Fancy Pants (31 page)
"You better get out of this sun, Francie, before you suffer heat
stroke."
Francesca whirled around to see Holly Grace ambling up next to her
wearing designer jeans and eating a grape Popsicle. Her heart took a
giant leap in the direction of her throat. She had not seen Holly Grace
since their lunch together two weeks earlier, but she'd thought about
her almost incessantly. "I assumed you'd be back in New York by now,"
she said warily.
"As a matter of fact, I'm on my way, but I decided to stop by here for
a few hours to see how you're doing."
"Is Dallie with you?" She surreptitiously scanned the crowd behind
Holly Grace.
To Francesca's relief, Holly Grace shook her head. "I decided not to
say anything to him. He's playing in a tournament next week, and he
doesn't need any distractions. You look like you're about ready to pop."
"I feel like it, too." Once again she tried to rub the ache from her
back, and then, because Holly Grace looked sympathetic and she was
feeling very much alone, she added, "The doctor thinks it'll be another
week."
"Are you scared?"
She pressed her hand against her side where a small foot was pushing
up. "I've been through so much this past year, I can't imagine that
giving birth could be any worse." Glancing toward the KDSC tent, she
saw Clare waving wildly toward her, and added wryly, "Besides, I'm
looking forward to lying down for a few hours."
Holly Grace chuckled and fell in step next to her. "Don't you think
it's about time you stopped working and took it easy?"
"I'd like to, but my boss won't give me any more than a month off with
pay, and I don't want to start the clock running until the baby's born."
"That woman looks like she eats hardware for breakfast."
"Only the screws."
Holly Grace laughed, and Francesca felt a surprising sense of
camaraderie with her. They walked toward the tent together, chatting
awkwardly about the weather. A gust of hot air
plastered her loose cotton dress to the mound of her stomach. A fire
siren went off, and the baby gave her three hard kicks.
Suddenly a wave of pain ripped across her back, the sensation so fierce
that her knees began to buckle. She instinctively reached out for Holly
Grace. "Oh, dear—"
Holly Grace dropped her Popsicle and grabbed her waist. "Hang on."
Francesca moaned and leaned forward trying to catch her breath. A
trickle of amniotic fluid began leaking along the insides of her legs.
She leaned into Holly Grace and took a half-step, the sudden wetness
squishing into her sandals. Clutching her abdomen, she gasped, "Oh,
Natalie . . . you're not acting . . . much like a ... lady."
Over by the calf pens, cymbals clashed and the boy with the trumpet
once again turned the bell of his instrument into the blazing Texas sun
and played for all he was worth:
I'm a Yankee Doodle Dandy, Yankee Doodle do or die, A real live nephew
of my Uncle Sam, Born on the Fourth of July. . . .
his fist, his thumb next to the button. He didn't want to kill. He
found no pleasure in drawing human blood, especially female blood, but
the time always came when such a thing was necessary. Tilting his head
to the side, he heard the sound he'd been waiting for, the soft ding of
the elevator doors opening. Once the woman stepped out, her footsteps
would be absorbed by the thick melon-colored carpet that covered the
hallway in the expensive Manhattan co-op building, so he began to count
softly to himself, every muscle in his body tense, ready
to spring into
action.
He brushed the pad of his thumb over the button of his switchblade, not
hard enough to trigger it, but merely to reassure himself. The city was
a jungle to him, and he was a jungle cat—a strong, silent predator who
did what he had to.
No one remembered the name he had been born with— time and brutality
had erased it. Now the world knew him only as Lasher.
Lasher the Great.
He kept counting, having already calculated the time it would take her
to reach the turn in the hallway where he had flattened himself against
the subdued paisley wallpaper. And then he caught the faint scent of
her perfume. He poised himself to spring. She was beautiful, famous . .
. and soon she
would be dead!
He sprang forward with a mighty roar as the call for blood raged in his
head.
She screamed and stumbled backwards, dropping her purse. He flicked the
button on his switchblade
with one hand and, looking up at her, pushed
his glasses back up on the bridge of his nose with the other. "You're
dead meat, China Colt!" Lasher the Great sneered
"And you're dead ass, Theodore Day!" Holly Grace Beaudine leaned over
to swat the seat of his camouflage pants with the palm of her hand,
then clutched her chest through her down jacket. "Honest
to God, Teddy,
the next time you do that to me I'm going to take a switch to you."
