Super Host

by Kate Russo

  “You really think your lame jokes are a good idea right now?”

  “No,” he says, feeling scolded. “Wait ’til you meet Mia,” he says, trying a new tack. “She’s beautiful, smart, and not at all annoying, even with my genetics in the mix.”

  He can hear her breathing, measured and mindful, like breathing exercises.

  “Alright. Come in later.” She takes another deep breath. “And, Bennett?” she says, wearily. “Come back to mine tonight. Please.”

  “Oh,” he says, remembering the deal he made with Kirstie to stay in the house. “Sure. Of course.”

  He sets down his phone, the sonogram of the baby still up on the screen. When the image goes dark, he refreshes it, telling himself that if he and Claire can come up with a plan tonight, he’ll get excited about whatever that is. Maybe they’ll decide he should sell the house and use the money to buy something more modest in Stoke Newington. There’s a nice family vibe there. He thinks back to that Saturday when he and Claire were walking down Church Street and she got clobbered in the ankle by a stroller, not once but three times, on the way to Clissold Park. She’d been desperate to have a picnic. “It’ll be like an impressionist painting,” she’d said, to sell him the idea. They’d gone to Whole Foods, bought a whole lot of fancy cheese and crackers, laid out a picnic blanket just by the pond, and he kissed the bruises forming on her ankle.

  Just add your own stroller and a screaming baby to that image.

  Was that so hard? He hears the question in Kirstie’s voice.

  Yes.

  That’s the thing. Every time he comes up with a suitable scenario for a future with Claire, his thoughts immediately return to Kirstie. Where will she be when he’s in Clissold Park playing happy family? Will she be alone? Lonely? Earlier, she asked him to keep making her smile. How can he do that now?

  * * *

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  When he arrives at the Claret, Mia is already sitting at the bar, leaning forward, showing Claire photos on her phone. Claire is in her tip dress, her cleavage plunging at Mia’s eyeline. He watches them through the window as they laugh. Claire reaches across the counter to grab Mia’s phone and gasps.

  My daughter and my pregnant girlfriend are bonding over a painting of a giant vagina.

  He has to linger outside a little longer than intended, because he’s getting emotional again. It’s an odd thing to get emotional about. Of course Claire would love that painting. How have I never thought to tell her about it?

  Claire spots him through the window and smiles like she hasn’t smiled in so long, like she doesn’t hate his guts. Mia turns around and waves her arm like, Get in here.

  “Don’t be a stalker, Dad,” she says as he comes through the door.

  “I wasn’t stalking,” he says, putting his arm around his daughter and kissing her on the head. “Just enjoying the view.”

  Mia gives him her Don’t be weird look. He loves that look. It only makes him want to be weirder. He glances at Claire. He hadn’t really thought about this moment. Will she want him to kiss her or stay away? Before it all got complicated, she would have wanted a kiss, she would have instigated it, but now he’s not so sure. He smiles at her. “Hi.”

  She smiles back. “Hi.”

  When he puts out his hand, open, across the bar, she places hers in it and he pulls her forward, giving her a gentle kiss on the lips, not the sloppy kind she usually goes for to rile up the regulars. “How are you?” he asks.

  She rolls her eyes. “Tourists, all damn day.”

  He can see out of the corner of his eye that Mia’s watching them with a proud little smile, like she’s the parent. He gives Claire’s hand a squeeze before letting go.

  Taking a seat next to Mia, he says, grinning, “You were showing her a picture of that painting, weren’t you?”

  Mia grins back. “You mean the vagina painting?” She winks at Claire, who’s pouring Bennett a glass of wine without even asking what he wants. “Dad can’t say the word ‘vagina.’”

  Both women look at him now.

  Right. This is why I didn’t want these two to meet.

  “Seriously?” He looks back and forth between them.

  “Go on,” Claire says, also grinning now.

  “Vagina?” He says the word, slowly, quietly, like it’s a secret password, sending both Mia and Claire into fits of laughter. He throws his hands up in the air and then, exasperated, lifts his glass of wine and says, “Cheers.”

  Mia, still cackling, rests her head on Bennett’s shoulder for stability. He sets down his glass and puts his arm around her, then runs his other hand over her hair like he did when she was little. He looks over at Claire on the other side of the bar, who is watching them, misty-eyed either from laughter or the sight of father and daughter, he’s not sure.

  * * *

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  Mia and Claire are getting along like a house on fire, as he suspected they would, so well, in fact, that these two women would be just fine without him. They talk about art, about books, about their bordering neighborhoods. And, of course, they talk about Bennett, as if he isn’t sitting right there. From time to time, he lets his mind wander. Mostly, he thinks about Kirstie in that big house all by herself, remembering how lonely it was for him after Eliza left. It makes exactly no sense, but he wishes she could be at the Claret with them, even though he suspects that neither Mia nor Claire would like her that much. Well, Claire definitely wouldn’t, but he’s pretty sure Mia wouldn’t, either. Kirstie is brash, assertive, and opinionated. She treats Bennett like a pet, which he finds endearing, but these two surely wouldn’t.

