Christopher's Diary: Echoes of Dollanganger

“What I really wanted to tell you was I’m all right. I could see you were a little concerned when we said good-bye today, but don’t worry about me reading the diary. I’m not usually that emotional about anything.”

“Tell me something I don’t know.”

“You’re good, angel, you’re real good.”

“I know. Are we going to the movies tomorrow night? I told my father we might.”

“Sure. After we—”

“Do our session in the attic. I know. I can’t believe I was once more enthusiastic about this than you were.”

“Were you?”

“I’ve got to go to sleep. I have a test tomorrow.”

“You can practice your answers on me in the morning,” he said. “I’ll go to sleep counting the minutes until I see you.”

In the morning, my father told me that he had forgotten to mention that my aunt Barbara wouldn’t be coming to our Thanksgiving after all. It wasn’t because she felt she had to go to her boss’s dinner. She had come down with a bad chest cold. I saw that he was quite disappointed, enough to suggest that we might visit her in the spring. He wasn’t fond of going to New York. He claimed he was too much a small-town boy.

This was going to be the ninth Thanksgiving for us without my mother. There would always be that gaping hole in our holiday happiness. Aunt Barbara’s presence would have helped us get through it a little, so I shared my father’s disappointment. Feeling this way brought back the terrible Thanksgiving the Dollanganger children had soon after they were brought to Foxworth Hall. For them, there would never be another with their father, and that first time, they didn’t even have their mother. Just like mine, their holidays would be forever a mixture of sadness and joy, no matter how fast their freedom was returned and how rich they would all be.

When Kane arrived in the morning and we started for school, most of his conversation was about his sister and her boyfriend, Julio Lancaster.

Kane told me he was named after his maternal grandfather. He was the fourth of four children, with two older sisters and one older brother.

“How is he taking your parents?” I asked.

“My sister prepared him well. He’s overly polite. I have to believe he went overboard on his conservative appearance, too. He has a haircut like my father’s, wore a tie to dinner, wore shoes with a shine better than my father’s, and had sharp creases in his pants. He looked like he had taken a graduate course in dinner etiquette, too. If I didn’t know better, I’d have thought he was satirizing my mother especially. I loved the way she pronounced his name: Jewel-o. Darlena kept correcting her, and he kept saying, ‘It’s all right. My father’s mother calls me Jewel-e.’ Even my father had to laugh at that.”

“Why is it I suspect your sister might be going with him and brought him home just to get at your mother?”

Kane smiled. “Could be, but he’s not bad-looking, and he is a bright guy. Slim, swimmer’s build, about six foot one, with those sexy dark Spanish eyes and a voice as melodic as Julio Iglesias’s, whose singing my mother likes, by the way. It’s like those racists who watch Oprah regularly.”

“Hearing you talk about your mother helps me to understand why you’re so ready to condemn Corrine Dollanganger,” I said.

“Yeah, I know, but something keeps me from all-out condemning her. But I can’t help believing she’s going to break Christopher’s heart.”

I nodded, and Kane changed the topic. He described how his close buddies were teasing him about me. Already, he had been seeing me longer than he had any other girl in our school.

“I’m losing my playboy reputation. It’s even caught my mother’s attention.”

“Oh? Is she upset?”

“No, but she quipped that I might have to bring you around to introduce you to her if my ‘new fling’ continues much longer. I think some of her trusted gossips mentioned it to her. Brought up like a princess, you naturally assume you’ll be queen.”

“If you keep talking about her like that, I’ll be terrified of meeting her.”

“That’s the idea. She likes people being a little terrified of her.”

“Stop it,” I said, and he laughed. The difference between him this morning and the way he had been when he was leaving my house the day before was like night and day.

The school day always seemed to go faster on Fridays. Maybe it was because of how hard we wished for the final bell and the beginning of the weekend. Tina Kennedy tried to up the excitement for her party by revealing that her parents had agreed to pay for a disc jockey. Her family had a large ranch-style home with a beautiful five acres just outside of the city in the opposite direction from ours. Besides the adult bar, her father owned five Burger King franchises and a number of triple-net properties renting to drugstores and two supermarkets. Tina liked to brag about all this in front of Kane, as if she was giving him another reason they belonged together. She practically came out and said, “The rich belong with the rich,” the implication being that Kane certainly didn’t belong with the daughter of a middle-class construction worker.

Despite how hard she tried to get him to commit to attending her party, Kane held out the possibility that we might not be able to make it. He kept the reason vague and was so convincing he had most, if not all, of my girlfriends believing it and tugging at me to tell them what we would be doing instead. I hadn’t done a very good job of hiding my lack of interest in her party, anyway.

“I can’t say, because it might be a surprise,” I told them, which only intensified their curiosity.

Suzette suggested that it might have to do with Darlena. She knew Darlena had brought her boyfriend home from college. Her mother was a member of Kane’s mother’s gossip club. “Maybe they’re going on a double date,” she told the others.