Teddy, whose I.Q. had been measured in the vicinity of one hundred and
seventy by the child study
team at his former school in a fashionable
suburb of Los Angeles, didn't believe her for a minute. But
just to be
on the safe side, he gave her a hug, not actually something he minded,
since he loved Holly Grace almost as much as he loved his mother.
"Your show was great last night, Holly Grace. I loved the way you used
those numbchucks. Will you teach me?" Every Tuesday night he was
allowed to stay up and watch "China Colt," even though his mother
thought it was too violent for an impressionable nine-year-old kid like
himself. "Look at my
new switchblade, Holly Grace. Mom bought it for me
in Chinatown last week."
Holly Grace took it from his hand, inspected it, and then ran the end
through the auburn hair that hung straight and fine over his pale
forehead. "Looks more like a switchcomb to me, buddy boy."
Teddy gave her a disgusted look and reclaimed his weapon. He pushed the
black plastic frames of his glasses back up on his nose and messed up
the bangs she had just straightened. "Come see my room.
My new
spaceship wallpaper is up." Without looking back, he took off down the
hallway, sneakers
flying, canteen banging against his side, Rambo
T-shirt tucked into his camouflage pants, which were tightly belted
high above his waist, just the way he liked them.
Holly Grace looked after him and smiled. God, she loved that little
boy. He had helped fill that awful Danny-ache she had thought she would
never lose. But now as she watched him disappear,
another ache nagged at her. It was December of 1986. Two months before,
she had turned thirty-eight. How had she ever let herself get to be
thirty-eight without having another child?
As she bent to pick up the purse she'd dropped, she found herself
remembering the hellish Fourth of July when Teddy had been born. The
air conditioning hadn't been working at the county hospital and the
labor room where they put Francesca already contained five screaming,
sweating women. Francesca lay on the narrow bed, her face as pale as
death, her skin damp with sweat, and silently endured the contractions
that racked her small body. It was her silent suffering that eventually
got to Holly Grace—the quiet dignity of her endurance. Right then Holly
Grace made up her mind to stand by Francesca. No woman should have a
baby by herself, especially one who was so determined not to ask for
help.
For the rest of the afternoon and into the evening, Holly Grace wiped
Francesca's skin with damp, cool cloths. She held her hand and refused
to leave her when they wheeled her into the delivery room. Finally, on
that endless Fourth of July just before midnight, Theodore Day was
born. The two women had gazed at his small, wrinkled form and then
smiled at each other. At that moment, a bond of love and friendship had
been formed that had lasted for nearly ten years.
Holly Grace's respect for Francesca had slowly grown over those years
until she couldn't think of a person she admired more. For a woman who
had started life with more than her fair share of character defects,
Francesca had accomplished everything she'd set out to do. She had
worked her way from AM radio to local television, gradually moving from
smaller markets into bigger ones until she made it to Los Angeles,
where her morning television program had eventually caught the
attention of the network. Now she was the star of the New York-based
"Francesca Today," a Wednesday night talk and interview show that had
been chomping up the Nielsens for the past two years.
It hadn't taken viewers long to fall in love with Francesca's offbeat
interviewing style, which, as far as Holly Grace could figure out, was
based almost entirely on her complete lack
of interest in anything resembling journalistic detachment. Despite her
startling beauty and the remnants of her British accent, she somehow
managed to remind viewers of themselves. The others—Barbara Walters,
Phil Donahue, even Oprah Winfrey—were always in control. Francesca,
like millions of her fellow Americans, hardly ever was. She just leaped
into the fray and tried her best to hang on, resulting in the most
spontaneous television interview show Americans had seen in years.
Teddy's voice rang out from the apartment. "Hurry, Holly Grace!"
"I'm coming, I'm coming." As Holly Grace began walking toward
Francesca's co-op apartment, her thoughts drifted back through the
years to Teddy's six-month birthday, when she had flown to Dallas where
Francesca had just taken a job at one of the city's radio stations.
