Page 53 of Bonds of Shame, Bonds of Lust

I'd arrived twenty minutes early. I hadn't been able to sit at home one more minute, and being early at a restaurant gave me actual tasks. Order water. Fold the napkin.

Dad had picked the restaurant. Nothing pretentious, a bistro on Romany Road where the lunch specials went up on a chalkboard. He'd emailed me the reservation like a calendar invite. Lunch at Dudley's. 12:30. Carol can't wait to meet you.

I'm too old to have a stepmother.

It was unfair, and it was uncharitable, and it was the most honest thought I'd had since the email came in.

I heard the door, the bright voice of the hostess, and I turned.

Dad was beaming.

I hadn't seen my father's face do whatever it was doing in twenty years, maybe twenty-five. He was holding the door with one hand and gesturing the woman with him through with the other, looking at her sideways like a man who couldn't quite believe he'd been allowed to walk in next to this person. Chin up, shoulders down. He was wearing a tie. Dad didn't wear ties to lunch on a weekday.

Then I saw her.

Carol was much younger than I'd been ready for. Dad was pushing sixty. Carol couldn't have been more than forty-five. She was a woman with a figure, and the wrap dress knew it. Stockings in September. Pumps. Hair fully done. A full face of makeup put on by a woman who'd been doing her own since she was sixteen and had never stopped. Tasteful by a margin so narrow my father would have made me change clothes in high school if I'd tried to leave the house in it.

My mother had worn clothes like that.

Dad was opening his mouth to introduce us. He didn't get there.

Carol crossed the last three feet with the brisk warmth of a woman who'd decided what was going to happen. She opened her arms and hugged me before I'd stood up properly. Both arms around my shoulders, cheek beside mine, a count of three. The competence of a woman who'd been hugging strangers her whole adult life and had worked out exactly how long.

She stepped back, hands still on my upper arms, and looked at my face.

Then she let go too quickly, half a step back, the expression dialing down a notch. The correction was instant and fully under control, and if I hadn't been looking right at her I'd have missed it. Behind her, Dad's smile faltered for half a second. He'd seen it too.

She'd read dislike on my face, or thought she had, and decided she'd come in too warm.

Oh, I thought. She was paying attention.

"It's wonderful to meet you, Carol," I said. "Dad hasn't stopped talking about you."

Carol's face came back up to full brightness in real time.

"Oh," she said, and turned to my father. "Bob. You undersold her."

Dad was still beaming. It had gotten worse. He looked, frankly, drunk on it.

"I told you," he said.

"You did not tell me. You said pretty. Pretty is what you say about a niece. This is your daughter, honey." She squeezed my arms once more. "Hi, sweetheart. I am so happy to finally meet you. He hasn't stopped talking about you. I feel like I already know you!"

She sat down across from me before I'd spoken again. Dad slid in beside her. The whole choreography of their arrival had taken about ninety seconds, and Carol had filled it with conversation that hadn't required any from me.

Carol was the kind of woman I'd always liked to be around. Confident, talkative, the kind who carried the room. Janice was one of those women.

I'd walked into this lunch ready to resent the woman who'd be sleeping with my father.

The woman I'd met instead was making it considerably harder.

Carol opened her menu. Then she looked over at Dad's, then at mine, then back at hers. She was scanning hers but checking ours, the way you scan a menu when you aren't sure what's safe to want.

"What looks good, Lacey?"

"The roasted chicken's good. The salad with the goat cheese. I haven't had the special."

"Bob, what did you have last time?"