Father Of The Brat (8 page)

“She’s said more tonight with you here than she’s said to me in the entire week she’s been living with me. Why is that, do you think?”

Maddy studied him in a way that let him know she had no clear answers. “Maybe because she finds this situation as awkward as you do.”

This time Carver was the one to shake his head. “Or maybe it’s because she hates my guts.”

“I think you’re wrong about that.”

“And I think I’m right.”

Once again, they were at odds, Carver thought. Why was it always like that with Maddy? Why couldn’t she, just once, try to see things from his point of view? Why did she always have to disagree with him?

“What happens if things don’t work out between me and Rachel?” he asked. It was a question that had been dogging him for days, one he wasn’t sure he wanted answered.

“Things will work out with you and Rachel,” Maddy told him. “They have to.”

“But what if they don’t?”

Her expression was one of quietly masked outrage. Carver felt certain that if he moved too quickly, Maddy would deck him one right in the kisser. “If you’re asking if you can send her back, Carver, the answer is no.”

“That’s not what I’m asking.”

She released her breath slowly. “Then what?”

“Just…” He ran two big hands through his hair and sighed. “What if she and I never come to terms with this thing? What if she never warms up to me or accepts me as her father? What if the two of us are doomed to spar like this for the rest of our lives? What then?”

“I wish I could tell you those things will never happen,” she said as he felt himself deflate a little.

She must have picked up on his anguish, because she reached across the table and covered his hand with hers, much as she had done a few mornings before. On that occasion, her hand had been cool and hesitant, in no way reassuring. This time, however, Maddy’s hand was warm and soft and comforting. She curled her fingers through his and squeezed hard.

“I can’t promise that you and Rachel will have a rosy future where nothing ever goes wrong. But I can tell you that it’s been my experience that a lot of situations, given time, do turn out for the better. Not all situations, mind you, but some. And not always perfect, but better. You and Rachel have started off in a situation with infinitely more potential than most of the ones I see. It seems very unlikely to me that the two of you won’t work through this eventually and have an acceptable life together.”

The words she spoke were so unlike the ones he would normally associate with Maddy. Twenty years ago, she would have chirped at him the most banal clichés about rainbows and silver linings and lemonade. Maddy Saunders would have promised Carver in no uncertain terms that good would win out and everything would be peaches. Maddy Garrett, however, would evidently choke on such reassurances.

He tightened his fingers around hers and met her gaze levelly with his. “You’d better be careful, Maddy,” he told her. “People might think you prefer to see the good in a situation.”

She almost smiled at him. Almost. Then she dropped her gaze to the table, to their two hands so intimately entwined.
“No, that’s not likely to be a mistake anyone makes nowadays. Not anyone who knows me, anyway.”

She tried to tug her fingers free of his, but Carver only tightened his hold. “I know you.”

She continued to avoid his eyes as she said, “No, you don’t. You knew Maddy Saunders, a different person entirely.”

Once again, she tried to pull her hand from his grasp. And once again, Carver strengthened his hold on her. “So what happened to Maddy Saunders that made her disappear?”

For a moment, he didn’t think she was going to answer. She simply sat perfectly still, staring at their hands in complete silence. Then she lifted her gaze to meet his again. Behind her glasses, Carver could see that Maddy’s eyes were dark and distressed and very, very serious.

“She didn’t disappear,” she said softly. “She died.”

“How?” he asked quietly.

Maddy’s voice, too, was soft when she replied. “Reality. Reality came up and kicked her right in the teeth. She fought it off for a while, but eventually, it got her, anyway—beat the life right out of her. She was just a stupid kid, after all. She never really stood a chance.”

With one final yank, Maddy managed to free her fingers from Carver’s manacle grip. Immediately, she entwined them with her other hand and held tight. He got the impression she did so to keep herself from reaching out to him again, but where such a bizarre idea came from, he had no idea.