Although they had talked on the phone, it was the first time the two
women had seen each other since Teddy's birth. Francesca greeted Holly
Grace at her new apartment with a squeal of welcome accompanied by a
loud smacking kiss on the cheek. Then she had proudly placed a wiggling
bundle in Holly Grace's arms. When Holly Grace had looked down at the
baby's solemn little face, any doubts that might have been lurking in
her subconscious about Teddy's parentage evaporated. Not even in her
wildest imagination could she believe her gorgeous husband had anything
to do with the child in her arms. Teddy was adorable, and Holly Grace
had instantly loved him with all her heart, but he was just about the
ugliest baby she'd ever seen. He was certainly nothing at all like
Danny. Whoever had fathered this homely little critter, it couldn't
have been Dallie Beaudine.
As the years passed, age had improved Teddy's looks somewhat. His head
was well shaped, but a fraction too large for his body. He had auburn
hair, wispy-fine and straight as a board, eyebrows and eyelashes so
pale they were almost invisible, and cheekbones that he couldn't seem
to grow into. Sometimes when he turned his head a certain way, Holly
Grace thought she caught a glimpse of how his face would look as a
man—strong, distinctive, not unattractive. But until he grew into that
face, not even his own mother ever made the mistake of bragging about
Teddy's good looks.
"Come on, Holly Grace!" Teddy's head popped back out the paneled white
doorway. "Get the lead out!"
"I'll get your lead out," she growled, but she walked the rest of the
way more quickly. As she entered the foyer, she shrugged out of her
down jacket and adjusted the sleeves of a snowy white sweat suit, the
legs of which were stuffed into a pair of Italian boots hand tooled
with bronze leather flowers. Her trademark blond hair fell well past
her shoulders, its color now highlighted with pale silvery streaks. She
was wearing a trace of sable brown mascara and a dab of blusher, but
little other makeup. She regarded the fine lines that had begun to form
at the corners of her eyes as character-building. Besides, it was her
day off and she didn't have the patience.
The living room of Francesca's apartment had pale yellow walls, peach
moldings, and an exquisite Heriz rug accented in navy. With its English
country garden touches of cotton chintz and silk damask, the room was
exactly the kind of tastefully elegant and outrageously expensive
showplace House and Garden loved to feature on its glossy pages, except
that Francesca refused to raise a child in a showcase and had, quite
casually, sabotaged some of her decorator's best work. The Hubert
Robert landscape over the Italian marble fireplace had given way to an
elaborately framed crayon rendering of a bright red dinosaur (Theodore
Day, circa 1981). A seventeenth-century Italian chest had been moved
several feet off center to make room for Teddy's favorite orange vinyl
beanbag chair, while the chest itself bore the Mickey Mouse telephone
Teddy and Holly Grace had bought as a present for Francesca on her
thirty-first birthday.
Holly Grace stepped inside, dropped her purse on a copy of The New York
Times, and waved to Consuelo, the Spanish woman who took wonderful care
of Teddy but left all the dishes for Francesca to wash up when she came
home. As she turned away from Consuelo, Holly Grace noticed a girl
curled up on the sofa engrossed in a magazine. The girl was sixteen or
seventeen with badly bleached hair and a faded bruise on her cheek.
Holly Grace stopped in her tracks and then rounded on Teddy with a
vehement whisper, "Your mother did it
again, didn't she?"
"Mom said to tell you not to scare her."
"This is what I get for going to California for three weeks." Holly
Grace grabbed Teddy by the arm and pulled him back to his bedroom out
of earshot. As soon as she had shut the door, she exclaimed in
frustration, "Dammit, I thought you were going to talk to her? I can't
believe she did this again."
Teddy walked over to the shoe box that held his stamp collection and
fiddled with the lid. "Her name's Debbie, and she's pretty nice. But
the welfare department finally found a foster home for her, so she's
leaving in a few days."
"Teddy, that girl's a hooker. She probably has needle tracks in her
arm." He began puffing his cheeks in and out, a habit he had when he
didn't want to talk about something. Holly Grace groaned in
frustration. "Look, honey, why didn't you call me in L.A. right away? I
know you're only nine years old, but that genius I.Q. of yours has some
responsibilities attached to it, and one of them is to try to keep your
mother at least partially in touch with the world of reality. You know
she doesn't have an ounce of common sense where this sort of thing is
concerned—bedding down runaways, tangling with pimps. She leads with
her heart instead of her head."
"I like Debbie," Teddy said stubbornly.
"You liked that Jennifer character, too, and she stole fifty bucks from
your Pinocchio bank before she split."
