LIKE FATHER

by Vandemonium1

Hi.

This one is short, has I think an original discovery method (kindly thought of by my partner, CTC) and a unique ending. It is mainly dialogue so if that’s not your thing you have been warned. Expertly edited by CTC once again.

I would appreciate feedback on whether you spotted the end coming and whether the title gave it away.

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“Hi, Jenny, thanks for coming. I…, I need a friend right now.”

“That’s fine, Mum, exams aren’t for another month yet.”

“How is university going? I haven’t seen or spoken to you for months now.”

“You know how it is, Mum. Final year of uni and working my ass off to get into the top ten percent of my class. It’s a dog-eat-dog world out there, especially in law.”

“But I thought you were going to work for your dad?”

“I am, in fact I’ve started already, but I want him to be able to say he hired me because I was one of the best students, not just because I’m his daughter. Me, I’m going to be working for him not because he’s my father, but because his law firm is the best around these parts. I know I won’t get preferential treatment from him. On the contrary, I expect to be given the shittiest jobs going, the legal equivalent of mucking out the pigs.”

Silence descended between the two women before the older one broke it with a sniff.

“Still, would it kill you to ring once a week?”

Jenny considered her mother for a long moment before replying. “Perhaps, but, well, we’ve never been what I’d call close, Mum, have we? Be honest.”

“No,” Margaret sighed. “You were always a daddy’s girl.”

Jenny arced up at her mother’s mildly accusatory tone.

“Don’t you dare try to put our lack of closeness on me, Mum. If I am a daddy’s girl, it’s because you were…” Jenny paused searching for the right term. “Emotionally absent from my life for pretty much as long as I can remember.”

The older woman looked down as a little of the truth of her daughter’s well-chosen words sank in, but it just wasn’t in Margaret’s nature to accept blame.

“I bloody worked too, you know? I was president of the PTA while you were at school. I ran, and still do run, several charities. I have a career every bit as valid as your father’s. Just because I don’t earn the big dollars doesn’t mean my career isn’t important too.”

She sat down, knowing her goals wouldn’t be served by getting angry and digging up old issues.

Jenny felt no such constraints.

“You didn’t have to do any of those things, Mum, as valid as they were, you chose to. And, let’s face it, you did them more for your own self-aggrandizement than for what good they would do in the community. You had to run everything, remember, you left the PTA when someone else was elected chairperson. If you’re honest with yourself, you’d have to know you only kept the chairmanships of most of the charities you run because dad or his associates donate much of the money they rely on.”

Now it was Jenny’s turn to realise there was little value in raking over old coals, to say what she really wanted to – that she’d much rather her mother had been there for her instead. What was the point in telling her mother she’d spent most of her childhood feeling like she was just one more annoying detail for her mother to organise? She’d never listened before. Pointing out home truths may have been a pointless exercise but she couldn’t stand by and see her father criticised unfairly.

“Sorry, Mum, but it’s the truth. It was dad who went with me to all the after-school sports. It was dad who was there for me to talk to when I needed a shoulder to lean on. Dad who helped with homework and taught me to ride a bicycle, drive a car. It was dad… everything. You just weren’t there, physically or emotionally. You were, how shall I describe it… detached. Unavailable.”

“No, that’s not fair, Jenny. I’m the warm one. Ask anybody. It’s your father who is the cold one, totally emotionless.”

“That’s a big fat bullshit, Mum. Dad is a lawyer, and just like doctors and shrinks, they can’t afford to get emotionally involved in their clients, it would destroy them. He still feels all the feelings a well-adjusted human being feels but he has to control them; hide them. You have to learn early in your training to separate emotion and action. So, sometimes he had trouble turning that off when he came home. To me that just proves he’s human. You…, well I’m starting to think you’re a sociopath.”

The older woman flushed bright red. Sociopath? How dare Jenny! She ran charities, for god’s sake! Charities that helped people. She was a humanitarian!

With difficulty Margaret managed to curb her reflex of anger – she needed a friend right now and after her husband’s actions of the last week, they were in very short supply. Being an extremely competitive person, Margaret hadn’t the personality traits to make many close friends, more arms-length acquaintances.

Her closest confidante had been her sister who’d rung her and told her about the pictures and video Dave had shown her. Images of her dirty dancing in a club, practically having clothed sex on the dance floor, then the camera following her and the guy twenty years her junior to the motel room door. No, it didn’t show her having extramarital sex, but it was obvious that was what was about to happen. Her sister had ranted on about her disgusting behaviour until Margaret could stand no more and hung up.

No, getting righteously angry right now would be very counterproductive. Silence prevailed for several long seconds before Jenny broke the uncomfortable hush.

“So, what did you want to talk about, Mum? I have to say, you look like shit.”

“Your dad left me, Jen.”

“I know, Mum, he told me.”

The silence returned for another long, crawling pause.

“He also told me why, Mum.”

The older woman’s gaze sank to the table and stayed there. Driven as she was by other’s perception of her, she’d desperately hoped Dave hadn’t told the rest of the family. It was bad enough he’d shown her sister the video. Margaret felt stuck – how much had Dave revealed to their daughter? Not knowing exactly how much Jennifer knew made volunteering anything problematic.

For her part, Jennifer waited for her mother to be honest and open with her for the first time in her life.

She was disappointed. Again.

