Chapter Three #2
“Girl’s got a mouth on her,” Fiona chuckled. “She get that from you?”
I blinked. I’m pretty sure Samantha was doing the same.
How the hell was Dawn managing to sound so reasonable?
The energy in the room was shifting. The longer the interview went on, the more Fiona actually seemed to be warming up to Dawn—and the worse Samantha’s icy reception looked. We needed to do something. I needed to do something.
As Dawn launched into an anecdote about Samantha’s difficult teenage years, I saw a familiar expression fill my babygirl’s face.
It was the same look she’d had back at the wedding, right before I’d stepped in and defused her parents’ attempts at bullying her into letting them stay.
It was fear, but mixed with something even worse.
They take everything, Samantha had told me.
They’d ruined her relationship with Chloe, with Jessamyn, and if they’d had the chance they would’ve started right in on our relationship.
They would’ve spent their energy chipping away at the incredibly special thing held between me, my babygirl, and my two other wives.
And now Dawn was trying to drive a wedge between Samantha and Fiona Hall.
“You’d call it… swinging, I suppose,” Dawn said a few minutes later as the topic changed. “It was nothing like what my daughter has—we didn’t do anything permanent, you understand. I think we were just having fun, living our lives.”
“And ruining ours,” Samantha snapped.
That pained look returned to Dawn’s face. “Sweetheart,” she said, turning to Samantha. “Listen. I know I have not always been the best mother. But, with everything that’s happened, everything that’s going to happen…”
And that’s when the pot that had been simmering at just below a boil this entire interview exploded.
Because as she said it, Dawn reached across the gap between the chairs and put her hand on my wife’s stomach.
On her pregnant belly.
Samantha was so stunned for a moment that she froze, like a deer in headlights. She looked down at the hand on her body—at the touch she hadn’t asked for. At the gesture that was trying so hard to make everything that was happening in that room seem normal and okay.
And my babygirl lost it.
She grabbed Dawn’s fingers the way you’d grab a stray hair that was refusing to be plucked and yanked, nearly pulling her mother completely off-balance.
“Do not touch my baby,” Samantha snarled.
A little less than a week ago, I thought I’d seen Samantha Avery as angry as she was ever going to get.
I’d watched her charge down the stairs with a baseball bat in her hand and murder in her eyes, fully intending to bludgeon Jessamyn Fawkes until the woman either left the premises or wound up buried in the backyard. I’d had to restrain her from doing it.
I thought that was her upper limit.
But Dawn Lowry had just pushed her right past it.
Samantha’s mother either didn’t notice or couldn’t properly recognize it. She looked at her hand, flexing the fingers, a little bit of that ‘how can you do this to me’ Dawn from the wedding surfacing on her face. “Samantha, there’s no need to be so cruel—”
“Cruel!?”
My babygirl was out of her seat. I was half out of my seat, though I wasn’t sure whether I was planning to rush to her side or hold her back from tearing her mother to shreds. Either way, I knew something painful was about to happen.
Fiona looked shocked—and a little appalled. “Sam, sit down—”
“You’re doing the thing!” my babygirl yelled. Tears brimmed in the corners of her eyes. “The thing you always do, where you look normal and decent and reasonable until people actually believe it! How long until you and Dad tell Fiona you love her vibe and try to get her drunk with you?”
Fiona’s jaw dropped. Dawn looked like she was going to be sick.
“Your father is not here,” she said, marshaling a defense. “Sweetheart, Warren—”
Samantha didn’t want to hear about her father.
“When I was eighteen, I swam varsity,” Samantha said, the words coming out in a rush.
“I didn’t want to do it—I wanted to be a cheerleader—but Dad pushed me.
Said I had it in me to be a real champion, which I should’ve known was bullshit because I never placed better than fourth on the team even on my best day. ”
I could practically hear the alarm bells ringing in Dawn’s skull. “Samantha, darling, no...”
Samantha wasn’t listening. She wasn’t even seeing. Her eyes remained focused on a point about three feet above the table, and I knew they were fixed on the past.
“The best girl on the team was Chloe,” Samantha said, her voice toneless.
“She was my best friend. I met her at youth group. We went to Six Flags together. She’s the reason I’m a roller coaster nerd.
” She shook her head. “I was so fucking scared to get on El Toro, but she dared me to and I did it and we both screamed at the top of our lungs the whole way down.” She sniffed hugely.
“I loved that girl. I had never been happier in my entire life than I was in the back of the bus with her and the rest of the team on the way to a meet.”
Dawn started to speak, only for Fiona to cut her off with a gesture. The host of Call Your Daddy clearly wanted to know where my babygirl was going with this.
“In February we had an overnight meet,” Samantha said, her bottom lip trembling. “Dad was the chaperone—Dad was always the team chaperone. The booster.”
Fiona’s brows shot skyward. She just figured out where this is going, I realized.
“Some kids dared me to steal a Diet Coke or some pretzels from that stupid little self-serve hotels always have in their lobby,” Samantha said—and now she turned to Dawn, unleashing the full force of her anger on her mother. “That’s when I saw them. My dad and Chloe. Together. Intimately.”
Fiona gasped.
“Dad fucked my best friend,” Samantha said, her mouth twisting with anger.
“My best friend who’d turned eighteen like two months ago, and God does it make me sick to know he was just counting down the days on the fucking calendar!
The whole reason I was on the swim team was so Dad could find girls to hook up with. Girls my age.”
Dawn stiffened. “And now you’re married to a man twice your age—”
“I am not Chloe!” Samantha screamed. “I’m not Jessamyn either, who both of you fucked like it was some kind of game to see how fast you could corrupt the girl I thought was my fucking hero!”
Fiona looked stunned. Like a woman who went fishing for trout and caught the Loch Ness Monster, I thought.
“You double-teamed her bestie?” the host blurted. “Her Mom and Dad!? What the fuck!?”
Dawn Lowry’s face had gone the color of milk. “You have no idea what that year was like for me,” she whispered.
“I don’t care.”
“That is not fair.” Dawn’s voice cracked, and for the first time since she’d taken her seat it sounded like there was something real underneath of it. “You don’t—Samantha, you were a child, you don’t know what was happening in that house, you have no idea what your father and I were—”
“I’m not you,” Samantha said. “And this child is not going to be me!”
She put a hand on the slight swell of her belly, rising to her full height.
“This child is not going to be left with the freaking nanny in Copenhagen so I can go chase European skanks. I am going to be there for this kid—at every recital, at every PTA meeting, at every sports game or dance class or whatever the hell they want to do!”
She pointed at me, sitting in my chair off camera.
“And that man, Mom? That man that I love and call Daddy and who is going to be the best fucking father in the world?” She leaned in close, dropping her voice to a menacing whisper. “He. Is never. Going to fuck any of their FRIENDS!”
It was one hell of a performance. Tears streamed down Samantha’s face as she stood over both her mother and Fiona Hall, one hand still pointed at me like she was indicating the only safe path out of a fucking minefield.
I watched the shock travel through Fiona, followed by an almost guilty look at how many views this episode of the podcast was undoubtedly going to get.
“My child is never going to be treated like an accessory,” Samantha finished. “Jack and Kiki and Marcie and me—we are nothing like you and Dad. We will never do anything remotely like what the two of you did to our family.”