Family Affair (31 page)

“Okay,” she says, and scampers out like the rat she is.

I follow her outside about a minute later, and I find everyone seated in the living room.

“When are we doing presents?” Scott says, and turns to me. “I wanna open my present from Layla.”

“Who says I got you anything, twerp?” I tease.

“You don’t fool me,” Scott says. “You always get me the best gifts.”

It’s true. I do pride myself on my gift-giving—which, if we got psychological, could say something about me, although I have no idea what. I always go out of my way to get great gifts for people. I like getting people nice things but, more important, well-thought-out things. Like, Ginny loves scented soaps and lotions, so I will get her those as a stocking stuffer. But I truly believe soap along with candles is a cop-out gift. The gift that says: I didn’t want to think really hard about this, so here is a candle/bath set/whatever. Nice enough, especially if the person goes through them like Ginny, but I’d never give that as a main present. Who among us doesn’t want to feel at least a little like people went out of their way for us?

“Okay, it’s true,” I say. “I brought gifts.” I look to Heather. “I didn’t get you anything. I’m sorry.”

“That’s okay,” she replies. “I didn’t get you anything, either.”

“I got you
both
something,” Brett says. And he hands Heather a wrapped package that I know he didn’t handle himself because he has the wrapping skills of Edward Scissorhands.

“Should I open this now?” she asks.

“Sure,” Brett says, and I want to hurl. I seriously feel the bile creeping up.

“It’s so nicely wrapped!” Heather coos, and I bite my tongue and watch as she tries to open the gift without tearing the paper.

Just rip the paper.
Rip the fucking paper!
I want to scream. But then I have to laugh.

“Bath products!” Heather squeals. “And a candle!”

He got her bath products.
Ha!
I look to Trish, and we share a knowing smile. Then Brett slides a gift in front of me. It’s an almost identical-looking package. Did he get us both the same thing? Am I on equal footing with Heather? Is she on equal footing with me? Did he get me fucking bath products? And a candle? He couldn’t. He wouldn’t.

He did.

There. Are. No. Words.

“I got you something else,” he says, checking his watch.

Thank God. Thank the Lord. Thank Jesus and Moses and Oprah
. I knew I meant more to him than that. Than
her
.

Brett gets up and walks out of the room. Odd. Must be a big gift, I think. Then he walks out of the house. Did he buy me a new car? Is he standing, James Bond—like, in the driveway, staring back at the house with a self-satisfied smirk on his face, his finger poised above the button on a remote-control device for the explosives he’s secreted away in the fruitcake?

The discomfort level in the room, already about a seven on a one-to-ten scale because of the still extremely awkward situation among Brett, Heather, and me, is steadily rising through the midteens toward twenty. Why did he get me anything at all? We’re through, and in this uneasy truce we’ve negotiated for sharing the earth’s most precious resource—my adopted family—I know I’m accepted and yet the natural first one to be let go. Last in, first out: the option and not the necessity. If he really understood the power he possesses to push me aside, he could just start getting closer to them—

Aha! That’s it. This is his new strategy: appear decent, show kindness to Layla, quit alienating the blood relatives, and the bloodless one will be easier to let go. It’s brilliant, coming as it does during the holidays, when most people’s emotions are spinning
just a bit out of their normal orbit and meltdowns are peering around every corner like kids trying to catch a glimpse of Santa Claus.

A minute later, Brett walks in with a strange look on his face. It’s a look I don’t recognize, and I feel like I’m pretty well versed in the many expressions of Brett. He stands in the doorway and stares at me.

“Layla?” he says. “I got you something extra-special. Something I know you weren’t expecting, yet something I think you’ll appreciate.”

“Wow,” I say. “Quite a preamble.”

“Well, it’s quite a gift,” he says.

“Way to blow up her expectations.” Scott laughs. “This thing better be pretty freakin’ good.”

Brett steps out of our line of sight and then reappears a few seconds later with that same look on his face. “Layla,” he says, “I know how important family is to you, so I present to you … your father.”

Everything feels like it’s moving in slow motion. I feel my heartbeat, and I think I can even hear it. I wonder if anyone else can.
Is this really happening?
I see Brett stepping aside, but is my father going to materialize in his place? My
father?
Whom I haven’t seen in more than twenty-five years?