“Maddy, I-”

“I’ll help you with the dishes,” she interrupted him. “Thanks for dinner. I never would have guessed you’d turn out to be a more than passable cook.”

It didn’t take a psychic to see that Maddy wanted to change the subject. So Carver let her. For now. But he wasn’t about to be fooled by her. She might claim that Maddy Saunders had gone to wear those big rose-colored glasses in the sky, but he still detected a little of her behind Maddy Garrett’s round, tortoiseshell frames. True, she
wasn’t the girl he’d known her to be twenty years ago. Then again, who didn’t change a great deal over two decades? Even he didn’t embrace the same philosophies that had carried him through college and into adulthood. Why should he expect that Maddy would be the same?

Because, dammit, the answer came to him almost immediately. He watched her collect her dishes and carry them to the sink. Because she was supposed to have been the one to change the world. Not him. Her. Instead, she had succumbed to it. Just as everyone else had. Just as he had himself. His realization that she was no longer anxious, nor even willing, to wield the sword of optimistic hope didn’t sit well with him. He missed the cheerful, nauseating girl he’d loved to provoke so many years ago. He wanted Maddy Saunders to come back to him.

“You’re going to have to take it upon yourself to make sure she does that.”

Carver’s head snapped up at the sound of Maddy’s voice, only to realize she had been speaking for some time and he’d heard not a word of what she’d said.

“What?”

She poured two cups of coffee and rejoined him at the table. “Rachel,” she clarified. “You’re going to have to take it upon yourself to make sure she feels welcome here. As far as she’s concerned right now, you think of her as an intruder, an interloper. You’re her host in a way, as well as being her father. You have to make sure she’s comfortable.”

Carver stubbed out the cigarette he’d barely smoked and sipped his coffee, too. “And how do you suggest I do that?” he asked.

“Spend as much time with her as you can. Take an interest in her. Talk to her. Listen to her. Show her that you care for her and respect her. Treat her like a human being.”

“Sounds easy enough.”

Maddy smiled before sipping her coffee. “Except for one thing,” she said as she settled her mug back on the table.

“Which is?”

“Rachel, you may have noticed, is an adolescent.”

“So?”

“So nothing, I repeat
nothing,
is ever easy about them. They go out of their way to make things as difficult and unreasonable as possible. For themselves and for everyone around them.”

Carver furrowed his brow, puzzled. “Why would they do something like that?”

Maddy smiled again. “It’s a hormonal thing.”

Carver smiled back. He wasn’t sure when the conversation had gone from analyzing Rachel’s behavior to investigating Maddy’s, but for some reason he was unable to stop himself when he said, “Oh. Sort of like what you’ve always had for me, right?”

Her gaze dropped immediately toward her coffee mug. “I do not now, nor have I ever had, a
thing,
hormonal or otherwise, for you.”

“Sure, Maddy. If you say so.”

She rose from the table and retreated to the sink, where she went about stacking and restacking the dirty dishes. Carver was up right after her, following until he stood behind her, his body nearly flush with hers. He had no explanation for his action. He only knew that Maddy suddenly attracted him more fiercely than a stray sock to a washing machine’s black hole.

“What are you doing?” she asked, spinning around to look at him.

Bad move, Carver thought. The only thing more intensely alluring than Maddy’s backside was Maddy’s front side. His gaze fell to her throat, to the long, delicate line of her neck, and her rapidly beating pulse. Her white shirt collar was open, and from his vantage point, he could glimpse just a teasing wisp of the champagne-colored lace that covered her breasts. As he continued to take full advantage of his position, her creamy skin began to grow rosy, and he knew that she was fully aware of how blatantly he was ogling her. But she did nothing to stop him. Which was good. Because Carver had no intention of stopping.

“Carver,” she said, her voice scarcely above a whisper. “What are you doing?”

He dropped one hand to her waist, the other to her hip. He started to lean in toward her, inhaling a vague, end-ofthe-day trace of her perfume that made him want to bury his head in her neck for a more thorough investigation. “Helping,” he replied softly. “Helping you. With the dishes.”

