by Ali Parker
And I had done a successful job avoiding my father, warning him off by telling him I needed time alone with my new wife, but eventually, he ran out of patience and cracked, calling me up and demanding we come over the next day. I could have tried to slip out of it again, but there was no point. I had to do it sooner or later, and I would rather get it over with and move on with my life once and for all.
Amaya had gotten her car from parking outside her house, and it was that beat-up old thing she had insisted on driving down to meet my father. I had tried to convince her to let me take my Mercedes, but she had been dead set, and I knew by now that there was no point arguing with her on these things.
“How long a drive is it?” she asked.
“A half-hour, if this thing doesn’t fall apart on the highway,” I replied, and she rolled her eyes at me.
“It’s not that bad,” she protested. “Just because it wasn’t built in the last two years doesn’t mean it’s total crap.”
“Right,” I replied grimly and set my eyes dead ahead. “Let’s just get there in one piece, huh?”
She drove quickly, faster than I would have, and before I knew it, we had come to a halt outside my father’s house.
“Fuck,” I muttered, checking myself in the mud-flecked side mirror.
“You all right?” she asked, and I nodded. Then, I shook my head. Then nodded again.
“Yeah, yeah, I’m fine,” I assured her. “Let’s just get this over with, shall we?”
“Agreed.” She nodded, and the two of us climbed out of the car and stood outside the gorgeous restaurant my father had booked for us tonight in the city. He had ins at fancy eateries all over the place, but this was where he came when he had to see me for one reason or another.
I trudged up the steps toward the door, and Amaya followed me. She slipped her hand into mine. I glanced over at her, surprised but not protesting.
“We have to make it look real, don’t we?” she remarked, offering me a comforting smile, but before I could reply, the door burst open and my father, Leo Balaban, was standing there staring down at the two of us. Why wasn’t he at his table? Had he seen us coming and wanted to intercept us at the door to make sure Amaya was fit for a place like this? His eyes slid between the two of us, and he nodded and stepped aside.
“Come in,” he ordered, his voice booming so loudly, I was sure the entire street could hear us.
“You know that’s what the host is for, right, Dad?” I muttered, mostly to myself, but of course, he overheard.
“That’s enough out of you.” He shot me a warning look, and I knew better than to protest, even though I hated it with a passion when he talked down to me in that way. We took a seat at the table he had booked for us, opposite his new wife—fuck, Kitty? Karen? What was her name again?—and I could feel the nerves coming off Amaya in waves.
“It’s lovely to meet you, Mr. Balaban,” she offered at last, and he leaned back and surveyed her like she was a piece of property he was thinking of investing in.
“So, you’re the wife, I suppose.” He shot a look in my direction.
“Yes, that’s me,” she replied perkily, and I could tell from the set of her jaw that she’d decided she was going to make a good impression no matter what. He picked up the menu and glanced over it as a waiter approached, looking up as he arrived at the table. He ordered for all of us as he was wont to do, and Amaya shot me a “seriously?” look that almost made me laugh.
“So, Amaya, what is it exactly you do?” My new stepmother, whose name I couldn’t for the life of me recall, smiled at Amaya.
“I’m a librarian,” she replied. “I work at the university library up on Main. What about you?”
“Oh, I retired a long time ago.” The woman shot an adoring look at my father. “I used to be a model, but then I met Leo, and that all changed.”
“A model?” Amaya leaned in curiously. “That sounds fascinating.”
“It really was,” she sighed, and before I knew it, the two of them were lost in a conversation about the fashion industry while my father looked on approvingly. As the food arrived and the conversation lulled, he jumped in to talk to Amaya himself.
“So, Amaya, what else did you bring to the table?” he asked, looking at her intently. I fought the urge to roll my eyes.
“Dad, she’s not a business deal. She’s my wife,” I reminded him, but he ignored me. Damn, sometimes I wondered if I was the only one in my family who knew how to act like a human being. Maybe my relative normalcy had come from my mother’s side, but I had been so young when she’d died, I could barely remember her.
“Well, on top of my librarian skills,” Amaya cocked her head, “a ferret.”
“A ferret?” My dad spluttered, and I couldn’t help but chuckle. Maybe we had something in common. That had pretty much been my internal reaction when she’d shown me that thing as well.
“Yep.” Amaya nodded, and Dad chuckled. A laugh—that was a good sign.
“And how exactly did you end up with a ferret?” he ventured.
Amaya launched off into the story of how she came to have him, after a family Jolene used to know through one of the schools she attended found a litter of them around the back of their garden and had done their best to pawn them off on anyone who would take them. She had been too soft-hearted to say no, and before she knew it, she had to housetrain a ferret on top of everything else.
The story amused my father, and he laughed so loudly a couple of times, the whole restaurant seemed to be shooting him dirty looks. In the midst of the story, I remembered that my new stepmother’s name was Karen and finally felt myself begin to relax. I could manage this. It might have been weird, but I could do it.
