Dangerous Ladies, Page 2

  In a guttural tone Daddy said, “For Christ’s sake, Tiffany, don’t be stupid.”

  “I’m not stupid!” Mama stomped her foot. “I just think things like manners and pleasure are important, and you shouldn’t have broken that vase.”

  Brandi skidded to a stop.

  Mama continued, “It took me months to find the right vase for that table!”

  Slowly Brandi lowered the dragon. She crept back toward her room. If they knew she was listening they’d make her shut her door, and no matter how her stomach churned, she had to know whether her daddy had destroyed their lives.

  “That’s the problem,” Daddy said. “You always cared more about vases and manners than about ideas or work—or me.”

  “That’s not true!” Mama whimpered like a kicked puppy.

  It was true, but to Brandi’s childish eyes, it had seemed that that was all he required of her mother. Only in the last year had he grown restless and contemptuous.

  Mama’s quiet sobbing must have made Daddy uncomfortable, for he tried cajoling her. “C’mon, Tiff, you’ll be all right without me. Jane is doing just fine.”

  “B-but J-Jane had a prenuptial agreement. Y-you didn’t want me t-to get one.”

  “That was your mistake.”

  Brandi recognized that tone in her father’s voice. Guilt was hotly prodding him—and he blamed Mom.

  “Y-you said . . . you said you’d take care of me forever.”

  “For shit’s sake, would you stop blubbering? It’s disgusting.” He slammed his suitcase closed. “I’ll have my lawyer call your lawyer.”

  “I don’t have a lawyer!”

  “Get one.” Daddy’s heels slapped the polished hardwood floor as he walked down the hallway.

  Brandi tensed as she waited to see if he would stop to hug her before he left.

  But he passed without a glance in her direction.

  Brandi swallowed her disappointment. She knew how. She’d done it for years.

  Mama ran past her and after him, crying with ever more desperation. “I don’t have a job. How will I support Brandi? We’ll starve!” She caught him as he opened the door, grabbed at his arm, and tried to hold him back.

  Even Brandi recognized high drama at its best.

  Quietly she shut herself into her bedroom and left them to it.

  Her stomach hurt, roiling with distress. She absently rubbed the pain and looked around her bedroom. Mama had decorated it with white-and-gold furniture and pink-and-gold upholstery. When Brandi was young she had felt as though she were living in a Barbie dream house, and she’d loved it.

  Now that she was older she felt as if she were living in a Barbie dream house, and she wanted it changed. But she hadn’t wanted to hurt Mama’s feelings, so she’d added a few touches herself. A stained-glass window done in shades of blue that looked like her favorite print in The Hobbit. Her shiny green dragon with sparkling gems for eyes. Three black-and-white posters of the Hadrien Boys from England. But peering through the stained glass, running her fingertips over the dragon’s scales, and looking at the boys did nothing to ease the ache in her chest. In her heart.

  She opened the window and looked out at the soft green unfurling in the trees. Nashville was beautiful in the spring. Their huge yard was tiered and landscaped and usually the sight made Brandi feel warm and secure. Today it wasn’t working. Nothing was working.

  Downstairs she heard the front door slam so hard it shook the house.

  Her throat hurt, so she took big breaths of fresh air, desperate to hold back . . . no, not tears. She wasn’t going to cry.

  She was going to fix this. Somehow she had to do something that would make it better.

  Walking to her painted desk, she pulled out a tablet, one engraved with her name, and at the top she wrote, Things to Learn. She drew a line beneath the words and numbered down the lines, and wrote:

  How to Take Care of My Mother.

  1. Learn how to write checks.

  2. Find out what a utility is.

  3. Figure out how to make the house payment.

  Then she tore that list off, set it carefully to the side, and on the top of the clean sheet, wrote:

  How to Take Care of Myself.

  1. Learn how to write checks.

  2. Get scholarships so I can go to school.

  3. Play baseball.

  She frowned at that one and chewed on the end of her pen. No, that wouldn’t do. She wasn’t good at baseball; to Kim’s annoyance Brandi ducked when the ball came in her direction.