"She left me a note telling me she'd pay it back, and she was the only
one who ever took anything."
Holly Grace saw that she was fighting a losing battle. "You should at
least have called me."
Teddy picked up the lid of his stamp collection box and put it over his
head, decisively ending the conversation. Holly Grace sighed. Sometimes
Teddy was sensible, and sometimes he acted just like Francesca.
Half an hour later, she and Teddy were inching their way through the
traffic-snarled streets toward Greenwich Village. As Holly Grace
stopped for a light, she thought about the beefy forward on the New
York Rangers she was meeting for dinner that night. She was certain he
would be terrific in bed, but the fact that she couldn't take advantage
of it depressed her.
AIDS really pissed her off. Just when women had finally gotten
themselves as sexually liberated as men, this awful disease had to come
along and stop all the fun. She used to enjoy her one-night stands. She
would put her lover through all his best tricks and then kick him out
before he had a chance to expect her to make breakfast for him. Whoever
said sex with a stranger was demeaning had to be somebody who liked to
cook breakfast. Resolutely, she pushed aside the stubborn image of a
dark-haired man whose breakfast she had very much liked cooking. That
affair had been temporary insanity on her part—a disastrous case of
rampaging hormones blinding her judgment.
Holly Grace leaned on the horn as the light changed and a moron in a
Dodge Daytona cut in front of her, barely missing the fender of her
newest Mercedes. It seemed to her that AIDS had affected everybody with
any sense. Even her ex-husband had been sexually monogamous for the
past year. She frowned, still upset with him. She certainly didn't have
anything against monogamy these days, but unfortunately Dallie was
practicing it with someone named Bambi.
"Holly Grace?" Teddy said, looking over at her from the soft depths of
the passenger seat. "Do you think it's right for a teacher to flunk a
kid just because maybe that kid doesn't do a dumb science project for
his gifted class like he's supposed to?"
"This doesn't exactly sound like a theoretical question," Holly Grace
replied dryly.
"What's that mean?"
"It means you should have done your science project."
"This one was dumb." Teddy scowled. "Why would anybody want to go
around killing a bunch of bugs and sticking them to a board with pins?
Don't you think that's dumb?"
stroke."
Francesca whirled around to see Holly Grace ambling up next to her
wearing designer jeans and eating a grape Popsicle. Her heart took a
giant leap in the direction of her throat. She had not seen Holly Grace
since their lunch together two weeks earlier, but she'd thought about
her almost incessantly. "I assumed you'd be back in New York by now,"
she said warily.
"As a matter of fact, I'm on my way, but I decided to stop by here for
a few hours to see how you're doing."
"Is Dallie with you?" She surreptitiously scanned the crowd behind
Holly Grace.
To Francesca's relief, Holly Grace shook her head. "I decided not to
say anything to him. He's playing in a tournament next week, and he
doesn't need any distractions. You look like you're about ready to pop."
"I feel like it, too." Once again she tried to rub the ache from her
back, and then, because Holly Grace looked sympathetic and she was
feeling very much alone, she added, "The doctor thinks it'll be another
week."
"Are you scared?"
She pressed her hand against her side where a small foot was pushing
up. "I've been through so much this past year, I can't imagine that
giving birth could be any worse." Glancing toward the KDSC tent, she
saw Clare waving wildly toward her, and added wryly, "Besides, I'm
looking forward to lying down for a few hours."
Holly Grace chuckled and fell in step next to her. "Don't you think
it's about time you stopped working and took it easy?"
"I'd like to, but my boss won't give me any more than a month off with
pay, and I don't want to start the clock running until the baby's born."
"That woman looks like she eats hardware for breakfast."
"Only the screws."
Holly Grace laughed, and Francesca felt a surprising sense of
camaraderie with her. They walked toward the tent together, chatting
awkwardly about the weather. A gust of hot air
plastered her loose cotton dress to the mound of her stomach. A fire
siren went off, and the baby gave her three hard kicks.
Suddenly a wave of pain ripped across her back, the sensation so fierce
that her knees began to buckle. She instinctively reached out for Holly
Grace. "Oh, dear—"
Holly Grace dropped her Popsicle and grabbed her waist. "Hang on."
Francesca moaned and leaned forward trying to catch her breath. A
trickle of amniotic fluid began leaking along the insides of her legs.
