Chapter 7
I decide to deliver the good news to my dad with a little fanfare.
I get up early and bake a batch of zucchini muffins and lay them out on my mother’s prized Whitfield platter.
She loved this stupid platter; I’m using it ironically.
When I was little, she read a magazine article that featured Stewart’s grandmother Lucinda’s spring table setting and became fixated on her ivy-covered fine bone china.
She hunted down a chipped platter in that same pattern and used it to serve everything from pancakes to a too-big turkey on Thanksgiving.
It was going to lend our family the elegance my mother craved, one meal at a time.
When not in use, she kept it in a stand on the counter like a shrine.
I’m frankly surprised she didn’t take it when she left.
I give Christopher a muffin and shoo him out to the front porch and wait to present my dad with the tray and the muffins and the crisp white check for thirty thousand dollars.
“You’re going to…what?” he asks. It wasn’t the reaction I was going for.
“He has an image problem since he was dumped, and his parents think he has no life. I’m going to be his pretend girlfriend.”
“Doll, I hate every single thing about this.”
I hold the check up with two hands. “But not this. There’s no way you hate this. Dad, I’m going to laugh at his jokes all summer, and we’re going to have a new roof and a little savings.”
“I don’t think Stewart Whitfield makes a lot of jokes.”
“He’s a little jokier than I thought. And I promise it’s nothing creepy. We have a contract that actually says so. He’s having it all typed up.” I laugh and pick at a crusty muffin top. I’m so relieved about the house and the money. “And he knows I need to make my shifts at the fish house.”
“We can handle that. That’s not it.” He covers my hand in his.
The same kind, warm hand that never wanted to take anything from me but needed to all the same.
“I just wish you were using the money to do something you wanted to do. I don’t like taking from you, I’ve taken enough.
” My childhood being what it was, my dad has always wanted to see me carefree.
One thing about caretakers is they are never carefree.
Without our cares, we’d just be takers like everyone else.
“Dad, a couple nights a week I’m going to put on mascara and eat fancy food.
Maybe I’ll have a few glasses of champagne.
What exactly are you taking from me? My chance to eat your signature baked potatoes?
” I smile at him and squeeze his hand. This is an answered prayer, and I want him to embrace it.
“Are you going to tell Gus?”
I’ve always tried not to lie to Gus. Not about Santa Claus.
Not even about his dad. I told him I thought he was better off without that particular dad, but that if he ever wanted more information, I would point him in the right direction.
The burdens of motherhood and personhood are things I can carry. The weight of deception I cannot.
“Of course,” I say. “But Christopher cannot keep a secret, you know that.”
“He’d go straight to Page Six,” my dad says and laughs.