“She will, Teddy. Give the girl a chance.”
He relaxed but still shook his head and continued to look annoyed with me. I felt my eyes tearing and looked down as I sipped my wine.
“Why don’t I leave you two for a little while to talk?” Lucille said, rising and putting her wineglass on the bar. “I’d like to take a hot bath and relax anyway, Teddy.”
“You don’t have to go,” he told her. “We’re not going to keep secrets from each other ever, from this day forward,” he declared. From the way he looked at me, I could see that was a comment made more for my benefit than hers. It sounded more like a threat, too.
She smiled and looked at me as someone who had just won a serious argument might.
“I’m sure we won’t,” she said. “See you in a while. Good night, Semantha.”
“Good night.”
She walked out, and for a long moment, the silence that followed echoed in my ears.
“I’m very disappointed in you, Semantha,” Daddy began. “I was hoping another year of private school would have matured you. I realize you’ve been through quite a lot, but you can’t wallow in the misery of the past forever. Heaven-stones don’t give up, don’t surrender. Every one of them up on these walls either was heroic or had the grit to make a better life for his or her children. It’s in our blood.
“For a long time after all that happened, I was almost like you, so depressed and unhappy I could not enjoy anything or anyone. My footsteps echoed in this house and riled up the bad memories constantly. I didn’t give in, but I wasn’t making any progress, either. Oh, I don’t mean with our business. Our business is an animal in and of itself. It has its own life, and it will overcome every economic downturn and survive. If anything, we feed off it, and I don’t mean just on the income. I mean on the reputation, the history, the very essence of it. When I go to work, I’m energized, and I hope, if you don’t decide to do something in education, that you will find a comfortable place in our company. I know Perry wants you to work with him.
“Now,” he continued, pacing a little, “although my relationship with Lucille comes as a bit of a surprise to you, I hope you will have the maturity to understand that she is responsible for something important being brought back to me. I can’t simply work, eat, and sleep, you know. I have to have a life, too. I want to travel, go to the theater, take pleasure in grand parties and dinners again. In short, I’m not ready to crawl into my grave, and Lucille, bless her soul, saw my needs and loved me for them immediately. She’s made the gray skies go away and driven the cobwebs out of my brain. I’m a happy man again, Semantha, and if I’m happy, you’ll be happier, too.
“So, for the present, I’d like you to try to stop thinking only of yourself. Think about all of us, about our Heaven-stone heritage, and become a pillar of support. It won’t be easy for Lucille, either, you know. She has to adjust, to make sacrifices and compromises. It’s not easy for a woman to step into the shadows left by a previous wife, especially someone who was as wonderful as your mother was, but she’s more than willing to do it, and one of the priorities in her life, she has said, will be you.”
“Me?”
“Yes, you,” Daddy said, pausing in front of me. He had his hands behind his back and was looking down at me. For a moment, he seemed even bigger and taller than he was in my eyes normally. “Lucille knows about the baby, of course, and now she knows how it came about.”
“You told her about Cassie, what she had done?”
“There can’t be such deep secrets between a man and a woman who are going to become one in marriage, Semantha. If and when you meet the man of your dreams, you must make sure he’s willing to open his heart and soul completely to you.” He paused again and looked at me. “Otherwise . . . otherwise, it’s not a marriage; it’s a civil union, a legal merging of two financial entities. It’s not a complete and solid thing built on a foundation of love, as I once had with your mother, God rest her soul.”
He paused, took a deep breath, and returned to his chair. He looked at me while he finished his drink. It took a few moments for all he had said to sink in.
“Are you saying she even knows what Cassie did to Mother, Daddy? I mean, with the sleeping pills?”
“We were never certain she deliberately emptied all of that sleeping powder into your mother’s drink. She might have . . . prepared the powder for your mother that way because your mother wanted it that way, and then . . . then she was ashamed or feeling guilty, so she hid the bottle in the attic. She knew she would be blamed.”
I stared at him, my mouth slightly open.
“Don’t gape at me like that, Semantha. It’s not an attractive thing for a young woman to do.”
“But what about what she did to me . . . the rape?”
“That was very wrong, of course, but I understood her motives. She had a great desire to please me, greater than she should have had, but nevertheless, I don’t think she wanted to hurt either of us. She simply went overboard.”
“No, Daddy. She threw me overboard. She didn’t go overboard.”
“Whatever, Semantha. I don’t like us to dwell on it!” he practically shouted. He realized it and calmed. “It’s not doing either of us any good. In short, no, I did not tell Lucille about your mother and Cassie, and I insist that you never mention it to her. That’s a dark part of our past that would only depress her, and at the start of a new life for both of us, there’s no point in it. What good will it do, anyway, to bury Cassie any deeper than she already is buried?”
I wanted to tell him that Cassie had not remained in her grave and maybe never would. In fact, she was standing right beside him now, looking at me and smiling. But I said nothing. I looked away. It was as if he had driven a nail of ice into my soft and already quite wounded heart. Denying what Cassie ha
d done, ignoring it, or searching for a new, more comforting interpretation diminished what had happened to me and to Mother. Daddy was still thinking more about Cassie than he was about us, and especially me now, even after all that had happened. But what was I to do about it? It made me sick even to talk about it, and I didn’t want to get him any angrier at me than he was already. I turned back to him.
“When are you and Lucille getting married? Next week?” To me, it wasn’t a foolish question. Look at how quickly he had gotten engaged to her.
His grouchy, old-crumpled-sock face softened into a new smile. “Oh, no, not next week. It’s not going to be something simple and quick. We’re planning a grand wedding that we will hold here on our grounds. She’s already begun a good deal of the work. She won’t do anything shoddy, that’s for sure. She says protocol requires eight weeks normally for the invitations, but we’re planning on taking the honeymoon suite on the Ecstasy Cruise the last week of August, so she’s agreed to what she says is the absolute minimum of six weeks. The invitations will go out in two days.”
“Two days? So, you already have the invitations and the wedding list made up?”