Marooned in Manhattan (7 page)

Chapter 11

I
had a crappy day. It started off okay,
with the sun peeping in my bedroom window and the sounds of Scott singing badly while making French toast in the kitchen. Then I heard voices and I knew Leela must be with him. Usually when she stays over, she’s gone before I get up as she’s always going to meetings called breakfast networking. I had forgotten today was Saturday.

‘Come and get it!’ Scott yelled.

I sighed and reluctantly pulled on the green and purple kimono robe Kylie had given me because she is too tall for it now, and sauntered into the kitchen.

Scott and I had planned to go the beach on Fire Island today. We were going to drive to the ferry, taking Ben and some pastrami on rye sandwiches from Zabars. I hoped fervently that Leela did not plan to join us. She hates sand, I reminded myself.

As I drizzled syrup over my French toast, Scott’s cell phone rang. It was his best friend, Jake, suggesting a spontaneous game of golf.

‘Can’t do it,’ said Scott, ‘Evie and I are heading to the beach.’

Leela intervened.

‘Why don’t you go play golf with Jake, sweetheart?’ she said. ‘You haven’t seen him in ages. I want to treat Evie to a girl’s day, a manicure and a nice lunch.’

I nearly yakked up a piece of my French toast.

Scott said, ‘Thanks, Leela, but I think Evie has her heart set on the beach.’

Leela looked meaningfully at me. I hated her but she was right. Scott hardly ever got time to hang out with Jake.

‘No, that’s ok,’ I said. ‘We can go the beach another time. I’ll go with Leela.’

‘Are you sure?’ asked Scott.

‘Totally,’ I said.

‘I’ll see you in fifteen minutes,’ he told Jake.

After hanging up, he said, ‘Thanks, Leela, very sweet of you,’ and he gave her a long, lingering kiss on the mouth. I had no French toast left or I definitely would have choked.

I never had a manicure before and I was embarrassed to hold out my rather grubby little nails. I don’t bite them but they don’t appear to be interested in growing. But Jordan, the Filipino guy who filed my nails, was very easy to talk to. He told me that he wants to be a comedian on a TV show called
Saturday Night Live
and he is taking
improvisation
classes at night. He suggested that I choose a pale pink colour for my nails called ‘Ballet Slippers’, but I picked a blueish colour called ‘Midnight Destiny’. Then I just flipped through magazines, waiting for Leela to finish. She went into the waxing room for a very long time. I heard her say she wanted her lip done and it made me giggle on the inside to
think of her with a moustache.

After leaving the nail salon, Leela took me to a boring
restaurant
in midtown where they only served salads, but they did have more than a hundred different kinds. We looked at our menus and I put my napkin in my lap as Mum had taught me. Leela put her BlackBerry in her handbag and I felt a little alarmed because I never saw Leela without her BlackBerry close to hand before.

She swirled the ice in her iced coffee.

‘Are you enjoying your little vacation in New York?’ she asked.

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘Good!’ she replied. ‘You must be so excited now about going back to Ireland?’

I didn’t answer, busy poking at my salad, trying to identify some of the mysterious looking beans.

‘Great!’ she said, even though I hadn’t said anything. ‘And maybe, when you are grown up and have finished college, you will come back to New York for a visit. I’m sure Scott would like that.’

I shivered. The air conditioning was way too cold.

‘Here,’ she said. ‘Have my scarf.’

‘No thanks,’ I said.

‘How is your cookbook going?’ I asked in an innocent voice.

Her eyes narrowed and she pursed her lips together.

‘I haven’t dated the right connections,’ she answered, ‘but I will get there.’

Then she smiled breezily.

‘Isn’t this fun?’ she said, ‘having a girls’ lunch.’

I didn’t answer.

She continued, ‘I know how important it is to you to be in Ireland, back with all your friends and your godmother, Lainey is it?’

‘Do you mean Janet?’ I said.

‘Yes, Janet, that’s the one. I need you to give me her phone number and her email address.’

‘What for?’ I asked.

‘So I can get the paperwork moving.’

‘What paperwork?’ I wondered.

‘To transfer full custody of you to Janet.’

My jaw dropped.

‘That’s got nothing to do with you,’ I told her.

‘Oh, of course not, I’m just trying to save poor Scott some money by doing the paperwork myself instead of him having to pay another attorney to do it. That would be a terrible waste, especially when he is so strapped for cash and the clinic expenses are so high and he has that new receptionist’s salary to worry about – Kelly.’

‘Karen,’ I corrected automatically.

‘Do you want your uncle to have to pay thousands of dollars to a lawyer?’ she said, in a fake shocked voice.

