Father Of The Brat

Maddy, too, turned to Carver, hoping for clarification.

“Rachel wants to get her nose pierced,” he explained. “Her mother gave her permission before she died.”

“Oh, I see,” Maddy replied, although she couldn’t see at all why anyone would want to do something like that to herself.

“So, can I?” Rachel asked again.

Carver turned to his daughter, trying not to buckle under what would be his first parental decision. “No,” he finally said. “Sorry, kiddo, but I don’t think it’s a good idea. Maybe when you’re eighteen.”

“No?” Rachel said as she jumped up from her chair and glared at him.

Even if she was only twelve years old, she was already taller than Maddy, and Carver suddenly felt about as awkward around his daughter as he had around his adolescent nemesis. Rachel’s demeanor changed dramatically in a matter of seconds, from a nonchalant preteen to a raging tower of indignation. It was amazing, he thought, the energy that was wreaked by unstable hormones.

“No?” she repeated, her voice rising about ten decibels in that one syllable. “What do you mean, ‘No,’?”

Although he was taken aback by the suddenness of her attack, Carver was able to maintain a stoic control. He’d dealt with scary kids before, he reminded himself. Back when he’d spent a week at a New Jersey youth detention center for a story he’d done on juvenile offenders. The trick was to stay calm and never let them know how terrified you were of them, no matter how badly you wanted to bolt.

So Carver turned to look Rachel right in the eye, settled his hands on his hips and calmly repeated, “I mean, ‘No. You can’t do it.’”

Rachel gaped at him as if he had just slapped her. “I can’t do it?” she asked.

He sighed heavily. “That’s what I said. You can’t do it. Hasn’t anyone ever said no to you before?”

Instead of answering his question, Rachel ran an impatient hand through her hair and glared even harder. “Oh, man, I should have known what a bastard you were going to be.”

This time Carver was the one to gape. His voice and posture were deceptively calm as he asked, “What was that?”

“I said you’re a class-A bastard,” Rachel was quick to reply.

Carver blinked once, turned to Maddy for support, then saw that she was as surprised as he by the turn of events. He scrubbed a hand over his face, reminded himself that Rachel was just a kid—a kid who’d recently lost her mother— and tried to remain calm.

“Look,” he said, “why don’t we just forget you said that and start over. We can go home, get situated—”

“Go home?” Rachel cried. “Home is L.A. I’m not going anywhere with you, you sonofa—”

“Hey!”

Carver’s tone of voice was sufficient to stifle the girl’s outburst, but she continued to glare daggers at him as she crossed her hands over her chest. She tilted her head back, thrust her chin out and frowned.

“One more blowup like that,” he said, “and I’ll…”

He’d what? he wondered. What did he know about parental ultimatums except for what he’d learned being on the receiving end of them for most of his youthful years? And a quarter century had passed since he was Rachel’s age. The world was a completely different place. Kids were different, ultimatums were different. And what the hell did he know about either of them?

“I’m going back to L.A.,” Rachel said as he pondered his quandary.

He pinched the bridge of his nose with his thumb and index finger, trying to ward off what promised to be a major headache. “No, you’re not,” he told her. “You can’t.”

“The hell I can’t. Just watch me. The first opportunity I get, I’m outta here. You’re bogus, dude. Just because you had a quickie with my mom doesn’t mean anything. I don’t care how much you look like me. You’re not my father. And I don’t have to do a damned thing you say.”

Carver looked at his daughter again, realizing then that there was a lot more of him in her than met the eye. “Oh, boy,” he said under his breath. Then, turning to his other female companion, he added more clearly, “Ever the optimist, aren’t you, Maddy? Well, something tells me this isn’t going to be quite as easy as you thought.”

Three (#ulink_14661a44-8457-5141-adbc-1a31f9599367)

Carver stood outside his bathroom door wearing nothing but a pair of battered blue jeans and rapped loudly for the sixth time. He sighed as he halfheartedly performed the gesture, knowing what the response to his summons would be before Rachel even uttered it.

“Just a minute!” she called out from the other side.

“You’ve been saying ‘Just a minute’ for more than half an hour,” he called back. “What the he…” He sighed fitfully. “What on earth are you doing in there?”

“Just a minute!”