  Brandi crossed off Play baseball and replaced it with Become a lawyer.

  She didn’t know exactly what a lawyer did—a girl who attended ballet, gymnastics, and cheerleading classes in every spare moment learned remarkably little about the real world, especially when her father never talked to her about his job—but she knew he made a lot of money. And her father had required her mother to look beautiful and Brandi to be charming when Mr. Charles McGrath and his wife visited, and Mr. McGrath was an important Chicago lawyer.

  That was what she wanted. She wanted to be important. She wanted the power to make her father behave, and the ability to get her mother a prenuptial agreement.

  Whatever that was.

  Learn how to make a prenuptial agreement.

  2

  Chicago

  Fourteen years later

  If Brandi’s caller ID had been working, she would never have picked up the phone.

  But it wasn’t, and she did, and that just figured, because it had been one hell of a week.

  Not that Brandi hadn’t expected it. Anybody with a lick of sense could predict that moving from Nashville to Chicago in the dead of winter would be difficult, and Brandi prided herself on her good sense.

  But she’d picked the coldest winter Chicago had seen for a century, which made the pipes in her apartment building freeze for the first time ever, which meant that her movers had had nothing to drink—not that that had stopped them from using her toilet, which for the lack of water didn’t flush and probably wouldn’t for weeks, and using it with such typical male abandon that she didn’t dare sit on it even in the most dire circumstances because there was no way to clean the seat. And one guy caught her talking to herself while she tried to wipe the seat with a wadded-up Kleenex out of her purse, and the son of a bitch had the gall to inch away as if she were crazy.

  She didn’t think much of men right now, and the movers’ back-pedaling only increased her ire—and her sense of isolation.

  She didn’t know anybody in this town except Alan and Mr. McGrath—for years now she’d called him by the honorary title of Uncle Charles—but where were they while she crammed her entire life into a one-bedroom apartment?

  In a lovely piece of irony, the icy roads had sent the truck carrying her new sofa and armchair careening into an empty Marble Slab Ice Cream Shop. The deliverymen wrestled the furniture up to her fourth-floor apartment by tilting it sideways in the freight elevator, a maneuver that made her cover her eyes and pray to the gods of furniture placement.

  Her entreaties must have worked, because they planted the sofa and the chair in front of the small propane fireplace, put the ottoman between them, and moved her end tables into place.

  Surely her luck had turned. The sofa wasn’t damaged. The colors and fabrics were exactly the way she had ordered them. They would fit perfectly in the new apartment she and Alan would move into when they married. It was only later that night, when she stopped unpacking long enough to drop into the chair, put her feet up on the ottoman, and look, really look at the furniture, that she realized the sofa was eighteen inches too short.

  She’d received the love seat, not the full-size sofa she’d ordered.

  She spent the whole night on her hastily made bed, worrying about making the phone call to Amy, her salesperson at Samuel’s Furniture.

  That, at least, went well. Amy was apologetic, behaving just as well as Brandi could have hoped, but the fact was that she had to wait
another six weeks until the actual furniture she’d ordered arrived, and for a few minutes it seemed as if that sucked more than anything else that had happened in this horrific, endless week.

  Until the phone call she picked up because she thought, honestly thought, that Alan was calling to tell her he was coming over at last.

  Instead, it was her mother.

  “Well? How did the move go?” As always, Tiffany sounded like a cheerleader bolstering her team’s spirits before the big game.

  Brandi stared around at the endless parade of boxes. Empty boxes piled catawampus against the wall. Flattened boxes stacked by the door. Boxes, far too many boxes, still taped shut and scratched with black Magic Marker from her last two moves. An endless supply of boxes, no stereo system in sight, and pizza for dinner again. “Well, I’ve been unpacking for a day and a half and I haven’t seen Alan. Not once.”

  “Now, sweetheart, I’m sure he’s busy. After all, he is a physician.” Mother’s Tennessee accent sounded soft and tender.