‘No, of course not,’ I said angrily. ‘I just didn’t realise anything had to be done, and won’t Scott and I have to sign the papers?’

She shook her head.

‘You are the child. You’re not even allowed to read them.’

‘It’s my life,’ I said angrily.

‘But your life does not belong to you in the eyes of the law,’ she said primly. ‘Yes, Scott has to sign, but we can get them ready now. If I tell Scott before I do the work, he will want to pay my law firm’s fees, which is what we are trying to avoid, isn’t it?’

I poked again at the large, rubbery, yellowish beans in my salad.

‘Here,’ said Leela, pulling a little red notebook out of her bag and flicking it open and handing me a pen. ‘Just write Janet’s email address here, that will be enough.’

I hesitated.

‘Oh! I’m so sorry, Evie,’ she said gushingly.

‘What?’ I said.

‘Are you afraid Janet doesn’t want you anymore?’

‘No, of course not!’ I said hotly. ‘Janet is one of the most loyal, best, greatest people I know. She would have me in a second, any time, no matter what.’

‘So, there’s no problem then,’ said Leela crisply.

I pushed the pen and notebook back at her.

‘I want to go home,’ I said.

‘Of course you do, sweetie, and you will be back in Ireland very soon. It must be lovely there, so beautiful with all those green fields and sweet little horses. I really must visit on my next trip to London.’

I didn’t point out that I had meant Scott’s apartment because I was sure Leela had known exactly what I’d meant.

‘Whatever,’ I said, and she tut-tutted at my rudeness, but stopped pushing to get Janet’s email address.

I took the cross-town bus by myself back to Scott’s apartment and I put the lunch with Leela completely out of my mind as if it never happened. I can do that sometimes.

Chapter 12

O
n Wednesday morning, Kylie called as
Scott and I were finishing our breakfast bagels. I was ignoring Ben as punishment for chewing the tip of my elephant Ellie’s trunk. As I chatted with Kylie, Ben gazed at me with sad, puppyish eyes, begging for cream cheese, and, I fondly imagined, forgiveness. Kylie was heading to Chelsea Piers with Greg Winters. It turns out that Kylie knows Greg. More than knows. They go to the same school and are good friends.

‘Greg plays for the River Rats. That’s a kids’ ice-hockey team. They have a game today so I’m going to go watch and then I have my figure skating lesson. You guys could watch my lesson and we can all eat lunch afterwards.’

I hesitated. I had planned to help out Scott in the clinic.

‘I’ll ask Scott if he’ll be okay this morning without me.’

Scott looked up from page six of the
New York Post
.

‘I will do my very best to manage adequately without you,’ he said solemnly. ‘Don’t stray from the Piers and I expect to see you back here no later than three. Have fun.’

‘Thanks a million!’ I replied.

The Rivers Rats’ game was more exciting than I expected.
Greg was amazing. He swept up and down the ice so quickly and scored a goal against the New Jersey team.

‘Woo-hoo!’ yelled Kylie. ‘Go Rats!’

‘There were no fights,’ Kylie said, a bit sadly, when the game ended.

Greg, still glowing from victory and from a fresh batch of angry-looking mosquito bites, sat on the bench beside me to watch Kylie’s figure skating lesson. I was in awe. She was so graceful on the ice and she did some amazing spins.

‘That’s a double Axel,’ Greg told me.

I thought she was fantastic, but her coach, a tall skinny woman in a blue and white tracksuit, yelled harshly at her several times. At the end of the lesson, I could tell the coach was having a go at Kylie although I couldn’t hear what they were saying.

‘Why is the bully coach being so mean to Kylie?’ I asked Greg angrily.

Greg looked surprised.

‘The coach is just trying to motivate her to do better, to be better. Kylie has a competition coming up.’

‘It’s not the Olympics,’ I muttered.

‘Not yet,’ said Greg.

After Kylie had changed back into normal clothes, the three of us went for burgers and fries and shakes at the diner and had a great laugh. Kylie didn’t mention her coach and she didn’t seem upset at all.

‘Your coach seemed a bit mean,’ I ventured.

Kylie swung around so that her green-streaked ponytail
nearly landed in my raspberry-chocolate milkshake.

‘Suzie is the best. She’s the greatest coach in the Tri-state area. I’m lucky she is teaching me. She’s tough on me because I haven’t practised enough, and she’s right.’

‘Does Rachel come down on you to do better?’ I wondered.

‘Nooooo! My mom is so not the competitive type. She just wants me to be happy. I think she would prefer if I did not compete at all, if I just skated for fun, but I like competing. Sometimes I wish she was one of those pushy moms so I would be forced to practise more.’

I looked out the window as I drained the dregs of my milkshake. I spotted Finn, dressed in hockey gear, walking past the diner with a slim blonde girl. He saw us and waved with his hockey stick.