  He hasn’t told Kirstie he isn’t coming back tonight and he can’t get it out of his head that she might be sitting in the garden with another bottle of wine, waiting to hold his hand and fight through the loneliness together. He knows that what’s in front of him, right now, is the opportunity not to be lonely anymore: a girlfriend, a daughter who likes her, and a baby on the way. If Kirstie herself had such an opportunity, wouldn’t she take it? Does she see Bennett as that opportunity? If he chooses all this, Claire and the baby, what does Kirstie have left?

  What the fuck is wrong with you?

  “Dad?!”

  “What? Sorry.”

  “You were a million miles away,” Mia says. Both she and Claire are staring at him, Claire’s face distinctly more sour than Mia’s.

  “Nope. I’m right here.” He smiles at Claire, but she doesn’t soften and he fears she might be able to read his mind.

  “I’m just going to pop to the loo,” he says, then glances at Mia. “Then you and I should consider getting some food.”

  Upstairs, he opts for a stall rather than the urinals. He shuts the door, thankful for a moment of solitude. He needs to collect his thoughts and to think what to say to Kirstie. After relieving himself, he sits on the toilet, pants still down at his knees, to compose a text. I won’t be coming home after all, he writes. Claire wants me to come over tonight.

  Back in the game, she responds only seconds later. Well done, you.

  I guess so. And though he knows he shouldn’t: Everything okay?

  Don’t be daft, darling. Everything is fine. XXX

  He can picture her brave smile, the one she used when she told him about her wanker ex-husband trying to strangle her. He tells himself maybe it’s not a brave smile at all. Maybe it’s just a smile. Maybe she’s actually, genuinely, happy for him.

  * * *

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  Back downstairs, Mia has her purse over her shoulder, ready to go.

  “Alright, kiddo, what are you hungry for? Barbecue?”

  She huffs, irked. “How about Thai?”

  “You got it.”

  He looks over at Claire. “You want something for later? Takeaway?”

  “No,
thanks,” she says, her expression suggesting that she’d rather stay angry than accept any favors from him.

  “No spring rolls? You love spring rolls.”

  “Yeah, alright,” she concedes. “Some spring rolls.”

  He smiles. “Good. How about the wine? What do I owe you?”

  “On me,” she says, through pursed lips, her arms crossed.

  “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  “Buying my boyfriend and his daughter a couple glasses of wine is ridiculous?”

  Jesus Christ.

  Mia heads toward the door, probably sensing they need some space.

  “Thank you.” He leans over the counter. “I’ll see you back here in a bit.”

  She nods like a little kid, forced to obey an infuriating set of instructions.

  He stands on his tiptoes and leans across to kiss her. She’s unwilling to meet him halfway across the bar, so he really has to stretch, his feet finally lifting off the ground.

  “Bye,” she says with a weak smile.

  Mia’s already pushing on the door, desperate to escape. “Nice to meet you, Claire! See you soon!” she shouts.

  Following Mia out, he glances back at Claire before letting the door close. Her arms are stretched across the bar, propping her up. This stance used to express confidence. The queen in her kingdom. Now it looks necessary for stability.

  “She’s cross with you,” Mia says, once they’re out on the street.

  “I know,” he says, putting his arm around her shoulders.

  “Why?”

  He swallows hard. He hates lying to his daughter. “Not sure.”

  * * *

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  They have dinner at the Thai place on Wardour Street, the one with the name he can’t pronounce. The place with all the communal tables and the heavy smell of incense. Mia shows him images of the paintings she’s working on for her end-of-year show. Her interest in feet and hands is paying off, and he’s thankful for the anatomical shift. The new paintings, close-ups of couples holding hands and caressing each other’s feet, are warm and delicate. They show a tenderness he’s relieved she still possesses after his and Eliza’s divorce, not to mention her own recent breakup. He wonders if they aren’t done from photos of her and Calum, but he doesn’t ask. He just beams because she’s so excited about them. Nothing, it seems, is weighing this girl down. He knows she hasn’t forgotten Calum; she probably still questions her decision to break up with him and probably fears, like everybody does, she’ll never find her partner in life. She’ll have her pick of partners, of course, but for now, Bennett thinks he still makes a pretty good one.

  “I have news for you, too,” he says, rubbing his fingers, greasy from crab rangoon, on a napkin.

  “What’s that?” she says, her chopsticks piled high with fried rice.

  “I’m going to be in the Royal Academy Summer Show.”

  “No way!” She shoves him. “What painting?”

  “You haven’t seen it. It’s of Claire, actually.”

  “Is she naked?” Mia asks, acting scandalized like Richard.

  He raises an eyebrow. “Possibly.”

  “Dad! All my friends go to that show!”

  “So what?”

  “So everyone’s going to know what your girlfriend looks like naked!”

  “I’m going to assume most of your friends have seen a naked woman before.” He shovels a spoonful of green curry with beef into his mouth. “Hell, if they want to know what a vagina looks like, they can just ask you.”

  She shoves him again, hard this time. He very nearly brushes up against his communal bench neighbor, a German man in a salmon-pink polo shirt. “You’re disgusting!” Mia shouts.

  “So,” he asks through laughter, “you don’t want to be my date for the opening?”