“Looks more like you’re helping yourself,” she retorted as she flattened her palms against his chest to halt his forward motion. “And to a lot more than the dishes.”

Carver allowed her to stop him, but only momentarily. Arming himself with his most disarming smile, he bent his head to hers again. “Oh, I don’t know, Maddy. I always thought you were a real dish.”

This time she pushed him away a little harder. “You always thought I was a real pain in the neck, remember?”

With one final shove, she managed to disengage their bodies once and for all. Carver stood with his hands in front of him, clutching air where only a moment ago he had felt the soft pressure of warm curves beneath his fingertips. Maddy was indeed too skinny, he thought as he had the day he’d seen her at the airport. But he had no doubt that she would still be a real handful.

“You’re blushing,” he said with a smile, reveling in the telltale patches of red that stained her cheeks.

She spun back around quickly and began to run hot water into the sink. “I am not,” she denied.

Carver came up behind her again, but this time he didn’t touch her. He only leaned over her shoulder and placed his cheek as close to hers as he dared. “Don’t worry,” he whispered. “I won’t tell anyone there’s still a final gasp of breath left in Maddy Saunders. I won’t even tell them that you’re the one who’s keeping her on life support. Your secret’s safe with me.”

Maddy didn’t respond to his charge in any way. She only submerged the dirty plates and glasses and silverware into the sink, rolled up her shirtsleeves, and plunged her hands
into the steaming water. Carver could only imagine how painful it must be to have damp heat like that surrounding a person’s hands. Then again, he reasoned, there was plenty of damp heat surrounding a certain body part of his own, too. And it was more than a little painful. But it was an oddly enjoyable kind of pain. The kind of pain a person didn’t mind very much, because a person knew easing it would be all the more satisfying.

“I’m going to find her, though,” he said further, dropping his voice even lower. “Maddy Saunders is still in there—I know she is. And if anyone can bring her back alive, it’s me. Just you wait, Maddy Garrett. You’ll see.”

Her only reply to his pledge was to pick up a dish towel and toss it over her shoulder at him. “Here, make yourself useful,” she told him.

“Oh, I will,” he assured her. “You’ll find full use for me before all this is through. I guarantee it.”

As he watched, the red stain in her cheeks grew darker, and Carver knew he’d never seen a more welcome sight. He was right—he knew he was. Contrary to Maddy Garrett’s assurances, Maddy Saunders was
not
dead. She was just…lost. Now all he had to do was locate her and help her find her way back again.

Unfortunately, that wasn’t going to be as easy as he might think. Because the woman in his kitchen—whoever she was—was doing her damnedest to steadfastly ignore him. She was also trying to pretend he hadn’t just had every intention of kissing her, something they both knew wasn’t true. And
he
was still trying to figure out that particular development himself.

Things between him and Maddy had never been easy, he reminded himself. And clearly, the two of them had left a lot unfinished when they parted ways at their graduation ceremony twenty years ago. He wasn’t sure which fate was responsible for throwing them back together again, and frankly, he didn’t care. For some reason, he was just glad to see her again. He would have thought that whatever had been between them back in high school was just some silly,
adolescent thing blown all out of proportion. Gradually, though, he was beginning to realize that wasn’t true at all. He only wished he could figure out what the devil was going on between them now.

And he wondered just how long Maddy would be around in his life this time for him to get things right.

T
he gymnasium of Strickler High School in Collingswood, New Jersey was quiet at four-thirty in the afternoon on a Monday, just as it had been when Carver had been a student there twenty years before. He stood in the doorway looking at the expansive room, marveling at how much smaller it seemed now than it had in his youth. He had taken P.E. classes in this gym for four years, had endured countless basketball practices and sweated through scores of basketball games. The gym had always felt comfortable to him. Nowadays, it seemed like an empty, lonely place.