  Brandi didn’t know why she’d bothered to complain. It was pure exhaustion and loneliness that made her give in to her irritation and criticize her fiancé to, of all people, her mother. “He’s not a physician. He’s a resident.”

  “That poor boy. I saw on 60 Minutes how those hospital administrators work their residents ninety-six hours at a time. And you said he was brilliant. Remember? You told me he was the top of his class and all eyes were on him.”

  For once Brandi wished her mother would take her side. About anything. “He hasn’t called, either. He may have e-mailed, but I don’t get connected to the Internet until next week.”

  “I hope you didn’t call him. A nagging woman is an unpleasant creature.” Tiffany was the personification of 1950s Southern womanhood.

  “Yes, Mother, I know, although if he’d remember me long enough to do as he promised, I wouldn’t be seized by this overwhelming desire to nag him.” Brandi scratched her nails against the grain of the fabric on the couch, watched as the brocade rose in four welts, and wondered which one of them she wanted to scratch—her mother or her fiancé. “But I’d like to point out that I’m a lawyer who relocated from a lovely, soft, warm city to be close to my fiancé. I’m about to start my first full-time job at a major Chicago law firm, and I’m going to be working all the time. He could at least call to see if I’ve frozen to the side of the Dumpster taking out my trash.”

  Mother’s voice took on that pious tone that made Brandi want to shriek. “To keep her man, a woman always has to give one hundred and ten percent.”

  “How did that work out for you?”

  The sound of her mother’s shocked inhalation brought Brandi to her senses. She loved her mother, she really did, but Mother had been Daddy’s first trophy wife, and he’d left her and the quietly anguished eleven-year-old Brandi for his twenty-three-year-old secretary and a new baby, a son guaranteed to give him what he needed—a football-uniformed mirror image of his youthful self.

  Except, of course, Brandi’s half brother was now thirteen and supremely uninterested in sports. Instead Quentin was a brilliant computer programmer.

  Brandi felt sorry for Quentin; she knew what it was like dealing with a panicked mother who was losing that dewy glow of youth, a father who didn’t bother to hide his disappointment in his child, and their rapidly disintegrating marriage.

  “I’m sorry, Mother. I’m a bitch.”

  “No, you’re not.”

  “I’m pretty sure I am.” Not always a bad thing, in Brandi’s opinion. “Let’s face it, with his current troubles Daddy has proved he doesn’t know what he wants. Not in a wife. Not in his kids.”

  “Your father is a good man.”

  Brandi smiled bitterly and stroked the slick scales of her treasured old dragon. No matter how much Daddy screwed Tiffany over, she never said a nasty word about him. When Brandi was a teenager she might have been conflicted if Mother had badmouthed him, but those days were long gone.

  Daddy was not a good man. He was self-centered, abusive, and manipulative, and no one knew that better than Brandi.

  “When you get off the phone with me, call him. He’ll want to hear that you got there safely.”

  “Oh, Mother. He’ll barely remember I moved.”

  “And tomorrow’s his birthday.”

  “Oh. I forgot.” He’d probably forgotten, too, but Tiffany kept up the pretense that he was a normal man who celebrated special occasions, probably because that way Brandi was forced to communicate with him on a semiregular basis.

  When Brandi thought of talking to him, of the chance that he would yell at her, or, worse, of the possibility that he wouldn’t have time to speak to her, her stomach hurt. She always put it off as long as possible.

  That was why she’d gotten engaged to Alan. He might not be a man of fire and passion, but he was steady and dependable—or he had been until she needed him.

  And Mother was right about that, too. He probably had a whopper of an excuse. But Brandi—who’d broken a fingernail down to the quick, whose deodorant had failed hours ago, who was dehydrated and didn’t dare drink her bottled water because she couldn’t flush—wasn’t in the mood to hear it right now.

  “Alan’ll be by soon.” Mother used a conciliatory tone. “Maybe he’ll come tonight to take you out to dinner.”

  “I don’t want him to take me out. I want him to help me unpack.” Yep. Definitely bitchy.