  “No way! That would be way too weird. Besides, you should take Claire. You need to score some brownie points there if you want to get out of the doghouse.”

  “Yeah, alright. I don’t need relationship advice, kiddo.”

  She scoffs into her bowl of fried rice. “The hell you don’t.”

  He bends down to meet her gaze. “Excuse me?”

  “Come on, Dad . . .”

  Come on, what?

  He’d love to sit back and get comfortable for whatever advice this nineteen-year-old is about to dispense, but it’s a fucking backless bench he’s sitting on and the German has pulled it up close to the table, so his chin is directly above his bowl. Every time the guy plunges his chopsticks into the rice and lifts them, they come up empty.

  “What, Mia?” He uses a tone with her that he hasn’t used in years, the don’t-lie-to-me tone.

  “You never fight,” she says, assertively.

  “I’m sorry?” That’s supposed to be a good thing, right? Not fighting.

  “You didn’t fight for your career. You didn’t fight for Mum. You’re not going to fight for Claire, either, are you? You’re just going to let her go.”

  So this is what a knife through the heart feels like.

  “You wanted me to fight harder for your mother? After she had an affair?”

  “Yes.”

  “Mia, she wanted to go,” he asserts.

  “Maybe in the end, but what about before that? When she just wanted you to pay attention to her and you wouldn’t. You spent all your time in the studio. She thought you were hiding in there. Hiding from her.”

  “What? Of course I wasn’t. She told you that?”

  She puts down her chopsticks. “Yeah.”

  You don’t ever ask questions, he can remember Kirstie alleging. Your girlfriend . . . must have the patience of a saint. Is he really as inattentive as everyone keeps saying he is?

  She scoots down her bench to get closer to him. “Dad, when your paintings stopped selling, you kind of disappeared back there.”

  He looks down, running a hand through his hair, aware he’s doing exactly what she’s telling him not to: hiding.

  “We kept waiting, waiting for you to get your fight back. We watched while you painted still lifes all day, every day, and then just stacked the finished work against the wall, never to be seen again.”

  “You were watching me?”

  “Well, yeah . . . We loved you.”

  “I loved you, too.” he says, taking her hands. “Both of you. You know that, right?”

  “I do. Mum didn’t.”

  He lets go and rubs his forehead with both hands. The guy in the salmon-colored shirt glances over at him, but only briefly. He’s got his own problems with his rice.

  “It’s fine, Dad. She’s fine.”

  Well, I’m not . . .

  He wipes his eyes with his thumbs. “Doesn’t sound like she is, not after what you told me.”

  “I spoke to her earlier today,” she says, cautiously. “Looks like Jeff came through after all. They’re getting married at city hall when I arrive in July. She wants me to be her witness.”

  “Right.” He tries to smile, tries to be okay with what he knows is the best possible outcome, even though he despises it.

  Jeff. Fucking Jeff fought for her.

  “Are you disappointed?” he asks, remembering their conversation from last night. “You were hoping she’d come home.”

  “I’ll be okay,” she says, “I have you, right?”

  Right???

  “Of course, you do.”

  * * *

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  They share a longer than usual hug outside the restaurant, Soho buzzing around them, before Mia makes her way to the Tube and he heads back toward the Claret. She tells him she loves him, even though he’s an idiot. “I know,” he says. “Thank you for that,” and he really means it. It’s both discouraging and comforting to have someone know you that well, and to
love you in spite of being the fucked-up mess you are. Still, to know that his daughter has seen and identified his cowardice isn’t something he’ll be able to carry around with him lightly. After all, disappointment is far worse than anger. He knows that from parenting. He always assumed Mia blamed Eliza for their split, as he did, but he wonders now if, in her heart, she blames him.

  He doesn’t get far before pulling out his phone. He stops, determined, in front of a lingerie shop, Agent Provocateur.

  “I hear congratulations are in order,” he says, when Eliza answers.

  “Bennett . . .” She groans on the other end.

  “In a few weeks?”

  “July first,” she says. “Once Mia arrives.” He can tell she’s trying to sound proud.

  “Good,” he says, nodding to himself.

  “Good?”

  “Yeah. Good.” He glances at the lingerie shop window. Eliza once bought a tight lace nightgown from this shop, because she thought Bennett would like it. He thought it was too scratchy. He wonders if she still has it? If Jeff likes it?

  Don’t ask her that.

  “Is that the reason you called, Bennett? To say ‘congratulations’?”

  “Were you going to tell me?”

  “I don’t know. I guess I figured Mia would.”

  “We shouldn’t expect her to pass on our news for us. That’s not fair to her.”

  “I don’t know, Bennett. Do we even need to pass on news? What’s the point?”

  What’s the point?! Twenty years of our fucking lives?!

  “Well, my girlfriend is pregnant. I’m having another kid.” The words just tumble out of his mouth, unexpected.

  Eliza says nothing, but he can hear her breathing over the sound of talk radio that plays faintly in the background. “Wow,” she finally says. “You trying to one up me?”

  “No. Not intentionally.” Maybe a little.

  “Wow. When?”

  “She’s ten weeks.” It occurs to him that he doesn’t even know the due date of his own child.