The food was good, and Amaya was bright and perky and everything I needed her to be, given that my father would eat me alive if he got a sniff that I had married someone totally wrong for me and the family.
By the time dinner was drawing to a close, my father was giving me these looks and nods that told me everything I needed to know about his opinion on Amaya. When she got up to go to the bathroom, he delivered his approval on a silver platter.
“I like her,” he announced, as though that was the most important thing in the world.
“Well, that’s handy since I’m married to her,” I shot back, and he rolled his eyes.
“Son, I’m trying to approve of your wife. Just let me,” he ordered, and I managed to smile. I was still so tense at the notion of how I’d thought this night was going to go, I was having a hard time unwinding myself, but this was good news, the news I’d been hoping to hear.
“You should keep her around.” He nodded in the direction she’d gone in. “I can tell she suits you.”
I bit the inside of my cheeks and tried not to make a comment about most people sticking at their respective marriages for more than two years at a time, but I thought better of it, considering she was only meant to stick around for a year. She returned to the table and squeezed my hand, playing the ever-attentive wife.
“Well, I think I should get the check.” My father leaned back and waved over a waiter.
“Thank you for this evening.” Amaya smiled at the two of them graciously. “I had a lovely time.”
“We should go out and do lunch sometime,” Karen suggested, and Amaya nodded. I wasn’t sure whether she was just playing or not, but she seemed genuinely enthusiastic.
“I’d really like that.” She smiled. I couldn’t imagine the two of them going out together. Karen was likely another in a long line of gold diggers for my father, and Amaya had never come across that way to me, which was somewhat ironic, given our setup but still. Maybe the two of them would become best friends and that would be that. My whole life had shifted a few degrees out of place, and now anything was possible.
“Thanks for dinner,” I offered my father, knowing if I attempted to pay he would take it as a personal insult.
“We’ll be around to visit the two of you soon,” he half-warne
d, half-threatened, and I hid my groan of annoyance. At least he liked her enough to want to see us again. That was a start. Though maybe it would have been better for everyone had he hated her so much, he’d sworn never to spend another minute with her. Then, at least, I might have gotten a moment’s peace.
16
“Are you sure you’re all right?” I asked, for what felt like the thousandth time since we’d left the restaurant.
“I’m fine,” Kristo assured me, but he had barely spoken a word to me since we’d left a few hours before. What was going on with him? Had I managed to piss him off in some way? Had I done something wrong? I felt like it had gone well, as well as could be expected, yet he was sitting there, hands on the wheel and gaze fixed dead ahead, looking as though someone had jammed a ramrod up his ass.
“I liked your dad.” I tried to change tack. “And his wife. They seemed nice.”
“Yeah, well, don’t get used to her,” Kristo remarked. “They’ll probably be broken up before we are.”
“They seemed to really like each other,” I offered, but he didn’t respond. I sank back into the seat. I was already tired from the day we’d had, and I sure as hell wasn’t going to spend the rest of the evening trying to coax conversation out of him if he didn’t want to give it to me.
We arrived back at the apartment, barely exchanging another word, and I made my way upstairs and into my room, peeling off the fancy clothes he had bought for me. I was so sure the evening had gone well, but now that we were back and he was acting weird, I wasn’t sure if I was reading into it the wrong way. Maybe I had fucked up without knowing it, said something to his father to insult him that Kristo’s dad was too polite to call out at the time? But then, I wasn’t going to learn if he wouldn’t talk to me about this shit, so what the hell was I supposed to do?
I carefully hung the dress up. It was beautiful, really beautiful, but I couldn’t have thought of anything less suited to me as a person. Whenever he dressed me up to meet his family, whether it was buying a collection of dresses for me to wear or just casting his eye over my look to give me his opinion, I found myself feeling the way I had that first night we’d met. Out of place. Sexy, sure, but like I was wearing some uniform required of me by the world at large.
I pulled on some comfortable clothes and went to speak to my baby ferret. Kneeling down in front of his cage, I stuck my fingers through the bars so he could come up and snuffle my fingers. He did so gratefully, as though he’d been waiting for my return since I’d left the house in the first place. Well, at least one man in this house didn’t seem to mind me talking to him. His little whiskers tickled my fingertips, and I couldn’t help smiling.
I realized I needed to top off his food bowl and headed through to the living room, racking my brains as to where I’d put his food. I planted my hands on my hips and surveyed the room, but there was nothing there that I needed. I started to make my way through the house until I reached the spare room and found what I was looking for.