Carver spun around on his heel and went to the kitchen for another cup of coffee. The clock on the stove reminded him that he should have left for work fifteen minutes ago if he was going to arrive when he normally did, and he hadn’t even had a shower yet. Rachel had commandeered his bathroom just as he was reaching for the doorknob himself, shouldering him out of the way with enough force to shove him back against the hallway wall. And she hadn’t come out once. He’d heard water run briefly, but had detected not a sound since it shut off. He couldn’t imagine what a twelve-year-old girl would need with forty-five minutes in the bathroom. She was only doing it, he was certain, to annoy him.

Annoying him had seemed to be Rachel’s favorite pastime since her arrival the day before. On the drive to his apartment, she’d prohibited any opportunity for conversation by snapping on the radio and fiddling incessantly with the dial. When she had finally found a station she deemed appropriate, she had turned the volume up so loudly, it had almost blown out his speakers. And today’s music was nothing but garbage, something Carver had taken great pleasure in pointing out to Rachel. Naturally, she had taken exception to his pronouncement, and had assured him he couldn’t relate because he was too old.

“Kids,” he muttered under his breath as he topped off his coffee.

Upon their arrival at his apartment, Rachel had taken one look at the spare room, had told Carver he had got to be kidding, then demanded a couple hundred dollars to do the place up right. She’d unpacked by removing piles of wadded-up clothing from her suitcase and heaving them haphazardly into drawers and onto the closet floor, and had assured him she never did her own laundry. And when he’d pressed her about that taking care of herself business, she’d only shrugged in that maddeningly nonchalant way he was quickly coming to hate.

“Damn kids,” he mumbled as he sipped his coffee.

Then, last night, just as Carver was settled into bed and on the verge of sleep, she’d cranked up the stereo in the living room until the whole apartment building shook. Within seconds, his phone had been ringing off the hook, virtually every neighbor within a four-block radius calling to complain about the noise. And when he’d gone out to confront his daughter about her nocturnal activities, he’d found her sprawled on the couch with the music blaring, watching television with the sound turned down, a half-smoked cigarette in the ashtray beside her. She had been eating pizza— the piece Carver had been saving for breakfast the following morning—and washing it down with a beer she’d evidently also swiped from the fridge.

And when Carver had demanded to know what the he…what on earth she thought she was doing, she’d swallowed a mouthful of beer, inhaled deeply on the cigarette and turned the music up louder. Then she’d told him it was what she always did to unwind in the evening.

“Damn unreasonable kids,” he grumbled into his coffee.

He was about to make another assault on his bathroom when someone knocked at his front door. There was something familiar about that rapping, he thought as he went to answer it. And something a little ominous, too. Reluctantly, he opened the door and found, not much to his surprise, Maddy Garrett standing on the other side. She’d returned to her masculine form of dressing today, and wore a rumpled gray flannel suit with an equally rumpled white shirt, and scuffed, flat-heeled shoes.

It bothered Carver to see Maddy rumpled and scuffed. She’d been neither in high school. Back then her clothes— although more than a little unstylish and stuffy—had always been as starched and pressed as she was herself. Maddy Saunders wouldn’t have been caught dead being rumpled. Maddy Garrett, however, evidently had no such qualms.

“Morning,” she said as she brushed past him without waiting for an invitation. Once again, she sounded and looked weary and run-down. “IIow’s it going with Rachel?”

Carver uttered a derisive laugh as he closed the door behind her and hoped he didn’t sound too hysterical. “Well, aside from her having some pretty awful personal habits, and aside from her indulging in a remarkably bad diet, and aside from the fact that she’s noisy, obnoxious, loudmouthed, self-centered…”

“Gee, she sounds a lot like her old man,” Maddy interjected with a smile.

Carver ignored her jab. “And aside from her having made it impossible for me to answer the call of nature in socially acceptable surroundings,” he added, “everything’s been just hunky-dory.”

As if to illustrate just how perfectly she and Carver were getting along, Rachel chose that moment to emerge from the bathroom, dressed almost exactly as she had been the day before. She crossed to the kitchen and came out with a cup of coffee and a lit cigarette, then slouched into a chair and picked up the TV remote. Without bothering to ask Carver if he was following the story on CNN, she switched the channel to MTV and, as always, pumped up the volume way too loud.

“Rachel,” Carver said, his voice laced with exhaustion, “put out the cigarette.”

Rachel continued to watch TV, completely ignoring the two adults.

“Rachel,” he repeated.

“What?”