Kiss the Girl (3 page)

“Nixie?”  Karl’s hand touched her shoulder.  “Honey?”

Nixie walked
into the room, pulled the panties from her pocket and hooked them over her mother’s toes. 
Sloan’s knees slowly folded, and the panties descended like the flag of a defeated army.  Her
eyes stayed closed,
though,
as if not acknowledging the situation would somehow erase it. 

Nixie finally found her voice.

“
Hey, Mom. 
I quit.”

CHAPTER TWO

Six weeks later

Nixie stood in the echoing kitchen of Leighton-Brace
Charitable Giving
’s DC apartment and eyed the stove.  It
was a hulking beast, a couple cubic yards of gleaming chrome, cast iron and bad attitude.  Nixie was almost sure it was French. 
S
he’d
already
assigned
it a snoo
ty Parisian accent in her head. 
Ouf
! 
Always wit zee tiresome attempts at zee
cookeeng
, zees woman.  I must put her in her proper place, non?
  Last night’s attempt at dinner had actually caught fire before Nixie admitted defeat.

So her stove hated her.  Big deal.  She was no
stranger to being disliked for arbitrary reasons
. 
Nixie
currently occupied
the moral high ground
in the battle
for public sympathy
but
S
loan was way hotter and
had mastered the art of
indulging her self-destructive streak
for the greater good
.  With
six lavish weddings, one harrowing widowhood, five
bitter divorces, and countless well-documented
scenes
under her belt, Nixie’s mom
was a perennial tabloid favorite
.
  But she’d also spent the past
twenty-odd
years
pitching her fits in corners of the world most people wanted to forget, sharing the spotlight with the kind of
unspeakable
suffering people
couldn’t
forget once they’d seen it. 
And
that
made her an American institution.  T
he ki
nd of bad girl her country loved.
 
So n
o matter what s
he did to her only daughter, Sloan’s
fame was at this point a self-propelled mower. 

Which was exactly why Nixie needed to figure out this damned stove. 

She cooked competently over a campfire, and she knew how to handle herself with grace at a state dinner.  The gray area
--
admittedly large
--
between those two extremes had been
handled by chefs in her mother
’
s
homes and take out
in all other circumstances
.
  But since her bitter break up with Leighton-Brace Charitable Giving, e
ven the take
-
out guys had sold her out.  Every time she ordered in, they showed up at the door with the paparazzi in tow.  Photos of Nixie with startled eyes, bad hair and a steaming bag of Chinese food appeared in the tabloids
with dismaying regularity
.

She poured herself a large glass of wine for courage.  There was a great deal in her life she couldn’t fix.  Not knowing how to feed herself in plugged-in, urban America wasn’t one of them. 
Nixie cracked open
The Passionate Vegetarian
--
all thousand plus pages of it
--
and applied herself to the business of producing a pumpkin and bean lasagna.  

The phone rang just as she slid the diced onions into a pan of sizzling canola oil. 

“Hello?”  She had to shout a bit, as the onions were cooking with enthusiasm.  So far, so good. 

“Nixie, it’s Karl.” 

She gave the onions a good sharp poke with the wooden spoon and turned away from the stove.  She was a little lonely, sure.  But not lonely enough to welcome another
stop-being-ridiculous
phone call from Karl.

“What do you want, Karl?” 

“I want you to come home.
  We have work to do.
”

She stepped out of the kitchen and sighed.  “I am home.” 

“You’re not home.  You’re camping out in the corporation’s DC apartment,
hiding from the world and eating a lot of
take out,
if the tabloids have it right.  Come on,
Nixie.
  Sloan dumped
James
weeks ago.  That big scene in Prague?  You must’ve read about it.
 
Why don’t
you
come home
now?
”

She realized she was trying to choke the spoon to death and consciously relaxed her gri
p.  “
Because
I
quit
, remember?
”

“I can’t believe you’re this upset about an asshole like James
Harper
.” 
He sighed.  “
Didn’t I tell you he was a dirt bag?  Didn’t I say he wasn’t good enough for you?
”

“
This isn’t about
James
.  This is about Sloan.
”

“Oh, please.
”  Karl snorted.
 
“
Sloan’s no different than usual.”

“Yeah,” Nixie said grimly.  “I know.”

“
Then don’t pretend to be all shocked and injured. 
Sloan being Sloan is
the reason what we do works
, and you know it.
  She’s like the Angelina Jolie to your Princess Diana,
and people eat you guys up.  W
hich is why you need
to come home
.
 
There’s work to do and w
ithout you we’ve only got half a
schtick
.
”

“
Schtick
?”  Nixie slapped the spoon against her thigh. “
My
fifty-year-old
mother screws my boyfriend on You Tube eight hundred times a day, Karl. 
That’s not a
schtick
, that’s a deeply dysfunctional family finally falling apart.”

“No, that’s Sloan burning herself to the ground in a new and novel way.  Your job is to rise up from the ashes and take her with you so we can keep building hospitals and schools and orphanages.  You’re named Phoenix for a reason, you know.”

“
I thought it was because I was conceived at a Rolling Stones show in Arizona.”

“Cute.”  Karl cleared his throat.  “
Come on, Nixie.  You’ve been sulking for nearly two months now.  Lives are at stake.  It’s time to get back to work.
  Come home.
”

Nixie squeezed her eyes shut against the rush of guilt and rage.  Her suffering was so small compared to what she’d seen. 
But at least she could still hurt.  At least she wasn’t stone-cold and numb yet, like Sloan, fo
rced to
act out more and more wildly to feel anything at all.  She hadn’t lost herself entirely.  Not yet.

“
Come home?”  Nixie laughed bitterly.  “
You keep saying that like I have a home to come back to, Karl.
”

“We’re your home,
” he said
. 
“
Me and your mom.”

Tears filled Nixie’s eyes and she brushed them away impatiently.  Okay, so she was lonely.  But not lonely enough to hang around while her beautiful, brittle mother destroyed herself over and over again in the name of charity.
 

“I’m sorry, Karl.
  I need more than that.
”

“
More?  More what?  Jesus, Nixie, you’re a ridiculously gifted young woman
.  You’re
beautiful
, famous, and wealthy beyond imagining.
”  There was a pause and Nixie closed her eyes, waiting for it.  The inevitable punch line to every argument she’d ever had with Karl.
  “
You have a
responsibility
toward those who haven’t been so lucky
, Nixie
.”
 

Nixie thought about the
Kenyan clinic she’d built with
Karl, her mom and
the man who
’d screwed her mother halfway across Europe after treating Nixie to an avalanche of public humiliation
.  She thought about
the clinic’s first patient,
a little girl with huge, trusting eyes in a head that was entirely too big for her withered, failing body.  She’d asked if Nixie was an angel, come to take her
home to
God
.  Nixie had lied without hesitation
, and been rewarded with a smile so pure it made her eyes sting even now to think of it. 

“Give me one more
month
,” Nixie said. 
“
One more month to be
...away
.  I promise, if I haven’t found some way to live up to my responsibilities by then
, I’ll come back to work.”

“One more month
.  Christ, Nixie, you’re killing me.
”   She could hear him scratching at
his
beard. 

“I
know.  I’m sorry.”

He
sighed.  “Okay, okay.  One
month, and not a day more.  I’ll be coming for you.”

She smiled into the phone.  “I know you will.”

“
All right then.
” 
There was an awkward pause, then
Karl
said,
“
You eating okay? 
I don’t like all this Chinese
food
I’m seeing in the papers.
”