“What?”

“The live one is now a real one, and yours truly will probably get the cleanup contract to start.”

“Foxworth is sold?”

“Looks that way,” he said. “I hope the first thing the new owner does is name it something else and then build something so beautiful no one ever thinks of those horrid stories anymore,” he added pointedly.

I nodded and went into the kitchen to make a salad and get the table set. Dad went upstairs to shower and change. As I worked, I felt a trembling inside me. There was no question in my mind now that the diary wasn’t simply the ramblings of some disturbed child. Christopher Dollanganger or Foxworth was a very bright young boy who was more than simply what my friends might call book smart. From what he was writing, I thought he was much more. I could tell that he was good at reading both people and books. Furthermore, he was not blinded by his love of his mother and his father to the extent that he refused to acknowledge and write about their weaknesses.

Was it cold for a child to look so clearly and closely at his own parents? He obviously had loved his father very much, but he was not hesitant to criticize him for having more children while he was struggling to provide for the two he had. More important, he now realized his father was more of a dreamer than an achiever. Anyone else would have been so shocked and disturbed that he couldn’t go on. Whom could he believe in? Maybe only himself. Maybe that was enough for him, but it certainly wouldn’t be for me, I thought.

In fact, I was so deep in thought about it all that I didn’t realize Dad was standing in the kitchen doorway watching me.

“How many times are you going to cut the same carrot?” he asked.

“Oh.”

“What’s got you so deep in thought, Kristin? I hope it’s not something you read in that diary.”

“No, no, I’m okay, Dad. Don’t you know that teenage girls have a lot on their minds?” I offered. It was unfair, I knew. I used that whenever I wanted to sidestep something or take advantage. I knew my father regretted that there wasn’t another female in the house to offer me advice, so it was an easy way out for me, but I never used it without feeling guilty.

“Boy troubles?”

“I’m trying to avoid that,” I said. I paused and looked at him. “You know, you never told me if you had a serious girlfriend before you met Mom. Did you?”

“Oh, boy,” he said. “I asked for it.”

“Well, it’s not fair. You can ask me about my relationships, but I can never know about yours.”

“Let me put it to you this way, Kristin. When I met your mother, every woman I had met before slipped out of my memory like melting icicles. There was no longer any room for any of them in my thoughts.”

I waved my knife at him. “You’re very good, Dad. I’d put you up against any CIA interrogator.”

He finally laughed. “Look who’s talking, Miss Sidestep,” he replied, and went into the kitchen to start his pasta dish.

He did talk about his early dates with my mother and how afraid he was of doing or saying something that would turn her off. When he talked like this, he looked so much younger to me. It was as if by resurrecting his good memories, he could actually go back in time, have a boyish smile on his face, and have dazzling eyes.

“So you believe in love at first sight?” I asked.

He paused and thought a moment. “Not for everybody,” he said. “Only the lucky.”

“What about the rest?” I followed.

“A shot in the dark at best,” he said.

Now he was the one falling into deep thought. I watched him work. He was preparing spaghetti carbonara, working as carefully as a surgeon on his sauce, not out of necessity but out of love fo

r what he could do. He always said, “When you prepare a meal for someone you love, you love the meal.”

I went to set the table. Usually, when we had pasta lately, he would open a bottle of wine and let me have some. He said he was happy I was old enough now to partake with him, because there was nothing lonelier than drinking good wine alone.

What he had told me about him and my mother got me thinking about Christopher’s parents, Corrine and Christopher Sr. Surely, they had to have fallen in love at first sight and so strongly and completely that they would defy whatever rules or morality stood in their way, not to mention her parents. It had to have been so strong a love for Corrine, in fact, that she would give up great wealth. At one point in her life, then, she wasn’t obsessed with expensive jewelry and clothes and other luxuries, or perhaps she had so much faith in Christopher Sr. that she wasn’t afraid to risk it.

Yet from what I had read so far, even though she must have known they were struggling financially, she didn’t appear to have any regrets. She was even willing to have more children. Had she changed, or was Christopher Sr. so good at filling her with hope and deceiving her about what they had and would have soon that she would put aside her own demands? Christopher hadn’t come right out and said it yet in his diary, but maybe his mother was very gullible and far more naive than she acted.

Without my even reading another word, it was clear that something changed in her, because she was willing to hide her children in a small bedroom and an attic while she worked on winning back her father’s love. Was she fooling herself again, justifying that by believing she could soon give them far more? How did it all turn so ugly? Why?

All my friends seemed to live in fairly uncomplicated families compared with the Dollangangers. Certainly, I did.

Tags: V.C. Andrews
Source: readsnovelonline.net