Sure enough, in walks a man who I guess is my father. I haven’t seen him since God knows when. I don’t have any memories of a relationship with him, and can only recognize him from pictures my mom had. He’s aged but not too terribly. He’s older for sure. I look at his face, the wrinkles, his lips, his eyes. I look to see if I see myself in this strange person who was once my dad, but I can’t look too long. I don’t want to look too long. He doesn’t deserve that long a look. He doesn’t deserve anything. I think a million things and feel even more. The conflicting emotions are short-circuiting my brain.

“Layla?” the man says.

I can’t say a thing. I’m speechless. I’m angry. At him. At Brett. At Christmas. I look at Ginny and Bill. I look at Trish and Scott. I can’t look at Brett, and I’m loath to look at Heather—how dare he allow her to be in the mix when he thrusts my long-lost father before me? I turn to my father to sneak one last look, then run out the back door and drive away.

• • •

I spend Christmas Day in bed, ignoring all phone calls from the Fosters. The holiday has been ruined forever.

I got Brett a signed Troy Aikman football jersey. His hero. Number eight. I hate myself for going above and beyond and getting kicked in the gut in return. Why did I feel the need to still get him something so nice? If I wasn’t at my wits’ end when I ran out of there, I’d have grabbed the gift bag and taken it back. And then donated it to some charity. Maybe he didn’t open it.

Though I wouldn’t have admitted it before—in fact, I’d have sworn the opposite, that it was meant to shame him with my goodness—I put a lot of thought, and dare I say love, into that gift. That’s evaporated like snow on Santa Monica Boulevard. I hate Brett Foster.

Wow
. I’ve never felt that before. Maybe that was what I needed to get past this, to get past him. Maybe he did me a favor? If the inspiration to stay inside for the better part of a week and gain four pounds in the process is a favor.

New Year’s Eve I stay home. Brooke, who’s back six weeks early from Vancouver, due to some complications on set that apparently involved a megaphone, Mountain Dew, and the director, tries to get me to go out with her, but there’s no way I’m going out to ring in the New Year (curious as I am to hear what fresh hell she’d gotten into). This is the first time I haven’t spent New Year’s Eve with Brett since I was sixteen. I watch a bunch of bad television, and also
Forrest Gump
, which always makes me cry. Brett
hates the movie, and so it seems fitting that it’s on and I’m enjoying it.

Ginny calls my cell phone at 12:01. I look at her name on my caller ID and almost don’t answer. But I can’t ignore her calls anymore. We haven’t even spoken since Christmas.

“Hi, honey,” she says. “Happy New Year!”

“What’s so happy about it?” I reply.

“Oh, come on now. Where are you?”

“I’m home, Ginny,” I say.

“Oh, dear …”

“What?”

“I’m used to catching you out having fun with Brett in some loud place.”

“Well,” I answer, “I’m sure there’s a good possibility that Brett
is
out having fun in some loud place. Just not with me.”

“This isn’t right,” Ginny says. “It’s just not … Bill?”

I hear her shuffling, and the phone sounds like she’s covering it with her hand.

“Hello?” I say.

“Honey, do you want me to come over?” she asks.

“No, no, I think it’s time I separate.”

“What do you mean?” she asks.

“I just think …” I pause to gather my thoughts. I haven’t really thought it through at all; it’s just sort of coming to me as I say it, but it feels right. “I think it’s time I move on. Tomorrow is the first day of a new year. And I think it’s time I actually … well … change out of the pajamas I’ve been wearing for three days, but also, you know. I think you know.”

“I do,” she says. “And I don’t like it one bit.”

“I don’t, either, Ginny,” I say. “But after what he did—”

“Would you believe I think he meant well?”

“I would believe that you believe it, but I don’t believe that he did.”

We sit in silence on the phone for a long while.

“I love you, Ginny,” I say, and I start to cry because it feels like I’m ending more than the phone call.

“I love you, too, Angel,” she says. “I’m here for you always.”

“I know,” I say. And I hang up. I don’t say the word
good-bye
. I can’t.

