Blessing in Disguise (44 page)

Drugs? All the kids tried them these days. He winced at the idea of Hannah’s popping a single pill, or smoking a joint. But even if she did, she was too smart to let herself get hooked. Wasn’t she?

Or had that tennis-jock boyfriend of hers pressured her into sleeping with him? Jack remembered what it had been like for him at that age, wanting to mount anything with tits. And Ben—he’d had girls following him home from school since seventh grade. Nowadays he could sleep with just about any woman, and probably had had his share. He wouldn’t know—Ben didn’t confide in him. But Hannah, his baby, his little girl, with a guy just in it for the sex, she’d be miserable.

Jack wasn’t about to let Ben’s hedging stop him. “But you
do
know what it is that’s bothering her? You’ve talked to her?”

“Dad ...”

“Ben, I’m not asking you to betray any confidences here. I just want to know what you
think.”

Ben lifted his head, and in his wintergreen eyes—Natalie’s eyes—Jack caught a look that he couldn’t quite make out, but that nonetheless made him uneasy. He’d seen that look before—a slight narrowing of the lids, a faint glittering deep within his pupils. Did Ben hate him? Not just harboring a few gripes, the usual kid’s stuff, but really
hate
him?

“The thing is, Dad ...” Benjamin straightened up, just having tied his shoes; regarding his lean, muscular torso. Jack felt proud of his son’s build, and at the same time a little chagrined at his own thickening waistline. “... Hannah would kill me if she knew I’d said anything.”

Jack, in the midst of knotting his own tie, felt his fingers grow suddenly clumsy. So it
was
serious. Carefully, he asked, “Is it something you think I
should
know?”

“She’s afraid she might be pregnant.”

“Jesus. Oh, Christ.”

Benjamin cut a sidelong glance at him, then said, “Look, let’s get one thing straight. You didn’t hear it from me.

Jack nodded, and sat down on the bench between the rows of lockers. His heart gave a dull kick before settling into a rapid rhythm. Pregnant? His Hannah, his baby?

If it
was
true, what would they do? What would
she
do?

Have to talk to her.
He’d keep his promise to Ben ... but there was no sense waiting around for Hannah to confide in him. Before the divorce, she would have come to him ... but not these days.

Jack remembered Hannah’s starting her period. Thirteen, and about as graceful as a split-rail fence, her face on fire as she whispered it to him—
him,
not Natalie. He’d wanted to hug her, but he hadn’t. Instead, he’d taken her to Rexall’s. He could still see her, a skinny kid with braces and no chest to speak of, hovering over by the magazine section, pretending the large and conspicuous man standing in the checkout line with the box of Kotex tucked under his arm was in no way connected to her.

Poor kid. To have confided in Benjamin, she must have been pretty desperate.

“All right,” he told Ben, giving in to a sigh that weighed on him like the Rock of Ages. “I didn’t hear it from you.”

“You going to talk to her?” Ben looked anxious.

“I see no other choice,” Jack said, feeling as if the air around him had grown too heavy to breathe.

He sat up straighter, observing a thickset man—smaller than he, but with a belly that, like his, had seen better days—wrench open a nearby locker, still gasping for breath after his swim. He felt a sour apple of dread lodge in his gut.

He thought of that line from the Kenny Rogers song.
You got to know when to hold them ... know when to fold them.

Now. Starting now. With Hannah. He had to stop pretending it would all turn out okay as long as they just rolled with the punches. He couldn’t bear it if the two of them ended up like Grace and her mother.

When Jack called to ask Hannah if she’d have dinner with him, she’d told him she was swamped with homework. Not wanting to seem too anxious, he’d arranged to take her out the following night. Now they sat at a wobbly-legged table in the back room of Hannah’s favorite grungy pizza parlor, Arturo’s, on West Houston, where the pizza was slid from coal-heated brick ovens on long-handled wooden paddles, and the waiters and waitresses took turns performing at the microphone.

But Hannah, who usually could put away half of an enormous pizza dripping with mozzarella, ate only one slice, and then sat picking at a second while Jack gobbled up more than he knew was good for him. More than Hannah, policewoman of his cholesterol count, would have let him get away with, had she not been so wrapped up in herself.