Still smelled the same, though, he thought as he took a few ginger steps forward. Dust and sweat and custodial floor wax. Funny how certain aromas could bring back a wash of memories. The late afternoon sunlight sifting through the dingy windows near the ceiling slanted across the floor in fits, reflecting scuff marks and water stains and bits of stray lint dancing in the air like fairies.

He had no idea what had brought him to South Jersey this afternoon. Under the pretense of visiting his sister and
brother-in-law and their kids—who hadn’t even been home—Carver had wound up wandering the streets of his old neighborhood, recalling haunts and hideouts he’d nearly forgotten. Ultimately, he’d found himself turning into the parking lot of his old high school. And like a long lost friend, the gymnasium had beckoned to him.

It was the only place at Strickler High that had ever felt comfortable to him. Here, he’d been able to expend all that pent-up energy and unfocused adolescent outrage that had seemed to accompany him throughout his teens. Here, he’d been able to put thoughts on hold and worries out of mind. He recalled vaguely that he’d ended up in the gym after many of his bouts with Maddy Saunders, often shooting baskets until it was nearly dark.

He noted a bag of basketballs near the coach’s office on the other side of the room and made his way toward it. The cool, pebbled surface of the ball felt good beneath his fingertips. It had been a while since he’d last played. He shed his jacket and tossed it to the floor, then bounced the ball once…twice…three times. The next thing he knew he was dribbling down the floor, visualizing his layup. The ball swished through the basket easily, and Carver landed on steady feet. It was nice to know that some things, at least, never left you.

“Coach Johnson would skin you alive if he saw you out there in street shoes.”

He spun around to find Maddy Saunders—or rather, Maddy Garrett, he quickly amended—standing in the doorway he had come through himself only moments ago. Behind her, the long hallway was dotted with red lockerslockers that had been beige when the two of them were students—and emptied into the school lobby, which had also been buffed and painted since their graduation. In spite of that, Carver could almost believe twenty years dissolved, and that he was gazing once again upon the seventeen-year-old girl he remembered so fondly.

Then Maddy stepped forward, into the light, and his reverie cleared. She was dressed in a shapeless charcoal suit that
was in no way reminiscent of her girlish skirts and blouses. She carried a very adult-looking trench coat and carried her leather briefcase. Her glasses were different and her long hair was gone. Gone, too, was her sparkle of youthful enthusiasm that had once been so blinding.

She had aged and changed as much as he, Carver thought, both physically and psychologically. They would never be able to recapture the trappings of their former selves. A part of him was sorry to realize that. But a part of him found the knowledge oddly promising. Change was good—he’d always thought so. As long as the essence of what he loved remained the same. And their essences, he told himself now, were still intact. What had made them Maddy and Carver twenty years ago continued to define them today. Of that, he was completely certain. He just wished he knew how to assure Maddy as absolutely.

“Yeah, Coach Johnson always wanted to skin me alive for something,” he told her with a smile as he danced deftly to the side to retrieve the ball. He tossed it to Maddy, and she caught it capably. “At least hiking boots have rubber soles.”

Maddy dribbled the ball a few times, hurled it toward the basket, and missed by a mile. She sighed. “Guess I should just stay off the court altogether,” she said with a glance toward her own flat pumps. “I never was good at games anyway.”

He wanted to contradict her, but thought better of it. The games Maddy was good at were just of a much more emotional nature. She’d always had Carver’s heart in a knot anyway.

“What brings you to our alma mater?” he asked as he darted to collect the ball once again. He realized he was panting as he performed the action, and that a thread of perspiration was trickling between his shoulder blades. Man, he must be getting old if a few simple maneuvers could rob him of his breath and make him break out in a sweat. Then he looked at Maddy again and realized basketball had
nothing to do with his breathlessness and rise in body temperature.

“I had an appointment with one of the counselors about one of the students,” she said. “I don’t have any jurisdiction in South Jersey, but the girl in question used to be a Philly student, and I’ve developed something of a rapport with her, so I’m usually the one they call when she gets into trouble.”