New Year’s Eve. Amateur night. The pressure is unbearable. I’ve never liked being around idiot drunk people under any circumstances, and it just so happens that about seventy percent of the populace is idiot drunk people on New Year’s Eve, making beer-goggled bad decisions before resolving to stop making bad decisions in the following year.

You’re trying way too hard to have fun, spending absurd amounts of money to get into places you otherwise would never want to go, drinking far more than you would on any other night, pretending that Ryan Seacrest is entertaining—and if that wasn’t depressing enough, you have to listen to drunken, slurred renditions of “Auld Lang Syne” and “Good Riddance (Time of Your Life).”

If you’re married, you have to spend a fortune on the night so that you and your wife can swear that next year you’re staying home. Just like you swore you’d do last year. If you’re single, you run the very real risk of waking up in a bed with a person of the opposite sex who may or may not have been a first or even fifteenth choice, had you not been drunk, a person of the same sex who may have jump-started your experimentation phase—one
that you’d never even considered before and now unfortunately can’t remember, or a person of indeterminate sex, which, well, that’s just not good news for anyone. (I won’t tell you which of my friends has passed along these stories of single New Year’s Eves. Because Jared would hate me for that.) Anyway, New Year’s Eve is a bad, bad night.

When I was a kid I loved it, of course. It was an excuse to party. Then the good times were far outweighed by the bad. Like the year my hangover lasted two full days, during which time I was unable to get out of bed except to clamber to the bathroom, eyes still shut, hoping my aim was decent, begging to be shot in the head. Or the time I lost my car in Tijuana. Or of course the time Scotty had the bright idea to mix Jägermeister and Goldschläger, a combination that inspired the “wet T-shirt contests are sexist” wet T-shirt contest that involved Scott, his friends, my friends, and myself (all male) climbing up onto a bar for an impromptu wet T-shirt contest, resulting in not one but two people slipping off the bar, onto the floor, and breaking limbs—an arm for young Scotty and a leg for Duane Gustovsen, who coincidentally never hung out with us again.

But now I couldn’t give a shit. Now it’s just another day of the week. Yet this one reminds me that another year is ending, I’ve gotten a year older, and I’ve accomplished much less than I wanted to.

But of course Heather asks me what we’re doing, so the pressure is on. Fucking New Year’s. Which brings up another point. I wonder if she’s expecting that our big “third-date” night will happen then.

“What do
you
want to do?” I ask, trying to put it back on her. “Go out,” she says. “Have fun … drink way too much …” I search her face for a hint of irony, hoping against hope that she’s kidding and she’ll say so any second. Nope. Nothing.

“Cool,” I say. “Have you heard about anything fun happening?
Anywhere specific you’d like to go?” Where I can spend hundreds of dollars on mediocre food and, even worse, give my credit card in advance so they can fuck me starting rightthissecond?

“I have some friends who are going to the Viceroy,” she says. “That sounds fun.”

“We haven’t really commingled the friends yet,” I say, half kidding. “Are you sure New Year’s is the best time to do this?”

“Why not?”

And that’s how I find myself at the Viceroy, having spent one hundred ninety-five dollars per person to get in, fifteen dollars on parking, and then to my astonishment learn that none of this includes the dinner that we apparently signed up for: a two-hundred-fifty-dollar-per-person four-course dinner that includes a champagne toast and entrance to the New Year’s Eve celebration at nine-thirty p.m. Turns out what I paid for in advance was the “celebration,” which is nonrefundable and would have been included in the dinner package. But now I’m out nine hundred five dollars.

This alone starts the evening off on the wrong foot, because of course I can’t complain—I’m not an asshole, nor am trying to be one—but this is a predicament Layla and I would never have found ourselves in. Layla hates things like this. And the idea of spending that kind of money for one meal and the privilege to celebrate somewhere would make her as sick as it makes me.

But Heather isn’t Layla.

“This is Krista,” Heather says, as she introduces me to one of her girlfriends. “Hi, Krista,” I say.

“And this is Kelly and Stacia,” she says, with regard to the two other girls who are with us.

What Heather didn’t tell me was that I would essentially be attending girls’ night out with her and her three friends, who would talk incessantly about bad dates, online sample sales, and weight
gain. Did these girls scare off all their boyfriends? How are all of them single? Why are all of them single? Were they hoping I’d help them attract other men?