Father Of The Brat

She hadn’t been with anyone since her husband, but even before Dennis had expressed his desire to be rid of Maddy, their sexual relationship had been on a steady downhill slide. She supposed, looking back, that there had been plenty of warning signs to let her know what was coming. Dennis had been staying at work later and later, and going in earlier and earlier. He’d usually been too tired to make love, and had always had something else to do on the weekends besides spend time with her. And if she was perfectly honest, she had to admit that she hadn’t missed him all that much when he was gone.

They’d stopped talking about anything of significance, their conversations simply stilted exchanges of daily experiences and observations. Her own job had become extremely demanding by then, and she hadn’t really had the time to think much about where her personal life was headed.

Still, when her husband had announced his intention to leave, Maddy had been floored. What had been the real shocker, though, was his reason for wanting out. Before they’d married, they’d talked extensively about the subject of children. Dennis had known exactly what he was getting into with her. Back then, he’d assured her that remaining childless wouldn’t be a problem. He wanted Maddy, not kids. Bottom line.

But suddenly, finding himself childless in his mid-thirties was a realization he couldn’t tolerate. He wanted kids, right away, and Maddy wouldn’t provide him with any. So he’d found someone who would. A nice, ripe, enthusiastic twenty-three-year-old who was more than ready to settle down and start a family.

So Maddy had said sayonara and wished him well. What else could she have done? The divorce had been as amicable as the two of them could make it under the circumstances. In a lot of ways, she supposed she was still a little numb from the experience. Maybe that was why she hadn’t dated anyone since her separation from her husband. Or maybe it was because no one had seemed much interested. Or maybe it was because she just didn’t have the time.

Watching Carver Venner as he paid for their lunch and exited the café, however, she realized it wasn’t because she didn’t have those kinds of feelings anymore. The way that man filled out a pair of jeans…As she continued to study him, he turned to look at her, waiting for her to catch up. He pushed up the sleeves of his charcoal sweater to reveal truly phenomenal forearms, then hooked his hands over intriguingly trim hips.

If Carver Venner had indeed gained thirty pounds since graduation, she thought, it was all solid muscle. The belly he had patted only moments ago was as flat as a steam iron. She wondered if the flesh covering it was as hot.

Bad move, Maddy, she told herself. The last thing she needed to be doing was wondering what Carver Venner looked like naked. Maddy Saunders had certainly never done that. Well, not for any length of time anyway. And none too accurately, either, since the high-school Maddy had never seen a naked man outside the Encyclopaedia Britannica. However, since married life had provided her with some working knowledge of the male anatomy, she could now imagine all too well what kind of equipment Carver was carrying. Boy, could she imagine.

“According to the arrival screen, the plane’s on the runway,” he said as she exited the café behind him. He looked anxious and agitated and not a little uncertain.

“Something’s been bothering me about this thing,” he added when she rejoined him. “Beyond the obvious, I mean.”

“What’s that?”

He began to walk slowly toward the terminal, and Maddy easily fell into step beside him. “How come there’s no one contesting this arrangement?” he asked.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, how come there are no outraged grandparents who are insisting that Rachel should come to live with them? I remember Abby saying she had a sister, so why isn’t Rachel’s aunt demanding custody? Why is everyone sending the kid off to live with a total stranger, even if the total stranger is perceived to be the kid’s father—which I’m not,” he added hastily.

This was always the toughest part to explain, Maddy thought. How did one make people like Carver—people who came from loving families—understand that a lot of kids didn’t grow up in the same kind of environment?

“Rachel does have a grandmother,” she began. “And she has an aunt and uncle. But the grandmother is an alcoholic who’s incapable of raising a child. And the aunt and uncle are financially strapped at the moment. Not to mention the fact that none of them, nor any of Rachel’s other relatives, has expressed an interest in taking her in.”

Carver glanced away, at some point over Maddy’s left shoulder. “In other words, nobody wants her.”

She nodded. “Unfortunately, that’s pretty much the gist of it.”

He said nothing in response to her assertion. Instead, he shook a cigarette from a pack that appeared out of nowhere, tucked it between his lips and lit it with a less than steady hand.

“I’ll go with you to the terminal,” Maddy told him. “But I’ll hang back and give you a few minutes alone with your daughter. There will be time for the three of us to talk later.”

“She’s not my daughter,” Carver insisted, inhaling deeply on the cigarette again.

“I guess we’ll have to let the courts decide that.”

“Regardless of what the courts decide, Maddy, Rachel Stillman is not my daughter.”

“Whatever you say, Carver.”

“She’s not my daughter,” he repeated adamantly. “She’s not.”

She was his daughter.