“You get back to Strickler a lot, then.”

She shook her head. “Not really. I generally deal with this counselor over the phone. The girl’s only been a student here for a few months. I was with her on her first day, to help her get settled, and they called me today because she got into a fight with another girl. I was in the office when I saw you pass by, and I guess I just couldn’t resist following you.”

She took a few steps toward the bleachers, then spun back around and surveyed their surroundings. “The place has changed a lot, hasn’t it?”

He nodded. “Except for the gym. What is it about gymnasiums, that they seem to defy modification?”

She shook her head. “I don’t know.” Finally, she sat down, once again studying the cavernous room as if she were trying desperately not to study Carver. “It seems smaller, though. The whole place seems smaller. Why is that? I’m no taller now than I was when I graduated. It’s bizarre.”

He took a few steps to close the distance between them, and dropped onto the bleacher beside her. “I thought the same thing myself when I came in. There’s probably some weird physics law at work, here. You were always the brain, Maddy. You explain it to me.”

“I can’t.” Then, after a moment’s thought, she suggested, “I suppose it’s all a matter of perception.”

“Perception changes even when objects don’t, is that it?”

She nodded. “Yep. Perception ages even when objects don’t, too.”

He thought about that for a minute. “That doesn’t seem fair, does it?”

She glanced over at him, really looking at him for the first time since their encounter. Her eyes were dark and serious, completely counter to the mild smile she offered him. “Well, I don’t know if anyone’s ever told you this, Carver, but life does tend to fall into that unfair category in most cases.”

“So I’ve heard.”

They sat in companionable silence for some moments, neither seeming to feel as if words were necessary.

“Hey,” he recalled suddenly, “do you still listen to Richard and Linda Thompson?”

It was the only thing Maddy and Carver had ever agreed on when they were teenagers, the only thing they’d ever discovered they had in common: the music of Richard and Linda Thompson, an obscure group even in their youth.

“They split up,” Maddy said. Her gaze traveled across the room toward the stage and lingered there. “They got divorced a few years back,” she said after a moment. “Didn’t you hear?”

“Yeah, I know, but they’re both still recording separately. Do you still listen to them?”

She shook her head. “No. I tried, but their music is different now. It’s not as good as when they were together.”

“But it’s still good.”

She was still staring at the stage on the other side of the room, and he wondered what she was thinking about.

“I know,” she finally said softly. “But it’s just not the same.”

Carver didn’t need for her to tell him that. Suddenly, for no reason he could name, he became very angry. He was tired of hearing Maddy spout about the differences that had come over them both in the last two decades. Maybe things had been a little easier when the two of them were in high school, he conceded to himself. Who knows, maybe in a way they had even been better. But if truth be told, Carver had no desire to ever go back to that time again. All in all, his life hadn’t been so rotten these last twenty years. He’d had a few
laughs, enjoyed some good times and made friends with some interesting people. Yes, there had been a lot of meanness and ugliness during the stretches in between. But sometimes a person had to take the bad with the good, just to make sure he knew the difference.

He jumped up from his seat and pivoted quickly around to face her. “You know, Maddy,” he began, not quite successful in keeping his impatience reined in, “change isn’t necessarily such a bad thing. Think about how many things are better now than they were fifty years ago. Hell, five years ago, for that matter. Without change, we’d all still be huddling in the dark, unable to even communicate with each other.”

Her eyes widened at his vehemence, as if she couldn’t understand where his attack was coming from. “I know, but-”

“Things change. People change. Times change. But that doesn’t mean the world has to come to an end. It doesn’t mean you just lie down and let it run over you.”

“Carver, that’s not what I—”

“I, for one, am pretty happy with a lot of the changes that have come about. I’m glad that I’ve grown up. I have a deeper appreciation for things now that I couldn’t have had when I was a kid. Maybe my life gets a little rocky sometimes. But getting over the rough spots and playing the breaks usually winds up making me a stronger, more thoughtful person.”