‘Finn’s too old and too good to play for the River Rats anymore. Now, he plays in a different league. He’s their big star,’ announced Greg proudly.

‘Who’s his girlfriend?’ asked Kylie.

‘Tamara something. She’s a freshman at Nightingale-Bamford,’ Greg said.

‘That’s one of the best private girls’ schools in the city,’ Kylie explained to me. ‘A freshman is someone in their first year of high school.’

‘She’s very pretty,’ I noticed.

‘If you like blondes,’ said Greg.

‘She’s too All-American, Gossip Girl slash cheerleader slash prom queen type. YAWN,’ said Kylie.

The more I get to know Kylie, the more I like her.

There was a note waiting for me when I got home, written in green ink.

‘Evie, the very old vacuum your uncle owns sucked up the trunk on your elephant yesterday. Sorry, Eurdes xx.’

I was horrified. I had punished Ben for nothing. I scrambled off to search for him straight away, but he was not in any of his normal places. Eventually, I found him lying under the receptionist’s table in the waiting room of the clinic, gnawing on what looked suspiciously like a tube of Leela’s lip-gloss. Good boy. I knelt down beside him. I knew he wouldn’t understand the word ‘sorry’ but I wanted to say it anyway.

‘I’m sorry, Ben.’

He licked my hand and he wagged his tail.

‘Longest walk ever, coming up right now,’ I told him and he happily stretched out his front paws so far that his belly hit the ground as I went off to search for his leash.

Later that evening, Ben and I hung around the clinic, keeping Snickers company. Snickers is a little, cotton-wool white bundle of tight curly fur, a Bichon Frise, which is a very popular breed of dog in Manhattan. He was staying overnight in the crate in the backroom of the clinic because Scott had to perform dental surgery on him the following morning. I was sitting cross-legged beside his crate, desperately yanking my almost bristleless hairbrush through an enormous knot when Scott walked in.

‘What is it?’ he asked, looking at my face screwed up in pain.

‘The mother of all knots,’ I answered.

Scott bent over to have a look, disappeared for a couple of minutes and returned with a scissors we use for trimming cat hair before operations and, with a decisive single snap, chopped off the large knot and handed it to me.

I stared at it, appalled.

‘Scott, I can’t believe you just did that.’

‘What?’ he said innocently. ‘You have lots of hair. I have never seen a kid with so much hair; you won’t even notice it’s gone.’

I resolved to keep my hair issues away from Scott’s trigger scissors hands in the future. Joanna would have been able to empathise but she was on a date with Stefan.

Joanna seems to like Stefan a lot because she is being pretty hush-hush about him and acting all girly. Although he’s from Frankfurt he speaks English perfectly if a little stiffly, with a London accent. His hair is white-blonde and his eyelashes are so fair I thought he didn’t have any when I first met him. He is huge, even taller than Scott, and has the largest feet I have ever seen. Stefan works for a hedge fund, which is some complicated finance job that has nothing to do with gardening. He doesn’t seem like a bad guy. He’s very polite. Last Tuesday, he took Mrs Rubenstein by the arm and helped her out of the waiting room, carrying Lulu in her cage, and hailed a taxi for them. Scott said he was just trying to impress Joanna. I’m not so sure. Stefan has nice manners. He’s just boring. I don’t think he can help it. He was probably born that way.

Scott and I have spied on him a couple of times, getting out of his Porsche to pick up Joanna from work.

Scott said, ‘It’s a crime against humanity to have a
highlighter
-yellow Porsche.’

He had a point. The car was so not cool, but I think he might, totally understandably, feel a bit jealous of Stefan because Scott’s Jeep is ancient and breaks down a lot, always at the worst possible times.

Maybe Scott secretly fancies Joanna without even realising it himself, but I could be totally wrong. When David and Mum first became friendly, I spent ages working on getting them together as a couple because I thought David fancied Mum like mad and I thought she fancied him too. When they eventually realised what I was up to, they sat me down for a
talk
.

David asked me, ‘Evie, you know I’m gay, right, and you know what that means?’

‘Yeeees,’ I said, ‘but I thought that might change, you know, on account of you falling in love with Mum.’

‘I do love your mum very much as a friend but the being gay thing, that’s not going to change.’

I felt very stupid because I was sure his being gay was just a detail, a little obstacle that could be overcome. I thought Mum was a bit lonely and could do with a nice, fun boyfriend like David and they both loved theatre so they had a lot in common.

As a result of the David – Mum romance fiasco, I completely lost confidence in my matchmaking
instincts. I promised Mum I would cease all
matchmaking
activities. She said I was talented in other areas.