to the phrase, “Don’t let the door hit you on the way out.” Once inside, I see that Lilly’s singles group consists mostly of men over forty losing their hair and their waistlines. I wouldn’t have noticed, except they look exactly like the men my father has been trying to set me up with for years. The only difference is that my father’s men can afford better hair plugs and they’ve all been married two or three times.

Lilly loves bald men, and it’s like a convention in here. I can’t believe she didn’t find the man for her in this bunch. I have a theory that the men of San Francisco work so hard they lose their hair early, and clearly there are a few workaholics here. Of course, Lilly herself was a workaholic and often didn’t make time for her singles group. Which may be how she missed all these candidates and ended up with Max.

(I have to wonder, though, why hair is such a big deal to guys. They obsess over it like we obsess over our bust size. And really, women don’t care about a guy’s hair. I look at the eyes. I look at the hands. But the head? Not so much.)

“Hi, Lilly. Who’s your friend?” A young man with a full crop of hair approaches us and takes my hand gently. It’s very chivalrous.

“This is my friend Morgan. Morgan, this is Steve Bandy. He’s a dentist.”

I pull my hand away. “Nice to meet you.” I smile pretty and show him the investment my father has made in my mouth, but I’m sidetracked by all the new surroundings. The walls are hospital green, and there are music and movie posters taped to the wall. “Is this the teen room, Lilly?” It looks exactly like where I once played broom ball.

She just shakes her head; apparently, it’s my clue to shut up. As I walk around the room, everyone smiles at me, and I gleam back, wanting to explain the cowboy boots, but knowing it’s part of the deal.
I’m finding myself!
I want to shout.
I’m
somewhere under these ghastly clothes.

In the corner, there’s a man playing the guitar, and he just arrests my attention. My mind immediately shifts to Andy and all I’ve done wrong and just how many conscience warnings in my head I ignored. The guilt is overwhelming. The room starts to feel claustrophobic and stifling. I’m reaching for the wall to steady myself when the guitar player looks up and there’s something in his eyes that pulls me towards him. I’m almost there when I feel something stop me.

“Where are you going, Morgan?” It’s Lilly. She is pulling on my shirt.

“I was just listening to the music.”

“He’s tuning his guitar.” She looks at me strangely.

“Is he really?” I ask the question, and truthfully, I don’t know the answer because I’m mesmerized by this man. He just seems to look right through me. “Who is that?” I ask. “Playing the guitar, who is that?”

“His name is Kyle Keller. I don’t really know him too well, but he’s the part-time music pastor.” Lilly pulls me aside and introduces me to someone else, but I don’t hear what she’s saying. There’s something about that man playing the guitar. I just feel like he’s sitting there, waiting for me to come over, and I can’t get to him. It’s not really an attraction thing, just intrigue, like he has something to say to me and I must hear it.

The singles pastor, a man of about forty, sits beside someone I can only assume is his wife, as she struggles to keep two toddler boys looking like good little church children rather than the obvious terrors they hope to be. My money is on the boys. The mother, a young woman with a pretty face and thin, muscular arms wrestles the boys in place without missing a beat, and the pastor begins speaking. Everyone files into place, and the pastor opens up with a “pre-message” that, I have to admit, I don’t hear a word of. The pastor introduces worship and we listen to Kyle play solo while the words pop up on a blue screen behind him.

After worship, we break into small prayer groups and “share.” This has been bred out of me, so I don’t say a thing, but I listen and nod with my most compassionate smile as everyone talks about the horrors of work and increasing rent. My eyes follow the guitar player as he gets up and leaves.

No one knows who I am here. That is both freeing and utterly frightening, because no one really cares either.

“So, Morgan, if you don’t have a job, maybe we could pray for your job search,” Steve Bandy, the dentist dandy, says.

“Yes!” I point at him. “That would be a good idea. Pray I’ll get a job.”

And a life.

And an image.

Please!

chapter 7

A
fter a solid night’s sleep, I wake up to the roar of traffic on Highway 101 and my mother’s picture on the front page of the
Chronicle
. Lilly must have left it for me. My heart plunges when I see the familiar glamour shot and my mother’s poised elegance. How on earth she managed to have just the right pose every time there was a camera near remains a mystery. She was like a bat, hearing the high-pitched sonar squeal of the photographer and turning with extreme precision towards it with a gracious smile.

I open the paper to the article in which she’s mentioned, and there again is the picture of me in Andy’s arms. The headline reads, “Like Mother, Like Daughter.” I crumple the paper and don’t bother to read whatever tripe they’ve dredged up today. I ran off with a loser, big deal. As if I’m the first. Where is Britney Spears when I need her?

But my mother’s photo does give me pause. When my mother, Traci Malliard, is spoken of in public, both my father and I don a sorrowful, reverent look that would make even the most callous of journalists cower in sympathy for our shared pain over her untimely loss. There are, of course, the persistent rumors, but we never speak of them. We stand shoulder to shoulder and protect her memory as if she was Mother Mary herself. When in fact she had far more in common with Joan Crawford—more than the fact they were both actresses and liked fire-engine red lipstick.