She only stared at him when he concluded his tirade, looking as if she had just been thrown into a cell with a lunatic. When she spoke again, her tone of voice, too, was reminiscent of the one a person might use when speaking to an imbecile.

“I didn’t mean change was bad,” she said softly. “I only meant…” She, too, stood, shrugged into her coat and picked up her briefcase. “I don’t know what I meant,” she finally said. “Just that…it’s not the same, Carver. And it never will be. I don’t know if that’s good or bad. I just know
it’s…” She sighed helplessly. “It’s not the same,” she finally concluded.

And with that, she turned her back on him and exited the gym without another word. Carver watched her go, watched the tails of her coat flap about her ankles, watched her briefcase bang against her calf. She walked like a woman with a purpose, though what that purpose might be, he had no idea. When she had delivered her last words to him, Maddy had looked confused, as if she had no idea what she should do or where she should go next.

She hadn’t looked like a woman with a purpose, Carver thought as she disappeared out of view. She’d looked like a woman who was completely lost. And for the life of him, he couldn’t come up with a single idea that might help her find her way back.

“Your principal called this morning.”

Carver looked at his daughter, seated across from him at his kitchen table, and frowned. Rachel, however, ignored him, and instead flipped idly through the pages of the latest issue of
Rolling Stone
that had arrived in that morning’s mail—the issue Carver hadn’t yet had the chance to read himself, the issue
he
had planned on flipping through during dinner, just as he always had before Rachel’s arrival.

“Rachel,” he repeated, “your principal called this morning.”

“Yeah? So?” she asked, pausing over an article about REM.

“So he said you ditched school today.”

“Yeah. So?”

“Yeah, you know he
said
you ditched school? Or yeah, you
did
ditch school?”

“I ditched.”

“Why?”

“I wanted to go to a movie with Lanette.”

“I see.”

Rachel had been with Carver for nearly three weeks now, and things between the two of them had improved not at all. When he tried to talk to her, she ignored him. When he tried to take an interest in her activities, she ignored him. When he asked her to help out with the chores around the apartment, she ignored him. And when he suggested the two of them go out for dinner or whatever, she ignored him.

He was making an effort to be a good father. He didn’t work nearly as late as he used to and was home by six o’clock a good two or three days a week. He’d stopped bringing home fast food or microwaving boxed meals for dinner as he had before Rachel’s arrival, and had in fact actually bought a copy of a cookbook which he had then put to good use. Two vegetables, he reminded himself. He was actually fixing meat with two vegetables every night,
and
a starch of some kind. Okay, so maybe that starch was just a slice of white bread at some meals, but dammit, at least he was making an effort.

And for what? he asked himself now. So that Rachel could come slamming through the front door every day after school and spend the rest of the day frying her brain on MTV. God, if he had to listen to another whiny song about how lost Generation X was, by another whiny group named after a food, he was going to toss his lunch. He was beginning to wish he could ignore Rachel as well as she ignored him.

In fact, she ignored him so well, Carver was beginning to wonder if he existed at all. It was pretty much the way he felt about Maddy lately, too. Since running into her at their old high school a week ago, he had tried to telephone her on a number of occasions, only to end up leaving messages on her answering machine which she had not returned. When he had tried calling her at work, it was only to be told she wasn’t in. Now maybe he wasn’t the sharpest guy in the world, but even he could sense that Maddy was trying to ditch him.

And now his daughter was ditching school to go to movies, he thought, returning his attention to this latest development
in the ongoing saga of parenthood. On one hand, Carver was happy that Rachel had evidently made at least one friend at school, someone she liked well enough to see a movie with her. On the other hand, Rachel had cut class to see this movie. On the other hand, Carver himself had cut class more times than he could remember, for reasons that were even more frivolous than seeing a movie. On the other hand, Rachel didn’t have to know that, did she?