  “No, go out! You should seize every chance for a good time right now, while you’re young.” About this, Tiffany sounded fierce.

  And that made Brandi squirm with guilt. The reason Tiffany hadn’t been out there kicking up her heels was because she’d been trying—not succeeding, but trying—to make a living for Brandi. “Mother, you’re not exactly old. You’re not even fifty. You could get out there and have a good time.”

  “Men my age want women your age, and men who want women my age are too old to have a good time. In every way.” Tiffany’s voice was droll. “But actually, I’ve been thinking. . . .”

  “What?”

  Tiffany hesitated.

  “What?” It wasn’t like her mother to be coy. Quite the opposite.

  “I wish I could be there to help you!” Tiffany burst out. “I miss you!”

  Brandi would have sworn that wasn’t what Tiffany intended to say. But she was too tired, too dirty, too disheveled to dig for the truth. “I haven’t lived at home for seven years. You can’t miss me that much.”

  “I know, but it’s different with you so far away. When you were at Vanderbilt you were right across town, and I thought if you needed me, I could get to you right away. Now . . .”

  “I’m okay, Tiffany. Really. I’m good at taking care of myself.” A lot better than you are at taking care of yourself.

  “I know. You are capable. I’m proud of you.” But Tiffany sounded fretful. “I just wish Alan were there. He’s so reliable.”

  Except now. “Tomorrow night he’s going to take me to a party at Uncle Charles’s.” And if he did this disappearing act and didn’t show for that, she didn’t care what excuse he came up with; she was going to kill him.

  “A party?” Tiffany inhaled with excitement. “At Charles’s home? Oh, that is a showcase. He recently had the foyer remodeled. Do you know that when they stripped the paint off the curved stairway, they found that underneath it’s solid mahogany? Can you imagine? I wish I could see it! Do you like Charles?”

  Her mother’s leaps from one subject to another made Brandi blink. “Sure. I’ve liked Uncle Charles since he used his legal expertise to wring child support out of Daddy.”

  “Your father was confused by that woman he married.”

  “So we’re hoping he’s pussy-whipped instead of morally corrupt?”

  “Don’t use that term, Brandi. It sounds bitter, and that’s not at all attractive in a young woman.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” Interesting that when Tiffany got motherly, Brandi felt more secure.

 
; “Tell me all about the party.”

  “It’s a charity ball to raise money for the museum. There’ll be a silent auction, and during the entertainment—by the way, Uncle Charles got Elton John—I’m sitting at the McGrath and Lindoberth corporate table.” Of course she was. She might be new, but she’d earned straight As out of Vanderbilt Law, and that was no small feat. Even without Uncle Charles’s influence she would have been interviewed, and she’d aced that. She’d won this job fair and square. She was good, and she knew it.

  “What are you wearing?” Tiffany asked.

  Uh-oh. “That black sheath I bought for parties at law school.”

  Tiffany didn’t say, Oh, but you bought it at Ann Taylor, or, But that’s two years old. Instead she said, “Darling, black? That’s so New York. Show those Chicago lawyers how good a Southern girl can look!”

  “I look awful in pink.” Brandi slithered down to sit on her backbone.

  “Wear red. Men adore red.”

  “I don’t care what men adore,” Brandi snapped, then took a long breath. Tiffany had never changed her mind. She’d lived through fourteen years of miserable existence, and she still thought a man was a woman’s best friend—a man and the gifts she could get from him.

  “But the sheath doesn’t show off your figure.”

  “Thank God. Do you know how hard it is to dress for business with a chest like mine?”

  “Women pay good money every day for a chest like yours. Marilyn Monroe made a fortune with a chest like yours. With a figure like yours!” Tiffany laughed, the kind of throaty purr that said she knew a lot about how men and women played.

  Unwillingly, Brandi laughed, too. It was true. If she hadn’t become a lawyer, she could have been a Las Vegas showgirl. She was all hourglass figure. During interviews she’d mashed down her bosom so the women wouldn’t immediately hate her and the guys would look at her face. “I can’t afford a new dress right now. This move cost a fortune.”