Life with my mother, when she was alive, was a persistent nightmare. My father escaped to his work, acquiring more and more real estate deeds and business deals to make himself feel like a man and escape her wrath. But whatever he owned, she wasn’t impressed with, and so at night he would come home to hear her estimation of his worthlessness.

In contrast, or perhaps because of her snappishness, I thought my daddy hung the moon. I would hear my mother shriek at him behind slammed doors, and his eerie silence, ignoring her as though she was a mere gnat in his great forest. My mother was the great enigma to me. The woman behind the closed doors. She was truly a beauty—her nose is still a favorite of the plastic surgery set—but as far as warmth? She made Mrs. Henry seem like a cozy log cabin. At least from what I remember. I remember being frightened of her and avoiding her at all costs.

Still, my father cared for her physically until the bitter end, keeping Mrs. Henry around to nurse her through her horrible fight with ovarian cancer. My mother’s once-glowing skin became ashen gray and her voluptuous figure withered away to a mere skeletal remnant. I don’t know what her faith was when she passed, but I am ever-hopeful. Yet sadly realistic.

Speaking of realistic. I look around to the concrete walls in Lilly’s apartment—the dusty windows twenty feet off the ground, the lack of art—and I laugh nervously. The dysfunction here is no different than in my own beautiful surroundings at home. We are broken people, regardless of station or environment, and my need for Christ becomes ever more apparent, like the one ray of light shining from the west bank of windows.

As I sit here on Lilly’s futon and open my Bible, I am ready to delve into my history and leave it behind.

Doorbell.

Right after I get the door.

I get up and open it to see my father in his double-breasted suit, his countenance missing its usual bluster, and it’s like a sign from above. As I let him in, I kick the balled-up newspaper under the futon.

“I’ll get my things,” I tell him.

He shakes his head. “I’m not here to get you.”

But he looks parched, his color wan. I can’t see him like this without remembering how my mother treated him, and I worry that I am exactly like her. He doesn’t have the paper in his hand, and I wonder if he’s seen today’s dirt. (And where are the journalists when there’s a real story? Like that I wore rhinestone cowboy boots to a social function? Now that is scandalous.)

“You’re not here to get me?”

“Do you want me to be?”

I think about this for a minute. “No, actually, I’m job hunting today.”

I wonder for a moment if he notices my clothes, how they lack the proper fit and the labels he’s grown to recognize as my favorites, but he seems to be involved in his own thoughts and pays my appearance little mind.

“Good for you, sweetheart. I hope you find a good one. Don’t let them pay you anything less than what you’re worth.”

Which, as an unemployed, unskilled laborer, I have to wonder is what, exactly?

“If you’re not here to take me home, why are you here?”

“I’ve met a woman.”

Lord have mercy.

“You’ve met a woman?” I’m fearful. Granted, I only know my father’s love life to exist in my mother, but let’s just say his track record rivals my own. Maybe it’s a curse. I take some comfort in the idea that maybe my future is mapped out and I’m merely a victim of my genes.

He looks me straight in the eye. “I didn’t think I’d ever consider marriage again, Morgan. But I am. I think I can trust her.”

“Trust her as in you could buy a car from her? Or as in she wouldn’t steal from the store if left there alone.”

“Trust her as in I could avoid a prenup.”

“But you won’t, of course.”

“True. One can never be too careful.”

“Where did you meet her?”

“At the club.”

The thought of what he has in store for me as a stepmother sort of frightens me. Will she be twenty-four? Married fourteen times? Have a little trouble with the bottle? What could it be? The fact that I haven’t met her is hardly a mystery. Daddy usually doesn’t take women seriously enough to share them with the world. His idea of good publicity is to have a new woman on his arm at each event and keep the media guessing.

My question is aimed at her. How in the world does she need him enough that he feels it’s necessary to tie the knot? And where exactly does this leave me, his codependent partner in life?

“Daddy, why would you want to get married? I thought you and I had discovered we’re free spirits.” Translation: warped human beings who cannot function in the world of relationship.

“Morgan, I’ve finally realized that you’re becoming your own woman. It’s time for me to start having my life now. I’ve raised you and you’re ready to fly.”

I know this moment generally comes a bit before a kid turns twenty-nine, but I’m a slow learner.

“Daddy, what about Andy?” I ask, wondering if he’ll see I’m not as ready for flight as he might imagine.

“I never expected you to do things perfectly. Granted, I didn’t expect you to do things with quite so much lack of perfection.” He rolls his eyes at this. “You’ve had your Andy; you didn’t marry him at least.” He pauses and claps his hands. “I did marry your mother.”

Daddy, I blew it too. “So when will I meet her?”

“That’s why I’m here.” My father checks his watch. “I need you to meet us for dinner on Saturday night at the club. I’m going to be making my announcement public and I want you there to celebrate. Maybe the leeches can print something good for a change, no?”

“Can’t I meet her beforehand?” I want to be prepared if she has a bad facelift or a puffy pink nose from an enlarged liver and too much alcohol.

“Morgan, your grammar, and you must stop questioning my decisions.” He looks at his expensive shoes, and his expression shifts. “You’re just like your mother sometimes. I don’t need you second-guessing my decisions. Do you understand?”