As soon as Carver saw the girl walk into the terminal, he knew without question that she was she was the fruit of his loins. Her dark brown hair and pale blue eyes, her lanky build and accelerated height, her square face, thin nose and full lips…

Had Carver Venner been born a girl, he would have looked exactly like Rachel Stillman when he was twelve years old. And he probably would have dressed like her, too, he thought. Except that his clothes would have fit. Everything Rachel wore—from her plaid flannel shirt and Pearl Jam T-shirt to her tattered army fatigues—were about four sizes too big for her. Even her boots looked as if she’d pilfered them from a six-foot-plus construction worker.

Her hair hung down around her shoulders with two strands in front wrapped in some kind of multicolored thread, and when she tucked the uncombed tresses behind her ears, he saw that one was pierced approximately a half dozen times, the other even more. Seemingly hundreds of bracelets made of everything from rubber to straw circled her forearms, and a long pendant—a peace symbol almost identical to one he’d worn when he was her age—swung between what would someday be breasts.

She approached him without ever slowing or altering her stride—as if she knew as immediately as he that they were related—eyed him warily, sighed dramatically, cracked her gum a couple of times and said, “I’m not calling you Daddy.”

Nonplussed, Carver fired back, “Who asked you to?”

Rachel shrugged, as if she couldn’t care less about anything, nodded toward the cigarette burning between his fingers and asked, “Got another smoke?”

He glanced down at his hand, then back at the girl. “What, for you?”

She nodded.

“Are you nuts?”

This time she shook her head.

He sucked hard on the cigarette, and amid a billowing expulsion of smoke asked, “Don’t you know these things will kill you?”

She eyed him blandly. “Doesn’t seem to worry you too much.”

“Yeah, well…” Carver looked down at the cigarette, reluctantly tossed it to the floor and ground it out with the toe of his hiking boot. He frowned. “Well, maybe it should worry you.”

She made a face, one Carver was certain was endemic of twelve-year-olds everywhere. “Nothing worries me. I’m a kid. Haven’t you heard? We’re immortal.”

Oh, yeah, Carver thought. She was his offspring, all right. Sarcastic, cocky and smart-mouthed as all get out. He suddenly regretted a lot of things he’d said to his own parents when he was a boy.

Without even realizing he needed to sit down, he slumped into a nearby chair. He dropped his head into his hands, raked his fingers through his hair and tried not to panic. A daughter. God. Who knew?

“Mom told me I could get my nose pierced back in L.A., but she, you know, checked out on me before she could sign the permission slip. So, what do you say? You got a problem with it?”

Carver looked up again to find that his daughter—his daughter—had taken the seat next to his. She studied him with a steady, to-the-point gaze, apparently completely unburdened of any grief one might have expected her to feel for the loss of the woman who had raised her.

“Checked out on you?” he repeated incredulously. “Your mother is dead, and that’s all you have to say about it?”

Rachel rolled her eyes and toddled her head around in the way kids do when they don’t want to be bothered with adults who are clearly idiots. “She wasn’t exactly June Cleaver, all right? It’s hard to miss someone who wasn’t, you know, there to begin with.”

Carver stared hard at the girl, trying with all his might to be sympathetic. But he could no more remember what it was like to be twelve years old than he could imagine a mother who wasn’t around. Ruth Venner had always been there for her kids, no matter what kind of demand they were making. She had been June Cleaver, right down to the pearl necklace. And although, thanks to his job, Carver knew a lot more about the world than most people, he still had trouble dealing with the whole neglected kids thing.

“She traveled a lot?” he asked. “Who took care of you?”

Rachel rolled her eyes again, and Carver thought that if she didn’t cut it out, they were going to roll to the back of her head and get stuck for good, and then where would she be?

“It’s not that Mom wasn’t around,” she said. “It’s that she just wasn’t there. You know?”

For some reason, Carver understood exactly what she meant, and he nodded.

“I mean, they told you how she died, right?” Rachel asked.

He nodded again. “Drunk driver.”

“Did they tell you she was the drunk driver?”

Carver looked up into clear, matter-of-fact eyes, eyes that held not a clue as to what their owner might be feeling. “No, they didn’t tell me that.”

“Yeah, well, so now you know.”

“I’m sorry,” he said, the phrase all that came to mind.

“Look, don’t get me wrong,” Rachel told him, her gaze dropping to study the toe of her boot. “She wasn’t a bad mom. She just wasn’t like most moms. She loved me and all that, but I don’t think it ever occurred to her that she was the one who was supposed to be responsible.” She shrugged philosophically. “I learned to look after myself.”

Carver hesitated only a moment before asking, “Do you miss her?”

Rachel shrugged again—a gesture Carver was already beginning to realize meant that she was stalling until she figured out what to say—and stared at her feet some more. “Yeah. I guess so. She was pretty tight. All my friends liked her all right.”

“How about you?”

“I liked her, too.”

Carver sighed and tilted his head back to study the ceiling. “Yeah, so did I. I’m sorry she’s gone.”

The two of them sat in silence for some moments, until Rachel finally broke it by asking, “So, are you really my dad?”

