The Anatomical Shape of a Heart(57)

“Please, just hear me out for one minute.” His arms slowly dropped to his sides. “Let me look at you. My God, you’re practically a woman. I haven’t seen you—”

“In three years,” I finished. “Been too busy banging your strip-club-owning wife to bother communicating with your own children until now?”

Jack made a small noise at my side, but he said nothing. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I knew I’d be sorry later that he’d witnessed this messiness, but right now I was too angry to care.

My father’s nose wrinkled. “Strip club? What in the world are you talking about? Suzi owned a cabaret in Santa Monica.”

“Cabaret?” What in the world was that?

“A piano bar,” he elaborated. “Singers, not strippers.”

That’s not what Mom had told us. But who was I going to believe? The woman who worked her ass off to keep a roof over our heads, or the man who abandoned us for a newer model?

“Strip club.” He said this like he was spitting out rancid food, shaking his head. It took me a second to realize he had darted a look toward the Jaguar. That was “Suzi”? No wonder Mom had gone ballistic. Suzi couldn’t have been that much older than I was! And by then she was standing outside the Jag, arms crossed over her breasts. Wearing designer clothes, which my father had probably paid for.

I wanted to vomit.

My father just shook his head and pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose. “And I haven’t been too busy to see you. Your mother won’t let me near you or Heath.”

“Maybe that’s because you’re too broke to pay child support.” I used finger quotes on “broke” and crossed my arms over my chest, mimicking his new wife’s stance. “Guess those car payments are more important than our utility bill.”

My father growled. “Oh, that’s rich. Is that what she’s telling you? She refused child support. It’s in the divorce papers, Beatrix. Go look at them. She had her lawyer strike right over the payments. She said she wasn’t taking a dime from me—that she’d rather the three of you live at the YMCA than accept a ‘handout’ from me.” He, too, used finger quotes. And his Dutch accent began creeping out of his Stanford-educated crisp words.

“A likely story,” I said. But if I was being honest with myself, it did sound a little like Mom. A lot, really. But, still, she wouldn’t have lied to us about something that big. Maybe there was a misunderstanding about the so-called cabaret—maybe—but not this. Not when we lost the house in Cole Valley. Not when she struggled to work twelve-hour graveyard shifts that barely kept us in generic shampoo and those weird-tasting tubes of discount ground beef.

“Not a story,” my father said firmly, hands on his waist, elbows pushing the tails of his sport coat back like angry wings. “Truth, Beatrix. It’s the goddamn truth.”

“Truth is action, not words. Mom helps me with my homework. Mom cooks me dinner. Mom takes care of me when I’m sick.”

“I know she does.”

“Do you know? Really? Did you know Mom received a Distinguished Nurse award from the chancellor in May?”

“That’s wonderful.”

“She’s wonderful. And she’s there every day for us. But what have you done? Have you even tried to write me or Heath a single postcard?

“As a matter of fact—”

“Did you know I lost all my friends when we were forced to move and I had to change schools? Did you know I’m one of the poorest kids in my class, and I’ve had to work since I was sixteen to pay my own cell phone bill and Muni pass? Did you know I can’t afford to go to the college I want, and that I’m spending my summer busting my ass for an art project because the only way I can go to any school at all is to win a stupid scholarship in a competition? Did you know Heath has dropped out of two colleges and gotten in all kinds of trouble? You wanna know why? Because you f*cking left us.”

His face jerked back as if I’d slapped him, but the hurt left as quickly as it had appeared, and the calm and reasonable Vice President Van Asch got control over himself. “I can’t apologize forever.”

“Forever? Try once!”

“I’m sorry, Beatrix. I should’ve done better. Tried harder. But I want to now. It’s one of the reasons I moved back—I took a provost position at Berkeley so I could be closer to you and Heath. Just let me try. Come have coffee with me. Meet Suzi—”

“Never.”

He was livid. And for a second, I saw a familiar look on his face—the same one he’d given me when I spilled a bottle of drawing ink on his precious Moroccan rug. He wanted to take me by the shoulders and shake me. His hand twitched, and he reached out as if he might just do it.

My shadow stepped between us.

Jack towered over Dad by a good head. And at that moment, with his face tight and his dark brows lowered, he looked like more of a man than my father.

“You don’t want to do that,” Jack said in a deep, scarily calm voice.

Oh, my father did not like this. Not at all. And for a moment they were two bulls, one young, one middle-aged. One wrong word and they’d be going at it, mano a mano.

“Lars,” a feminine voice called from behind him. His new wife, Suzi. It was a plea and a gentle warning. And it was enough to break up the pinballing tension.