The Daughter Merger

He turned to fetch them. That was, apparently, his only acceptable role in this handoff. He couldn’t imagine coming back tomorrow or the next day and knocking on this bedroom door, going in for a chat. How, he wondered, would Grace deal with it when Claire refused to sit down at the dinner table if he was there?

“You’ll stay for lunch, won’t you?” Grace asked, when he came back with the roll of posters.

He sensed Claire’s sharp movement without looking at her. “Thanks, but I have to go into the office. Another time.”

“Then dinner tomorrow,” she said with an air of satisfaction. “Claire, what’s your favorite dinner? I cook a lot of pastas. Do you both like Italian?”

He had no idea what Claire ate besides the microwave meals she’d pop in when he wasn’t around. “I do,” he said. “But maybe I should let Claire settle in before I start hanging around.”

The stubborn woman didn’t know when to let up. “No, the sooner the better,” she said. “We’ll expect you tomorrow. About six?”

His daughter’s eyes narrowed.

“Fine.” He made himself look at her. “Claire…”

It was hard not to flinch at the hatred blazing in her eyes.

Without expression, he said, “I hope you’ll be happy here,” and walked away.

His specialty.

SHE WAS SO HAPPY when he left without bothering with some fakey goodbye scene. She didn’t even know why she’d been worried about that. Look how glad he was to get rid of her.

Well, he wasn’t any gladder than she was to be gone! Claire told herself for the fiftieth time today that anything had to be better than his house.

Mrs. Blanchet had made him promise he’d come over all the time and play daddy. Yeah. Right. They’d see how long that lasted, she thought bitterly. He might come a couple of times, but then he’d cancel at the last minute and say he had to work, and finally weeks would go by without anything but a check from him. He’d pay whatever he promised. Why not? Like he wasn’t loaded. And if he didn’t pay, Claire might be dumped back in his lap. Which he wouldn’t want.

What she figured was, once he’d forgotten all about her existence, she’d get Mrs. Blanchet talking to her mom. That way, once they got tired of her here, she could just quietly go home again.

Daddy might never even notice.

She wished, Claire thought viciously, hating the sadness that squeezed her chest like the asthma she’d had as a little kid. So what if he didn’t love her? She had her mother. Mom was all she needed.

“What CDs do you have?” Linnet was digging in her bag. “You have hardly any!”

“I left most of mine at Mom’s house. I just brought a few.” She didn’t have that many there, either, because Mom didn’t make much money. If she’d asked him for money, he probably would have given it to her, but she wasn’t going to.

“Oh.” Linnet gave up looking and flopped on the bed. “You can just borrow any of mine you want.”

Like she’d want to listen to Britney Spears or ’N Sync. Music was one thing she and Linnet did not agree about.

“This is going to be so cool,” Linnet said dreamily. “We can talk whenever we want. And do our homework together, and borrow each other’s clothes, and…” She rolled onto her side and propped her head on her hand. “Hey! Would you like to take dance with me?”

“Me?” Claire scrunched up her face. “I am so-o clumsy. I’d fall on my face.”

“Yeah, but see, dance makes you less clumsy,” Linnet said earnestly.

“And I’d be in a beginner class. Not with you.”

“Well…” Linnet frowned. “Yeah, but there’s one at the same time as my jazz dance. I think it’s ballet, but that’s okay, because you should get training in ballet first.”

Claire pictured herself in a pink leotard, standing with heels together and toes pointing out in that dorky position, slowly bending her knees and straightening all to the tinkle of a piano. No, thank you.

“Dance isn’t my thing.”

“What is your thing?”

Claire jumped to her feet and yanked open a drawer. She wasn’t going to hang those posters, she wouldn’t be here that long, but she might as well put her clothes in the drawers.

“What do you mean, what’s my thing? I like music and hanging out. It’s not like everybody has to dance.” She knew she sounded disagreeable and was mad at herself. She didn’t have to take her bad mood out on Linnet, who had rescued her from purgatory.

“I’m sorry.” Her friend flushed. “I mean, I just thought you’d want…”

“To be like you.” She still sounded weird. Abrupt. “I can’t be.”

“I’m nothing so great! I just think dancing is fun.” Linnet was starting to look ticked. “Is that so bad?”

Collapsing onto the floor cross-legged, Claire wrinkled her nose in apology. “I’m really sorry! I’m just jealous because I know you’re really good at dance, and I don’t want to be the only beginner over eight years old. Besides, your mom shouldn’t have to pay for stuff like that.”

“No, but I’ll bet your father would.”

“I don’t want to take his money!”

Her friend rolled onto her stomach and hung her arms off the bed, her chin resting on the edge. “Why not?”

“Because I don’t want to owe him anything!” she said fiercely.

“Who says you owe him?” Linnet asked logically. “I mean, parents don’t expect to be paid back. He’s already giving Mom money for your food, right? Mom says he is. So why not lessons? Isn’t there something you’ve always wanted to do? Skiing? Windsurfing?”