He remembered, when she was little, how they’d dance around the living room to Patti Page’s “Tennessee Waltz,” with her small feet planted on his shoes, as she giggled and clung to his trousers to keep from losing her balance. Looking down at the crooked part in her hair, at her flowered nightie billowing about her spindly ankles he’d felt both so vulnerable and so protective.

He wanted to protect her now. But she was acting as if she barely knew him.

It wasn’t until the waiter was clearing away their plates that Jack ventured, “How’s it going with you and Conrad? Seems like I haven’t heard his name pop up on the old hit parade lately.” He smiled, hoping his anxiety didn’t show.

Hannah’s gaze fixed on him for the first time that evening. “I don’t know,” she said with what seemed an elaborate pretense at nonchalance, “I guess I haven’t seen that much of him lately, except at school.”

Jack waited. “You mean you two are no longer an item?”

She rolled her eyes. “Daddy, you’re so old-fashioned.
Nobody
talks like that anymore. Anyway, I’m not sure we ever were, as you put it, an ‘item.’ ” She dabbed at her chin with a napkin she’d folded into a neat square.

“Oh?”

“He’s not really my type. His big dream is to be a lawyer someday and make a ton of money.”

“You can still be head over heels about someone who’s not your type.”

“You mean like you and Grace?” She said it jokingly, a rueful smile lurking at the corners of her down-turned mouth, but he caught the barb.

“Sort of,” he answered guardedly.

“Daddy, this is the nineties. Kids my age don’t even
date
anymore. My friends and I, we just hang out, that’s all. It’s sort of like you’re in this club, and if you like somebody and he likes you, well, that’s cool ... but it’s not necessarily this big deal.”

Unless you happen to be sleeping together.

Jack pictured himself as Fred Flintstone, cudgel in hand, swinging it at Conrad, whom he’d met only once, but imagined to be the kind of heartless jock who’d have bragged about his conquest in the locker room. No, that had to be another of his anachronisms. Nowadays it was all about safe sex, making sure you were “protected.” But what about when someone got hurt—who, or what, was supposed to protect you from that?

“Hannah, I may belong to another generation ...” he began cautiously, covering her hand with his. “... but one thing I
do
know—when you get involved with someone, however casual it might seem, you can’t help having feelings, certain expectations.”

She rolled her eyes. “Daddy, you don’t have to tell me. I’m
not
in kindergarten.”

I know ... because, if you were, I wouldn’t let you out of the house dressed like that.
Levi’s so worn they looked as if they’d been through a paper shredder, slouchy black lambswool sweater with holes big enough for him to put his thumb through. But at least her hair was washed and neatly combed—dark silk draped in overlapping sheaves over her back and shoulders. He remembered when he used to braid it for her every morning before school, in two long plaits, sometimes having to do it more than once, until he got the part straight enough to satisfy her.

“I just don’t want to see you get hurt, that’s all,” he told her.

Hannah sat silently picking at a strand of dried mozzarella stuck to the table. Arturo’s had gotten crowded and noisy, and now he could hear someone at the microphone in the next room launching into a lively bluegrass number.

“Daddy, what are you getting at exactly?” she asked, squinting at him as if peering through a rifle sight.

“In other words, ‘Chill, Dad’?”

She grinned. “Where did you hear that?”

“I get around.”

“I’m impressed.”

“So you’re not ...”
Pregnant.
The word hovered on his lips. “... worried about anything in particular?”

She shrugged. “What gives you that idea?”

“I don’t know. ...You haven’t been yourself lately. And as your friendly neighborhood warden, I can’t help being concerned.”

Hannah’s eyes narrowed. “Have you been talking to Grace?”

“About you? What makes you think that?”

“I don’t know. I just wondered.”

“Is there something Grace knows that’s happening with you that I don’t?”

Hannah just stared at him, her eyebrows drawing closer together, until they were meeting over the bridge of her nose. “Oh, I get it.
She
made you promise not to say anything.”

“Hannah, it wasn’t Grace—” He stopped himself before he could blurt out the truth. Ben.

“Oh, Daddy, I can
always
tell when you’re covering up. You’re so obvious. Why don’t you just come out and
say
it? You know about my stupid pregnancy scare,
because Grace told you.”

Even with her voice lowered, he felt the blast of her fury.