She leaned into Holly Grace and took a half-step, the sudden wetness
squishing into her sandals. Clutching her abdomen, she gasped, "Oh,
Natalie . . . you're not acting . . . much like a ... lady."
Over by the calf pens, cymbals clashed and the boy with the trumpet
once again turned the bell of his instrument into the blazing Texas sun
and played for all he was worth:
I'm a Yankee Doodle Dandy, Yankee Doodle do or die, A real live nephew
of my Uncle Sam, Born on the Fourth of July. . . .
Lighting the Lamp
Chapter 22
He pressed himself flat against the wall, the switchblade clenched inChapter 22
his fist, his thumb next to the button. He didn't want to kill. He
found no pleasure in drawing human blood, especially female blood, but
the time always came when such a thing was necessary. Tilting his head
to the side, he heard the sound he'd been waiting for, the soft ding of
the elevator doors opening. Once the woman stepped out, her footsteps
would be absorbed by the thick melon-colored carpet that covered the
hallway in the expensive Manhattan co-op building, so he began to count
softly to himself, every muscle in his body tense, ready
to spring into
action.
He brushed the pad of his thumb over the button of his switchblade, not
hard enough to trigger it, but merely to reassure himself. The city was
a jungle to him, and he was a jungle cat—a strong, silent predator who
did what he had to.
No one remembered the name he had been born with— time and brutality
had erased it. Now the world knew him only as Lasher.
Lasher the Great.
He kept counting, having already calculated the time it would take her
to reach the turn in the hallway where he had flattened himself against
the subdued paisley wallpaper. And then he caught the faint scent of
her perfume. He poised himself to spring. She was beautiful, famous . .
. and soon she
would be dead!
He sprang forward with a mighty roar as the call for blood raged in his
head.
She screamed and stumbled backwards, dropping her purse. He flicked the
button on his switchblade
with one hand and, looking up at her, pushed
his glasses back up on the bridge of his nose with the other. "You're
dead meat, China Colt!" Lasher the Great sneered
"And you're dead ass, Theodore Day!" Holly Grace Beaudine leaned over
to swat the seat of his camouflage pants with the palm of her hand,
then clutched her chest through her down jacket. "Honest
to God, Teddy,
the next time you do that to me I'm going to take a switch to you."
Teddy, whose I.Q. had been measured in the vicinity of one hundred and
seventy by the child study
team at his former school in a fashionable
suburb of Los Angeles, didn't believe her for a minute. But
just to be
on the safe side, he gave her a hug, not actually something he minded,
since he loved Holly Grace almost as much as he loved his mother.
"Your show was great last night, Holly Grace. I loved the way you used
those numbchucks. Will you teach me?" Every Tuesday night he was
allowed to stay up and watch "China Colt," even though his mother
thought it was too violent for an impressionable nine-year-old kid like
himself. "Look at my
new switchblade, Holly Grace. Mom bought it for me
in Chinatown last week."
Holly Grace took it from his hand, inspected it, and then ran the end
through the auburn hair that hung straight and fine over his pale
forehead. "Looks more like a switchcomb to me, buddy boy."
Teddy gave her a disgusted look and reclaimed his weapon. He pushed the
black plastic frames of his glasses back up on his nose and messed up
the bangs she had just straightened. "Come see my room.
My new
spaceship wallpaper is up." Without looking back, he took off down the
hallway, sneakers
flying, canteen banging against his side, Rambo
T-shirt tucked into his camouflage pants, which were tightly belted
high above his waist, just the way he liked them.
Holly Grace looked after him and smiled. God, she loved that little
boy. He had helped fill that awful Danny-ache she had thought she would
never lose. But now as she watched him disappear,
another ache nagged at her. It was December of 1986. Two months before,
she had turned thirty-eight. How had she ever let herself get to be
thirty-eight without having another child?
As she bent to pick up the purse she'd dropped, she found herself
remembering the hellish Fourth of July when Teddy had been born. The
air conditioning hadn't been working at the county hospital and the
labor room where they put Francesca already contained five screaming,
sweating women. Francesca lay on the narrow bed, her face as pale as
death, her skin damp with sweat, and silently endured the contractions
that racked her small body. It was her silent suffering that eventually
got to Holly Grace—the quiet dignity of her endurance. Right then Holly
Grace made up her mind to stand by Francesca. No woman should have a
baby by herself, especially one who was so determined not to ask for
help.
