Page 13 of The Crush
“Oh my god,” she says, her hands shooting up, covering her breasts.
I grit my teeth, swallowing down my disgust. I show nothing. I am the portrait of unflinching as I lean against the kitchen counter. Impervious.
“Hungry?” I ask as I crunch into the carrot.
Even in the dark, I can see her face turn red. “I’m so sorry.”
But she’s not moving. Perhaps her bare feet are stuck to the floor of the entryway.
“I had no idea you were going to be in the kitchen,” she says, stumbling on words.
I smile. All plastic. “That’s clear.”
She spins around, rushes off.
I finish the carrot in the silence, then return to the upstairs bedroom. I can’t wait till I don’t live here anymore. If I couldneverset foot in this house again, it wouldn’t be soon enough.
When groans slink up the stairs and curl down the hallway, I grab my headphones, punch up the soundtrack forAsk Me Next Year,a little-known Broadway musical, and let it help me blot out the sounds of my father’s sex den below.
The next morning when I go downstairs, still humming the bittersweet tunes, I brace myself for a run-in with the new lady. But the amply endowed woman is nowhere to be seen. Instead, my father is brewing tea and listening to NPR’s morning report, dressed for the day in a polo shirt and beige slacks.
He turns my way and smiles. “Ready for the big day?”
“Yup,” I bite out.
“What’s wrong, poppet?”
I’ve had enough. I’ve swallowed years of lies, and I’m done. “I’m not here that often,” I tell him. “Just summers and breaks. So, do you think you could ask your sleepover guests to, I dunno, wear clothes when they wander around the house at night?”
A slow grin spreads across his face, and he rolls his green eyes—the same shade as mine. “Poppet, it’s nothing. You have all the same parts.”
That’shisargument? “So if you were queer, and had a half-naked man as a guest this would benot okay. But because you’re straight, it’sokay?”
He furrows his brow, trying to work out my logic. “Is this about orientation or identity?”
I huff. There’s no point. He doesn’t get it. I grab a bagel and bite into it, ripping off a hunk.
As I chew, the front door creaks open and Joan sails in, just arrived from Boston. “I couldn’t miss sending you off to Paris for the semester, sweetheart,” she calls out, kind and oblivious.
My throat squeezes.My father fucked someone else while you were out of town. Her tits are perkier than yours. Instead, I say,“Thank you for coming.”
I know better than to tell her the truth.
When I was thirteen, and my father was married to Roselyn, wife number three, I let slip at the dinner table that his friend Graceanne had spent the night a few weeks before. I’d thought she was simply sleeping over in the guest room.
The next day, Roselyn checked into aspa. My father sat me down in the living room and told me I needn’t have concerned myself about Graceanne. After all, he and Roselyn had an arrangement.An understanding. “Darling, I know you’re trying to be helpful, but it’s better you don’t get involved. Roselyn doesn’t need to know about my guests. It’ll only upset the delicate balance of an adult relationship.”
But that left me more confused. “Okay, but you said that woman was your friend. Graceanne?”
He’d patted my knee. “Exactly. Just a friend. So we don’t need to tell Roselyn these things again. They can send her over the, well, the edge.” A fatherly hug. An unspoken warning. “Best to just keep things that happen in the house…in the house.”
Let sleeping dogs lie.
Roselyn moved back in a month later. “She’s so much better now,” my dad had declared. Like her stint wherever she’d been had erased the memory not only of his cheating but of my big mouth.
They stayed together for another year, then my father left her. I knew what was coming when he switched from a rainforest scent to a spicy one. He always picks out a new cologne when he’s ready for a new woman.
Perhaps Roselyn had upset his delicate balance, because he soon moved on to Mariana, marrying her for a few years, then changing his cologne again when he met Joan.