As You Wish (The Summerhouse 3)

“Back then, he still had Martha. I knew she wanted to retire, but Ray wouldn’t let her. He kept giving her raises and begging her to stay. I asked her to find out where Rita Morales was and to ask her to come in for a job interview as her replacement. She was so pleased I thought she was going to cry.”

Olivia laughed. “Great idea! So what about Cal?”

“I’m coming to that,” Kathy said. “Martha went through all the papers I’d done and she knew they were good. She didn’t say a word, just unlocked one of Ray’s desk drawers and pulled out a two-foot stack of folders. They were clients of other firms who Ray wanted to win. He was trying to come up with ideas he could show them that would entice them to come to Dad’s firm.”

“And you knew every campaign that would win them over,” Olivia said.

“Yes, I did,” Kathy said. “Martha plopped the folders down in front of me and put my cell phone on top. ‘Record the jingles you make up,’ she said, then left. As I went through them—and most of them Ray and I had worked on together—I realized that it was more about choice than creativity. The ideas that were eventually used were there but we’d presented the wrong ones.”

Kathy looked at them. “She called Bob from the art department and he came up and sketched out storyboards. And she called in Dave and he brought a keyboard and put music to the jingles that Ray and I had discarded.”

Kathy smiled. “It was a wonderful day! We didn’t leave the office until after two a.m. We were exhausted, but we had some good-looking campaigns to present to my father.”

“How did he take your presentation?”

Kathy got up and went to the window to look out for a moment, then turned back. “Sorry, but it still makes me angry. My father—” she swallowed “—refused to look at them. It was the next afternoon and he was in a bad mood—as he always was when Ray was out of town. He had an office full of men and he was telling them their ideas were garbage. I was standing there with Martha, Bob, and Dave behind me, our arms full of storyboards and recordings. That man, my father, gave a snort of derision, then waved his hand for us kids to go away. And we did. We backed out of the office like the cowards we were.

“‘That’s that,’ Martha said. ‘Ray will have to show him what we did.’

“‘And take credit for all of it?’ I said.”

When Kathy said no more, Elise and Olivia stared at her.

“What did you do?” Elise asked.

“Let me guess,” Olivia said. “You used what you’d learned from Ray and attacked.”

“Exactly!” Kathy said. “I’d gone back in time to change things, but that man just dismissed me like I didn’t matter? Not this time! It turns out that I really am my father’s daughter because I lost my temper. What was really making me angry was that half the good ideas Ray presented were from me. But my father only wanted to hear them if they were filtered through a man.”

“The worship of the penis,” Olivia said. “I see it in my work all the time.” She saw the shock—and interest—on the women’s faces. “Sorry. This time around, I’m a psychologist.”

“Disappointing,” Elise murmured. “I thought you were speaking from experience.”

Olivia laughed.

“You’re right,” Kathy said. “That’s what it was. I went back into my father’s office but then I turned coward. You can’t break a lifetime of fear in just seconds. But then I saw Cal. He was smirking at me. I could take what my father handed out but not him. Why did he always look at me with contempt? What had I ever done to make him so nasty to me? The whole thing with Felicity hadn’t happened and never would, so what was his problem?”

Kathy took a breath to calm down. “That’s when I really and truly lost it. Because of Cal, not my father. I slammed all the papers down on Dad’s desk, leaned over him, and made him look at them. After a flash of surprise, he showed no more emotion. But children know their parents. He was shocked, stunned. Not by me, but by how really, really good my ads were. They were finished products that I knew would work. The next year, one of them won a People’s Vote prize for the third-best ad of the year,” Kathy said. “Is there any more of this white wine?” She sounded as though she was finished with the story.

Olivia looked at Elise. “Shall we sit on her?”

“I’ve heard of something called waterboarding. I think it’s a torture, so I say we use it.”

They looked back at Kathy with laser glares, and she smiled. “Okay, so things changed between Cal and me.”

* * *

After she left her dad, Kathy went back to Ray’s office—and her body began to shake. Anger had given her strength when she’d faced her father, but now that was draining away and fear was filling her. When she’d finished her presentation, he’d said, “What title do you want?”

She knew what he meant. He was never going to say that he liked her campaigns. Praise was not something Bert Cormac gave. But what he did give were jobs and bonuses.

When she realized that her father had just offered her a real, actual job, it was as though all the energy suddenly drained out of her. She was leaning over her father to the point where their noses were almost touching, and she stood up straight.

The room was still full of her rage. She could feel it, and it was an anger she hadn’t possessed before she married Ray. Marriage to him had changed everything inside her.

Suddenly, she could see her marriage more clearly than she’d ever been able to. His ferocious ambition, his obsession with body image, his insatiable work ethic, had all seeped into her. It was Ray who’d pulled her into the advertising firm. His mantra had become “Kathy can do it.” He’d volunteered her to plan company parties, arrange schedules, whatever was needed. At home, he’d started handing her ads and having her rewrite copy. When she made a suggestion, he’d listened.

By the second year of their marriage, they were discussing his every ad campaign. By the third year, she was as involved in his work as he was. In the fourth year, he began plopping accounts down on her home desk and telling her to take care of them—and she did.