For the rest of the afternoon and into the evening, Holly Grace wiped
Francesca's skin with damp, cool cloths. She held her hand and refused
to leave her when they wheeled her into the delivery room. Finally, on
that endless Fourth of July just before midnight, Theodore Day was
born. The two women had gazed at his small, wrinkled form and then
smiled at each other. At that moment, a bond of love and friendship had
been formed that had lasted for nearly ten years.
Holly Grace's respect for Francesca had slowly grown over those years
until she couldn't think of a person she admired more. For a woman who
had started life with more than her fair share of character defects,
Francesca had accomplished everything she'd set out to do. She had
worked her way from AM radio to local television, gradually moving from
smaller markets into bigger ones until she made it to Los Angeles,
where her morning television program had eventually caught the
attention of the network. Now she was the star of the New York-based
"Francesca Today," a Wednesday night talk and interview show that had
been chomping up the Nielsens for the past two years.
It hadn't taken viewers long to fall in love with Francesca's offbeat
interviewing style, which, as far as Holly Grace could figure out, was
based almost entirely on her complete lack
of interest in anything resembling journalistic detachment. Despite her
startling beauty and the remnants of her British accent, she somehow
managed to remind viewers of themselves. The others—Barbara Walters,
Phil Donahue, even Oprah Winfrey—were always in control. Francesca,
like millions of her fellow Americans, hardly ever was. She just leaped
into the fray and tried her best to hang on, resulting in the most
spontaneous television interview show Americans had seen in years.
Teddy's voice rang out from the apartment. "Hurry, Holly Grace!"
"I'm coming, I'm coming." As Holly Grace began walking toward
Francesca's co-op apartment, her thoughts drifted back through the
years to Teddy's six-month birthday, when she had flown to Dallas where
Francesca had just taken a job at one of the city's radio stations.
Although they had talked on the phone, it was the first time the two
women had seen each other since Teddy's birth. Francesca greeted Holly
Grace at her new apartment with a squeal of welcome accompanied by a
loud smacking kiss on the cheek. Then she had proudly placed a wiggling
bundle in Holly Grace's arms. When Holly Grace had looked down at the
baby's solemn little face, any doubts that might have been lurking in
her subconscious about Teddy's parentage evaporated. Not even in her
wildest imagination could she believe her gorgeous husband had anything
to do with the child in her arms. Teddy was adorable, and Holly Grace
had instantly loved him with all her heart, but he was just about the
ugliest baby she'd ever seen. He was certainly nothing at all like
Danny. Whoever had fathered this homely little critter, it couldn't
have been Dallie Beaudine.
As the years passed, age had improved Teddy's looks somewhat. His head
was well shaped, but a fraction too large for his body. He had auburn
hair, wispy-fine and straight as a board, eyebrows and eyelashes so
pale they were almost invisible, and cheekbones that he couldn't seem
to grow into. Sometimes when he turned his head a certain way, Holly
Grace thought she caught a glimpse of how his face would look as a
man—strong, distinctive, not unattractive. But until he grew into that
face, not even his own mother ever made the mistake of bragging about
Teddy's good looks.
"Come on, Holly Grace!" Teddy's head popped back out the paneled white
doorway. "Get the lead out!"
"I'll get your lead out," she growled, but she walked the rest of the
way more quickly. As she entered the foyer, she shrugged out of her
down jacket and adjusted the sleeves of a snowy white sweat suit, the
legs of which were stuffed into a pair of Italian boots hand tooled
with bronze leather flowers. Her trademark blond hair fell well past
her shoulders, its color now highlighted with pale silvery streaks. She
was wearing a trace of sable brown mascara and a dab of blusher, but
little other makeup. She regarded the fine lines that had begun to form
at the corners of her eyes as character-building. Besides, it was her
day off and she didn't have the patience.
The living room of Francesca's apartment had pale yellow walls, peach
moldings, and an exquisite Heriz rug accented in navy. With its English
country garden touches of cotton chintz and silk damask, the room was
exactly the kind of tastefully elegant and outrageously expensive
showplace House and Garden loved to feature on its glossy pages, except
that Francesca refused to raise a child in a showcase and had, quite
casually, sabotaged some of her decorator's best work. The Hubert
Robert landscape over the Italian marble fireplace had given way to an
elaborately framed crayon rendering of a bright red dinosaur (Theodore
Day, circa 1981). A seventeenth-century Italian chest had been moved
several feet off center to make room for Teddy's favorite orange vinyl
beanbag chair, while the chest itself bore the Mickey Mouse telephone
Teddy and Holly Grace had bought as a present for Francesca on her
thirty-first birthday.
