Oh fuck. My cheeks burn.

I drop my legs and the matter-of-factness of that observation makes me feel for the first time as though my behavior of late is wrong. Linda is a superlative mother. Calm, matter-of-fact, all knowing, and strangely tolerant and reprimanding simultaneous. A Jewish mother’s power. That’s what Bobby calls it.

“Was there ever a paternity test?”

Linda shakes her head. “It wasn’t something Chrissie would do. Not for a lot of reasons.”

“She’s spent most of her life hopping in and out of Alan Manzone’s bed. Why wouldn’t she need it? My mother is a slut who can’t keep her legs closed with him—”

The pain shooting through my cheek is so overwhelming that it nearly takes a minute to realize that Linda just slapped me hard on the face.

“Put a lid on that anger. It’s going to hurt you,” Linda says calmly. “You don’t believe that and I won’t listen to it. If you want to talk to me there will be no cheap shots at your mother. That was a really ugly thing to say.”

That makes me cry, first softly and then harder. It is like a magical power Linda has to douse the anger first in shock and then in regret. I am ashamed of myself for the second time in less than five minutes, and as awful as it is, it feels realer and nearer to myself than I’ve felt at any other moment in the past year, except in those new moments of me and Bobby.

Linda begins to slowly rock me in her arms. “Oh, Kaley. You’ve got a lot bottled up inside of you. Just don’t hurt yourself with it.”

I nod.

She brushes back my hair and smiles.

“Is my boy good to you? Does he treat you the way he should?”

My face burns darker.

Linda is the weirdest mom I’ve ever known, but did she just ask me if her son treated me well in bed?

“W-what? I’m not answering that,” I sputter.

God, this is humiliating.

Linda laughs quickly. “No. No. I’m not asking how my boy treats you sexually. God, Kaley, not that. Have I raised a good man? Is he a good man with you?”

Oh.

I nod, feeling badly for Linda and not exactly sure why. “Bobby is wonderful,” I admit. “He’s the best guy I’ve ever known.”

Linda smiles, pleased, and nods.

For a moment she seems lost in her own thoughts.

“Why are you so certain Neil Stanton is not my father?” I ask.

Linda takes a puff of her cigarette, seems to debate with herself her answer, and then says it bluntly. “It’s obvious.”

“Does my dad know the truth?”

Linda sighs. “I don’t know what Manny knows. He doesn’t talk about Chrissie with me. Not anymore. Not in a long time.”

My temper flares, because I don’t believe that last comment. Everyone talks about everything with Linda. There is just something about her and I hate the suspicion that she is lying in an attempt to protect me.

“Does he know I’m his daughter? Does he or doesn’t he? Is he part of this fucked-up pretense and lie? Does he know and pretends he isn’t?”

Linda’s head shakes in an aggravated tempo in sync with the movements of her hand as she stomps out the cigarette.

“Grow up, Kaley. Life doesn’t devolve into giant conspiracies. Life happens, sometimes quickly, and your mother was young. We make the wrong turn. It gets fucked up. It gets hard to correct. This is not a conspiracy against you, so knock that victim chip off your shoulder and be done with it. No, he doesn’t know. He is about the only one who doesn’t think it. I don’t know how things got so fucked up. But it’s not a conspiracy.”

“That’s stupid. I don’t believe any of that.”

Linda makes a face and then shrugs. “Fine. Don’t believe it. It is the truth. Love can make you see whatever you want to see. I’ve seen a lot of things with my eyes that my heart won’t let me believe. It’s how people cope, manage. You’re no different. We all muddle through believing what we want to believe.”

OK, what a fucked-up group of people I’ve been born into. I give up, and watch Linda as she rises from the sofa in a silent announcement that this is through for tonight.

I follow her back into the kitchen. In the silence we stand at the breakfast bar, picking at a bag of Oreos and staring at the sleeping pyramid in the chair. After wiping the crumbs from my face, I cross the room to the sliding door. Linda is watching me like a woman standing guard, not wanting anything to erupt in her house.

I look at Alan. My dad. Linda says he is, I can feel it inside me, and yet it still isn’t real, would never be real, until I know for certain and he acknowledges me.

As an afterthought I go back to my dad, prop his feet up on a stool and cover him with a throw blanket. Linda gives me an approving nod, clearly thinking she’s fixed everything, and quickly I slip through the door.

When I return to the pool house it’s even more full of pot smoke than when I left and that really pisses me off. I hate the pot. Bobby smokes it every night, though not until after we’ve had sex because I won’t fuck him if he is stoned.

His eyes are lazy and red when they fix on me and the silence has more to do with his ability to read my moods than how fucked up he is. I lift the joint from his fingers, take a hit, and then drop it into a half-finished beer. One hit is more than enough for me. It is dispensary quality—he got a script from a doctor downtown—and I can’t understand how he can smoke so much of it and still be coherent. Any more than one hit and I’m out for the night.

I pull off the t-shirt and climb into bed, spooning against him so he can hold me while I sleep. “How can you get so fucked up every night and still have a perfect GPA? You really need to stop that shit.”

He gently pulls my long black curls over my shoulder to tuck them behind me so they don’t cover his face. “What happened? You were gone a long time.”

“My dad is sleeping in your parents’ house.”

“What did you do?”

“Nothing. Just stared. Ran into Linda, though. She wanted to have a talk with me. No big deal. Didn’t tell me to go home. It’s cool.”

Bobby eases up to look at my face. “Safe sex or guys are assholes. Which talk?”

I laugh. “I didn’t realize that Linda had two talks. I thought she only had one. The only talk she ever has with me is about my anger issues.”

“Oh, the anger issue talk. How did that go?”

“I’m less angry.”

“Really?”

“No. But I’m tired. I want to go to sleep. I can’t even see in this room through the smoke. Try opening a window once in a while. I don’t know how you’re awake.”

He lies back down behind me and pulls me more intimately up against him. “I waited for you.”

I lie in the smoke-filled room, listening to Bobby breathe. “Do you know where my dad’s house is in Malibu?”

Bobby leans up on an elbow and stares at me. “Of course.”

That causes anger to flash upward with all the other junk in me. I’m grateful for the anger. It helps me keep an ‘I don’t give a shit’ tone of voice.

“I want you to take me there tomorrow,” I command.

“OK.” Bobby settles back down on the pillow behind me.

I wait.

Nothing.

I look over my shoulder at him. “Aren’t you even going to ask me why I want to go to the Malibu house?”

“Don’t need to. You know better than I do what you need to do to work through this.”

CHAPTER 17

We head out shortly after dawn and go to Malibu.

Bobby pulls into a driveway, parks and turns off the engine. We sit there silently staring through the windshield.

An enormous concrete and glass structure hugs the beach behind a twelve foot wall. I’d often wondered if it was as large as I remembered or if my memory played tricks on me because I’d been a little girl when last here or if I even remembered it clearly. But it looks exactly the same, every detail, exactly what I see in time-frozen pictures in my head.