“I don’t have to talk to Grace to see that you’re young and beautiful and just as interested in boys as I’m sure they are in you. One thing that hasn’t changed since I was your age—teenagers’ hormones still come in the large economy size.”

She didn’t even smile at his attempt to be lighthearted. She just stared at him, her eyes with their inky lashes seeming to grow darker, larger, giving her face a tender, bruised look.

“Oh, God! I don’t believe it! I don’t
believe
I fell for it!” She startled him by jumping up, slashes of color making her cheekbones stand out. “She was only
pretending
to be my friend, just so she could run to you and rat on me.”

It wasn’t supposed to turn out this way, he thought numbly. “Hannah, it wasn’t Grace who ...”

“If it wasn’t her, then
who!
I know it’s Grace, because she hates me. Don’t you get it? Can’t you
see
how she hates me?” She was weeping now, her lashes spiky with tears. Hannah, who hadn’t let him see her cry since that day he’d moved out, when she’d sobbed and begged him not to go. His fastidious little girl, now wiping her nose on her sleeve like it hadn’t occurred to her to use a handkerchief or even a napkin.

Jack’s heart ached for her. But, Jesus, he couldn’t just sit here and let Grace take the rap. It was unfair, both to Grace and to Hannah. On the other hand, if getting Grace off the hook meant breaking his promise to Ben, what would that be saying to Ben? Their relationship was already so precarious. ...

“Grace doesn’t hate you,” Jack said, choosing his words carefully. “Believe me, she had nothing to do with this.”

Hannah took a huge, shuddery breath, and the look she fixed on him cut him to the bone. As if in some terrible way he had betrayed her.

“Hannah.” He tried to take both her hands in his, then felt them sliding from his grasp.

“Oh, Daddy,” she said, a heartbreaking catch in her voice, like when he was walking out his and Natalie’s door for the last time and she’d said goodbye.

“Here’s how we do it. ...” Tim Fitchner sketched an imaginary display in the air with his pencil. “A riser with a photo of Grace and a bigger one of her father, and, right between the two of them, a small inset of Nola Emory. And we can do the same thing in a smaller version for the counter displays. And then posters for the stores that don’t want displays ...”

Watching Cadogan’s excitable marketing director wave his pencil and pump his arms like Kurt Masur conducting the Philharmonic, Jack remembered Grace calling him a few evenings ago, an hour or so before Cordelia was due to arrive for drinks.

“Jack, I have them—Daddy’s letters. ...” She’d sounded out of breath, as if she’d been running.

“Nola?” he’d asked.

“She just left. I don’t know what made her change her mind, but she ... she wants me to use them. Now we can publish the
real
story about my father. Oh, Jack, do you know what this will mean?”

He did ... not only for Grace, but for himself.

Over the past few days, with Grace hard at work rewriting and adding new inserts to her book, he had set the machinery in motion here at Cadogan. And today’s meeting was showing him that he wasn’t the only one with high expectations for
Honor Above All.

Reinhold, adieu, maybe now you’ll get off my back,
he thought.

The only downside, as he saw it, was that by the time they published they’d have lost some of the momentum being generated by the publicity over Nola’s story. Jack still couldn’t believe how quickly it had gotten out. Someone at Cadogan—the same big-mouth who’d leaked the Ned Emory story? But it could have been anyone—an editor at one of the book clubs, or Grace’s agent putting the bug in Hollywood’s ear. Something as big as this ... almost impossible to keep a lid on it.

Jack did some quick mental calculations. Could they move up publication by a month or so? Up the print run to three hundred thousand? And if they were lucky, with at least a 70 percent sell-through, the bottom line would look good enough to satisfy even Reinhold.

But there was still the advertising-and-promotion budget to settle. Everyone was keyed up. Nell Sorensen, in publicity, had been deluged with calls since the squib in the
Daily News
yesterday. Everyone in the world seemed to want to interview Grace and Nola. They’d probably be getting more orders than it would make sense to fill. And they still needed the final okay on the budget from Reinhold. The three hundred Jack wanted to spend on promotion alone would be as much or more than they’d be putting out for all the rest of their spring list put together.

But Reinhold, as usual, was late.

Jack glanced at his watch. He was supposed to meet Grace any minute—they were having lunch in the neighborhood. She might even be waiting in his office. If Reinhold didn’t get here soon ...