Carver turned his head to look at her, to see if there was anything of Abby in her at all. He was shocked to realize he couldn’t even remember what the mother of his daughter looked like. But there was a sprinkling of freckles over Rachel’s nose, and her eyelashes were impossibly long. He supposed she’d gotten those features from her mother. Everything else about her screamed Carver Venner.

“Looks that way,” he said after a moment.

“Mom told me you’re a journalist, too.”

He cocked his head to one side thoughtfully. “What else did your mom tell you about me?”

“Not much. Just that she met you in Guatemala, that you wrote for some left-wing magazine, that you were a great kisser, and that she didn’t see any reason why you had to know I was around. She never told me your last name or where you lived.”

He expelled a single, humorless chuckle, wondering if Rachel might have tried to look for him if she’d known who and where he was. All he said in reply though, was, “I guess she covered all the important stuff then.”

Rachel dropped her gaze to her feet again, tugging on a loose thread that pulled a small hole in her fatigues. “After she died, I found her stash of some of the articles you wrote. You work for that magazine, Left Bank, right? The one that’s getting sued by the GOP for defamation and slander?”

Carver’s brows arched in surprise at they casual way she tossed out the question, as if she understood perfectly what the lawsuit involved. “You seem to know a lot about it.”

“Politics were a pretty big deal to my mom. She thought the Republican party was made up of a bunch of fascists who wanted to turn the world around and go back to the way it was in 1951.”

Carver smiled to hear such a young kid spout such adult rhetoric. “Well, it is, isn’t it?”

Rachel smiled, too. “I don’t know. They seem harmless enough to me. Stalling the crime bill that way was a pretty crummy thing to do, though. The gangs in L.A. are incredible. A bunch of pin-striped old guys wouldn’t last a minute in some of the neighborhoods I’ve lived in.”

She was way too grown up for a twelve-year-old, Carver thought. She shouldn’t even know about things like crime bills and gangs. She should be worrying more about how to get a playing card to make just the right clicking noise when inserted into the spokes of a bicycle wheel. Even during the turbulent sixties, he and other kids like him had managed to hold on to some of their innocence. Nowadays, it seemed, kids had to cash in their innocence early in order to survive.

“You do a lot of stories about foreign countries for the magazine,” Rachel continued, stirring Carver from his reverie. “Human rights and stuff.”

“I cover a lot of ground, I guess, yeah.”

“So that means you’re gone a lot of the time.”

He nodded. “I’m out of the country a good part of the year. And there are times when I have to do a lot of domestic traveling to research and back up my stories.”

Rachel nodded, too. “That’s okay. I can look after myself.”

“So you’ve said.”

She tilted her head and lifted her chin defiantly, but she still didn’t look at Carver. “Well, it’s true.”

“I believe it.”

He wanted to say more, but had no idea how to address a twelve-year-old girl he had just discovered was his daughter. Fortunately, Maddy chose that moment to join them, and cleared her throat discreetly to announce her arrival. Carver smiled his gratitude, then realized she couldn’t possibly understand how much she’d just helped him out.

“Uh, Maddy,” he said, standing awkwardly. He gestured toward the girl who remained seated. “This is Rachel. My daughter.”

Maddy arched her brows inquisitively, but didn’t ask what had convinced him to change his mind so quickly and irrevocably. Then she looked down at Rachel, and he could see by her expression that she noted the dramatic resemblance between father and daughter as well as he. She looked back up at Carver and smiled, then turned her attention back to the girl.

“Nice to meet you, Rachel,” she said, extending her hand.

Rachel stood, looked at Maddy’s hand for a moment as if she didn’t understand the gesture being offered, then brushed her own palm against Maddy’s. “Hi,” she said a little breathlessly. “Are you my new stepmom?”

Maddy bit back the furious denial she felt coming, and tried to tamp down the odd sensation of delight that threatened to spiral out of control at hearing the suggestion. “Uh, no,” she said. “I’m Maddy Garrett. I work for the Child Welfare Office of Pennsylvania.”

“Oh, the social worker,” Rachel said with a knowing nod.

Yeah, the social worker, Maddy thought, squelching a wistful sigh. She supposed that was all she would ever be to anyone. Still, that was something. There were a lot of people out there who needed her, kids who wouldn’t stand a chance without her. Unfortunately, thanks to the society and bureaucracy that went along with her work, there were a lot more who fell through the cracks, too, a lot more who were let down.

“Yes, I’m the social worker,” Maddy told Rachel, trying to inject a little more fortitude into her voice than she felt. “I’ll be helping you and your father out for a little while, to make sure everything runs as smoothly as possible.”

She glanced at Carver, and her heart turned over at the look on his face. He was staring at his daughter as if he couldn’t quite believe she was real. He looked confused, tired, shocked…and…and kind of proud, she realized. Something in his demeanor told her he wasn’t quite as unhappy about this situation as he’d first let on.

“Looks like the two of you are off to a pretty good start,” she said.

Rachel turned to look at her father. “So how about the nose piercing thing?” she asked. “You never said for sure.”

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

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.