Jennifer sighed. When she spoke her voice was neutral, calm, her law training kicking in. “I’ll tell you what Dad told me. He found out you were cheating on him so he set you up. He pretended to take a business trip for three days and two nights. Instead, he hung around town and watched you. He thought you’d at least wait until the second night but he said you headed out practically before wheels-up on the plane he was supposed to be on. He followed you to that club right the way across town and saw you accept drinks from the third guy that approached you. What was wrong with the first two, Mum? In their thirties too old?”

Her mother didn’t rise to the bait. She kept looking down.

“He watched the guy ply you with drinks and your dirty dancing performance. He followed you to the motel next door, watched as you checked in, saw you head for the room. What did it feel like when Dad tapped you on the shoulder as you were kissing the guy outside the room? Dad told me he’d gone to remove your wedding and engagement rings but they weren’t there.” Jenny snorted. “What did you think, Mum? That removing your rings made you single again?”

‘Oh my god,’ her mother thought, ‘this is embarrassing.’

Indeed, that moment had been the worst of her sheltered life. To break off from the kiss, a kiss that was meant to be the prelude to a night of pleasure, to look into the deadpan eyes of her husband of twenty-eight years.

She could still hear his slightly choked voice saying, ‘Goodbye, Margaret,’ with an unmistakeable finality. His words, that voice, they’d struck her dumb and immobile until Dave had disappeared from view. Only when Dave was out of sight had instinct kicked in. The awkward running to her car in high heels and screeching homewards pure reflex.

The policeman flagging her down, the breath test and subsequent trip to the police station for booking, merely sealed the death of her reputation and positions of authority on top of the vaporisation of her marriage. By the time the taxi deposited her at home, Dave was long gone.

The loss of everything important to her made saving her relationship with her only child all the more critical. How could she spin it in her favour? Even she was smart enough to know a defence of ‘I was lonely, I allowed myself to be seduced, it had never happened before’, was a non-starter. She’d been a lawyer’s wife for twenty-eight years. She didn’t need a third party to tell her that a married woman entering a club alone, not wearing her rings, proved intent. What had Jenny said? Dave had found out she was cheating. How? She’d always been very careful.

“Ho… how did your father find out?”

Her daughter sighed, disappointed that the method of discovery of her cheating was what concerned her mother. Silly perhaps, but she’d hoped for some remorse for her actions from the woman who had birthed her.

“Remember that two-day trip Dad took about a month ago? He came home and went to use the toilet in the ensuite. Under the toilet seat, where only a guy would see, someone had taped a note. The note said he picked up what he thought was a single woman—well, she had no rings on—and brought her back to her house for a night of fun. In the morning, he realised that the room was obviously shared by a man, probably a husband. He felt ashamed, left the note where a woman would never find it unless she cleaned the toilet, and bolted before the woman—you—woke. Frankly, the note gives me, as a woman, reassurance. It’s nice to know there are still some honourable men left in the world.”

‘Fuck, fuck, fuck.’ Margaret rarely swore but the ‘F’ word was the only appropriate one for her current situation. ‘The one fucking night I was so super horny that I brought a guy here because there was a huge conference in town and all the motel rooms were so booked that even her chosen partner was forced to share a twin room with a fellow salesman from his company, and I pick up a guy with a conscience. How can I spin this?’

“You know, Mother.”

Jennifer’s use of the word ‘mother’ rather than ‘mum’ made Margaret flinch in anticipation of what was to follow.

“I can’t help thinking you’ve been doing this for years. I remember ever since I was about six or seven, every time Dad was out of town on business you packed me off to Grandma’s. Have you really been screwing around on Dad that long? You call him an unfeeling bastard but he must really have loved you to miss that all these years. Only love could make someone that blind.”

Margaret’s gaze was on the floor and staying there, her failure to deny anything shouting volumes. How could she recover this situation? None of the family and friends she shared with Dave were returning her calls. She’d been summoned to two urgent meetings with organisations she volunteered with later in the week. No prizes for guessing what that was all about.

Then there was the pre-nup she and Dave signed, gutting the half of the partnership that cheated. Sure, she wouldn’t be entirely destitute but her comfortable existence would be a thing of the past. The certified letter delivering the eviction notice from the house had arrived just today.

She needed a friend. She needed a supporter, now like never before. Various plans of attack, words of justification, flitted across her mind; none stood up to even the most perfunctory bullshit test. But there had to be one, Jennifer was her own flesh and blood, after all. Sure, she hadn’t breastfed her. Was it really so bad that she hadn’t wanted her breasts to sag and lose their fullness like those of her sister? Was it really so awful to want them to stay pert for as long as possible? Besides, she’d held the bottle the majority of the time.

‘Hang on, if I tell her…’

“Mother, you’ve been served.”

With a neutral expression, Jennifer Brown stood and calmly unbuttoned her suit jacket and pulled a manilla envelope from within. For a split second, Margaret wondered how she could have missed the extra bulk on her daughter’s normally slender frame. Jennifer didn’t rush. Her movements were slow and deliberate, her gaze on her mother the entire time. She placed the folder on the table in front of her mother. Jennifer’s movement sped up, as if afraid she’d miss the moment. She pulled a phone from handbag, quickly taking a photograph of the shocked woman across the table.

Then she let herself out.

THE END

Now lighten the fuck up.

A new supermarket opened near my house. It has an automatic water mister to keep the produce fresh. Just before it goes on, you hear the sound of distant thunder and the smell of fresh rain fills the air.

When you approach the milk fridges, you hear cows mooing and experience the scent of fresh hay.

When you approach the egg counter, you the hens cluck and cackle and all around you wafts the pleasing aroma of bacon and eggs frying.

The veggie department features the smell of freshly buttered corn.

I don’t buy toilet paper there any more.