He is full of get-rich-quick schemes, the latest being the sale of land on the moon. Were he able to manage his own fortune, he would be impatient with a ten-or fifteen-percent return on investment and would plunge great sums on unlikely ventures in hopes of doubling and tripling his money overnight.
The kitchen is big, with restaurant-quality equipment and every imaginable culinary tool and gadget, though he eats out six or seven nights a week. Maple floor, ship’s-style maple cabinets with rounded corners, granite counters, and stainless-steel appliances contribute to a sleek and yet inviting ambience.
Britney is sleek, as well, and inviting in a way that makes your skin crawl. When we entered the kitchen, she was standing hipshot at a window, sipping a morning champagne and staring out at sun serpents sinuously flexing across the surface of the swimming pool.
Her thong bikini was small enough to excite the jaded editors of Hustler, but she wore it well enough to make the cover of the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue.
She was eighteen but looked younger. This is my father’s basic criterion in women. They are never older than twenty, and they always look younger than they are.
Some years ago, he got in trouble for cohabiting with a sixteen-year-old. He claimed to be unaware of her true age. An expensive attorney plus payoffs to the girl and her parents spared him the indignity of a prison pallor and jail haircuts.
Instead of a greeting, Britney gave me a sullen, dismissive look. She returned her attention to the sun-dappled swimming pool.
She resents me because she thinks my father might give me money that would otherwise be spent on her. This concern has no validity. He would never offer me a buck, and I would never take it.
She would be better advised to worry about two facts: first, that she has been with my father for five months; second, that the average duration of one of his affairs is six to nine months. With a nineteenth birthday looming, she would soon seem old to him.
Fresh coffee had been brewed. I asked for a cup, poured it myself, and sat on a bar stool at the kitchen island.
Always restless in my company, my father moved around the room, rinsing out Britney’s champagne glass when she finished with it, wiping a counter that didn’t need to be wiped, straightening the chairs at the breakfast table.
“I’m getting married on Saturday,” I said.
This surprised him. He’d been married to my mother only briefly and regretted it within hours of exchanging vows. Marriage doesn’t suit him.
“To that Llewellyn girl?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“Is that a good idea?”
“It’s the best idea I’ve ever had.”
Britney turned away from the window to study me with beady-eyed speculation. To her, a wedding meant a gift, a parental boon, and she was prepared to defend her interests.
She didn’t stir in me the slightest anger. She saddened me, for I could see her deeply unhappy future without need of any sixth sense.
Admittedly, she scared me a little, too, because she was moody and quick to anger. Worse, the purity and the intensity of her self-esteem ensured that she would never doubt herself, that she could not conceive of suffering unpleasant consequences for any act that she might commit.
My father likes moody women in whom a perpetually simmering anger lies just beneath the surface. The more clearly that their moodiness indicates genuine psychological disorder, the more they excite him. Sex without danger does not appeal to him.
All of his lovers have fit this profile. He doesn’t appear to spend much effort seeking them; as if sensing his need, drawn by vibes or pheromones, they find him with dependable regularity.
He once told me that the moodier a woman is, the hotter she will prove to be in bed. This was fatherly advice that I could have lived without.
Now, as I poured coffee into a gutful of Pepsi, he said, “Is this Llewellyn girl knocked up?”
“No.”
“You’re too young for marriage,” he said. “My age—that’s when it’s time to settle down.”
He said this for Britney’s benefit. He would never marry her. Later, she would remember this as a promise. When he ditched her, the fight would be more epic than Godzilla vs. Mothra.
Sooner or later, one of his hotties, during a bad mood swing, will maim or kill him. I believe that on some deep level, even if subconsciously, he knows this.
“What’s that on your forehead?” Britney asked.
“Band-Aid.”
“You fall down drunk or something?”
“Something.”
“You in a fight?”
“No. It’s an employment-related fork wound.”
“A what?”
“A flipped fork flicked my forehead.”
Alliteration seems to offend people. Her expression soured. “What kind of shit are you on?”
“I’m fully amped on caffeine,” I admitted.
“Caffeine, my ass.”
“Pepsi and coffee and No-Doz. And chocolate. Chocolate contains caffeine. I had some chocolate-chip cookies. Chocolate doughnuts.”
My father said, “Saturday’s not good. We can’t make Saturday. We’ve got other plans we can’t cancel.”
“That’s all right,” I said. “I understand.”
“I wish you’d have told us earlier.”
“No problem. I didn’t expect you’d be able to make it.”
“What kind of dork,” Britney wondered, “announces his wedding just three days before the ceremony?”
“Go easy,” my father advised her.
Her psychological engine didn’t have a go-easy gear. “Well, damn it, he’s such a freak.”
“That’s really not helpful,” my father admonished her, but in a honeyed tone.
“Well, it’s true,” she insisted. “Like we haven’t talked about it maybe three dozen times. He doesn’t have a car, he lives in a garage—”
“Above a garage,” I corrected.
“—he wears the same thing every day, he’s friends with every loser geek in town, he’s a wannabe cop like a water boy hanging around a football team, and he’s just a major freak—”
“You won’t get an argument from me,” I said.
“—such a major freak, the way he comes in here on some shit or other, talking about weddings and ‘employment-related fork wounds.’ Give me a break.”
“I’m a freak,” I said sincerely. “I acknowledge it, accept it. There’s no reason to argue. Peace.”
My father couldn’t quite fake a convincing note of sincerity when he said, “Don’t say that. You’re not a freak.”
He doesn’t know about my supernatural gift. At the age of seven, when my previously weak and inconstant sixth sense grew in power and reliability, I didn’t go to him for counsel.
I hid my difference from him in part because I expected him to harass me int
o picking winning lottery numbers, which I can’t do. I figured he’d parade me before the media, parlay my gift into a TV show, or even sell shares in me to speculators willing to finance an infomercial and a psychic-by-the-minute 900 number.
Getting off the stool, I said, “I think now maybe I know why I came here.”
As I started toward the kitchen door, my father followed me. “I really wish you’d picked another Saturday.”
Turning to face him, I said, “I think I came here because I was afraid to go to my mother.”
Britney stepped behind my father, pressing her nearly naked body against him. She put her arms around him, hands flat on his chest. He made no attempt to pull away from her.
“There’s something I’m blocking on,” I said, more to myself than to either of them. “Something I desperately need to know…or need to do. And somehow, some way, it’s related to Mother. Somehow she has the answer.”
“Answers?” he said incredulously. “You know perfectly well that your mother’s about the last place to find answers.”
Smiling wickedly at me over my father’s left shoulder, Britney slid her hands slowly up and down his muscled chest and drum-flat belly.
“Sit down,” my father said. “I’ll pour you another coffee. If you have a problem you need to talk about, then let’s talk.”
Britney’s right hand moved low on his belly, fingertips teasing under the waistband of his hip-slung shorts.
He wanted me to see the desire that he inspired in this lush young woman. He had a weak man’s pride in his status as a stud, and this pride was so fierce that it filled his mind, leaving him quite incapable of recognizing his son’s humiliation.
“Yesterday was the anniversary of Gladys Presley’s death,” I said. “Her son wept uncontrollably for days after losing her, and he grieved openly for a year.”
A faint frown made the shallowest of furrows in my father’s Botoxed forehead, but Britney was too engrossed in her game to be listening to me with full attention. Her eyes glittered with what might have been mockery or triumph as her right hand slowly slipped deeper in his khaki shorts.