I paused for a moment as I looked around that spare room. He had been kind enough to sleep in there as long as I needed the bed to myself, and I had barely been in here as a result, guessing he needed his privacy, given all that was going on. But what caught my eye was all the art stacked at the back wall of the room, paintings, some framed and some not, in a variety of styles, charcoal sketches, full-on oil portraits, some more avant-garde stuff. I glanced around to make sure he wasn’t going to come in and bust me and then leafed through the lot of them. There were so many, at least two or three dozen, and yet the walls of this place stood utterly empty. Why hadn’t he hung those up? He had obviously spent a huge stack of cash on acquiring these works, and his apartment still looked as though he had just moved in, as though he spent as little time there as possible.
I went back to feed Toby, thoughts humming away. I could hear Kristo in the shower, which would give me a little bit of time to get started. If I was his wife, then this place was my home, and I wasn’t going to let it sit around looking like a doctor’s waiting room for a moment longer.
Making my way back through to the bedroom, I gathered as much of the art as I could and moved through to lay it out over my bed. There was so much to work with, so many styles and techniques, I could have themed each room totally different and still come up with at least five or six pictures for every one, which was exactly what I intended to do.
I sorted out the pictures into piles of those I thought would work well together. Soon enough, I found I had enough to decorate every room of the apartment, and I started carrying them through each room, working out which ones would look best where, the color schemes that would best draw out the potential of this place.
“What are you doing?” Kristo asked, eyeing me from behind the breakfast bar where he was sipping on a beer. I shrugged.
“I saw all this art, and I thought it was a shame not to hang it,” I replied casually. I half-expected him to tell me off for getting my hands all over his stuff, but he just shrugged.
“Fair enough.”
I continued around the apartment until I had decided exactly what was going to go where. After the last few weeks, it was good to do something that was so totally practical, so hands-on. When I was done, I headed back through to the kitchen and stood in front of him.
“I need to borrow your toolbox,” I announced, and he cocked his head at me.
“And what makes you think I’d have a toolbox?” he remarked, the flicker of a smile passing over his face. I rolled my eyes.
“Because you’re a modern man who can handle his own shit?” I remarked, and he got to his feet with a slight sigh and headed through to the spare room.
“I might have one that my stepmom gave me years ago for Christmas,” he called through, and I heard him moving things around in there. “But I don’t know if I’ve ever used it.”
“It’s all right. I know what I’m doing,” I called back, and a moment or two later, he emerged holding a large plastic box.
“This what you’re looking for?”
After he placed it down on the counter, I flicked it open and surveyed the equipment inside, nails, a hammer, some screws.
“Yep, this’ll work.” I nodded. “But I’m going to need a little help.”
“I’m sure I can manage that,” he replied, and soon enough, we had retreated into my bedroom to start hanging the first half-dozen pictures in there. It wasn’t exactly how I’d imagined our very first encounter in here would go, but I would take it for the time being. He was paying attention to me, at least, and that was more than I could say for a few hours ago.
“You know, you have good taste in art,” I remarked, taking a step back to check that one of the larger modern pieces we’d just hung was straight. He was holding, and I was hammering, and the two of us made a pretty solid partnership, if I did say so myself.
“You think?” He stepped back to join me and cocked his head at the piece. “I don’t really know. Sometimes, I really like most of the stuff I get, and sometimes, I wonder if I’m just being conned to hell by the people making this stuff, you know?”
“Well, I like it.” I waved my hand. “And it’ll look better when it’s up on the walls, anyway. Art’s meant to be looked at, not hidden away.”
“Exactly why I took you out to meet my family tonight,” he shot back playfully, and I raised my eyebrows.
“All right, smooth talker,” I teased back. “Come help me with the stuff I have for the bathroom.”
The tension between us broke, lifting for the first time since we’d arrived back home. He took some time to fully unwind, but soon, the two of us were actually having a good time getting all his art hung up around the place, bantering about the best wall for the biggest piece, about whether he should have paid ten thousand dollars for what amounted to a sketch of an orange.
He was good-humored about it and happy to let me take the lead, his confidence slowly returning to him. I wondered if it had something to do with his father.
I knew in high-achieving families like his, relationships could take on a tense edge quickly. But I was happy to just talk to him, to tease and laugh and dance around that apartment, turning it from a cold, sterile place to a home filled with color.
When we were done, I slumped down on the couch and punched both fists into the air.
“Yes,” I celebrated, and he sat down next to me and proffered me a hand for a high-five. I slapped my palm against his and felt myself flush a little. All right, so I was still doing the schoolgirl-crush thing. That was good to know.
“It looks so much better in here,” he remarked as he glanced around. “I’ve been meaning to do that for so long.”
“Why didn’t you?” I wondered aloud. “All those paintings just sitting there.”
He fell silent for a moment, thinking. I liked that he took time to think before he answered my questions instead of just blurting out anything that came into his head. And when he spoke again, I felt my heart twist with sadness for him.
“I didn’t know if I’d be staying here,” he replied at last. “I mean, I knew I wanted to have somewhere that was my own, somewhere I could build a life, but with my family putting all that pressure on me to get married, I didn’t want to … I didn’t want to do too much to a place that was going to have someone else in it soon.”