Holly Grace stepped inside, dropped her purse on a copy of The New York
Times, and waved to Consuelo, the Spanish woman who took wonderful care
of Teddy but left all the dishes for Francesca to wash up when she came
home. As she turned away from Consuelo, Holly Grace noticed a girl
curled up on the sofa engrossed in a magazine. The girl was sixteen or
seventeen with badly bleached hair and a faded bruise on her cheek.
Holly Grace stopped in her tracks and then rounded on Teddy with a
vehement whisper, "Your mother did it
again, didn't she?"
"Mom said to tell you not to scare her."
"This is what I get for going to California for three weeks." Holly
Grace grabbed Teddy by the arm and pulled him back to his bedroom out
of earshot. As soon as she had shut the door, she exclaimed in
frustration, "Dammit, I thought you were going to talk to her? I can't
believe she did this again."
Teddy walked over to the shoe box that held his stamp collection and
fiddled with the lid. "Her name's Debbie, and she's pretty nice. But
the welfare department finally found a foster home for her, so she's
leaving in a few days."
"Teddy, that girl's a hooker. She probably has needle tracks in her
arm." He began puffing his cheeks in and out, a habit he had when he
didn't want to talk about something. Holly Grace groaned in
frustration. "Look, honey, why didn't you call me in L.A. right away? I
know you're only nine years old, but that genius I.Q. of yours has some
responsibilities attached to it, and one of them is to try to keep your
mother at least partially in touch with the world of reality. You know
she doesn't have an ounce of common sense where this sort of thing is
concerned—bedding down runaways, tangling with pimps. She leads with
her heart instead of her head."
"I like Debbie," Teddy said stubbornly.
"You liked that Jennifer character, too, and she stole fifty bucks from
your Pinocchio bank before she split."
"She left me a note telling me she'd pay it back, and she was the only
one who ever took anything."
Holly Grace saw that she was fighting a losing battle. "You should at
least have called me."
Teddy picked up the lid of his stamp collection box and put it over his
head, decisively ending the conversation. Holly Grace sighed. Sometimes
Teddy was sensible, and sometimes he acted just like Francesca.
Half an hour later, she and Teddy were inching their way through the
traffic-snarled streets toward Greenwich Village. As Holly Grace
stopped for a light, she thought about the beefy forward on the New
York Rangers she was meeting for dinner that night. She was certain he
would be terrific in bed, but the fact that she couldn't take advantage
of it depressed her.
AIDS really pissed her off. Just when women had finally gotten
themselves as sexually liberated as men, this awful disease had to come
along and stop all the fun. She used to enjoy her one-night stands. She
would put her lover through all his best tricks and then kick him out
before he had a chance to expect her to make breakfast for him. Whoever
said sex with a stranger was demeaning had to be somebody who liked to
cook breakfast. Resolutely, she pushed aside the stubborn image of a
dark-haired man whose breakfast she had very much liked cooking. That
affair had been temporary insanity on her part—a disastrous case of
rampaging hormones blinding her judgment.
Holly Grace leaned on the horn as the light changed and a moron in a
Dodge Daytona cut in front of her, barely missing the fender of her
newest Mercedes. It seemed to her that AIDS had affected everybody with
any sense. Even her ex-husband had been sexually monogamous for the
past year. She frowned, still upset with him. She certainly didn't have
anything against monogamy these days, but unfortunately Dallie was
practicing it with someone named Bambi.
"Holly Grace?" Teddy said, looking over at her from the soft depths of
the passenger seat. "Do you think it's right for a teacher to flunk a
kid just because maybe that kid doesn't do a dumb science project for
his gifted class like he's supposed to?"
"This doesn't exactly sound like a theoretical question," Holly Grace
replied dryly.
"What's that mean?"
"It means you should have done your science project."
"This one was dumb." Teddy scowled. "Why would anybody want to go
around killing a bunch of bugs and sticking them to a board with pins?
Don't you think that's dumb?"
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