“Horseback riding.” Where had that come from? It just popped out, a little kid dream. She had those plastic horse statues, now sitting on a shelf in her bedroom at home. She used to play with them for hours. Sometimes, with her eyes closed, she’d imagine herself on horseback, galloping like the wind.

“See?” Linnet crowed. “I knew there was something! That’s it! Ask to take horseback riding lessons.”

Part of her balked at the idea. But another part started thinking, why not? The temptation nibbled at her resolve. She could spend his money. Lots of his money. Maybe she could ride English. Learn to show-jump.

Uh-huh. Sure. Let him think he’d done something for her. Tell everyone he was a good daddy because he’d paid for horseback riding lessons.

“No!” She shoved the roll of posters in the closet, in her haste denting it. “No. I don’t want his money. I don’t want anything from him.”

“Wow.” Linnet sounded awed. “You must really hate your dad.”

“I told you I did.” And she didn’t want to think about him, not anymore. One of the Blanchets’ two cats gave her an excuse, poking his head into the bedroom. “Hey, Lemieux,” Claire coaxed, holding out her hand. “Here kitty-kitty. Maybe he’ll sleep with me.” She trailed her fingers down the big Siamese’s taupe back. “Listen,” she said to Linnet, “why don’t you set up my stereo while I put away my clothes? Okay?”

Linnet slid nose first off the bed, like a seal going into the water. As she hit the floor, the cat erupted under Claire’s hand and fled, thundering down the hall.

Both girls laughed, and Claire’s mood improved for the first time. This wasn’t home, but it would be okay.

For now.

CHAPTER THREE

DAVID HAD NEVER SO BADLY wanted to make an excuse as he did Sunday. But he wouldn’t—couldn’t—let himself. Leaving Claire with her mother, believing she’d be better off there, was one thing. Deserting her on a stranger’s doorstep was another. He might be a coward, but not that big a one.

Besides which, damn it, he’d promised.

What the hell, he thought with grim humor as he rang the doorbell, Grace Blanchet might as well find out now what her Good Samaritan plans would come to.

She was the one to open the door. She wore an apron again, like the other day. From inside her home wafted the smell of garlic and baking bread and a whiff of something sweeter. Apple pie? Behind her, on the stairs, lay a different cat from the other day, this one a fluffy brown Maine coon type with a white bib. It paused in the midst of some intricate grooming ritual and stared at him, unblinking and distinctly unfriendly.

He tore his gaze away from the cat and looked at Grace Blanchet, who was smiling like any good hostess should, even one entertaining this particular guest only because she felt she had to.

“I’m glad you made it.” That smoky voice completely belied her prim exterior. “Claire wasn’t so sure you would.”

Yeah. More likely, Claire had hoped.

When Grace turned, his gaze flicked to her jean-clad rear. The white bow of the apron was a saucy accent to her slender curves.

Hating himself for ogling, feeling the cat’s stare between his shoulder blades, David followed Grace back to the kitchen, into déjà vu. There she was, behind the tiled counter, the apron protecting her clothes from the marinara sauce bubbling on the stove, which she stirred. He stood in exactly the same spot, beside the sliding door, feeling as socially inept as he had that day. He hadn’t stuck his foot in his mouth yet, but he knew damn well what was to come and hadn’t warned this perfectly nice woman.

“If you want to go up and say hi to Claire,” she began.

“I was hoping to talk to you first,” David said truthfully. “Is she, uh…”

“Behaving herself? You bet. She’s very polite.” A faintly troubled look crossed Grace’s face. “She hasn’t exactly settled in, though. She doesn’t want to put up her posters, for example. I wish you hadn’t said that.”

He shook his head. “Usually, my opening my mouth would guarantee that she’d do whatever I suggested she not do.”

“That bad, huh?”

“Worse.”

She set a wine bottle and corkscrew on the counter. “Would you open this?”

He automatically began turning the screw into the cork. “In all fairness,” he said gruffly, “I should warn you that Claire and I haven’t sat down for a meal together in a month or more. She’s bound to make an excuse tonight.”

For an apparently gentle, pleasant woman, Grace had a steely core. “She can try.”

With a pop, the cork came out. David poured two glasses, held his up, and said, “To a very brave woman.”

She lifted hers in turn. “Courage is in the eye of the beholder.”

They both swallowed.

David leaned one hip against the cabinet and watched her run water into a big pot for the pasta.

“I want you to know that I’m grateful to you for trying this,” he said abruptly.

She clapped a lid on the pot. “All I’m doing is giving your daughter a safe place to stay while you two work out your problems.”

He took another gulp of wine. “I have a bad feeling that you’re underestimating our problems. We don’t have father-daughter tension. Claire hates my guts.”

Her eyes were drenched with compassion. “And loves you, too.”

His laugh hurt. “Sure she does. So much so, she’d rather hitch a ride across three states than stay with me.”

“Thirteen-year-olds don’t think anything bad can happen to them.”

He wasn’t so sure about that. Claire knew that divorce happened, that mothers became drunks, that fathers disappeared from their daughters’ lives.

“Maybe. Just remember,” David said, “if you have trouble with her, you’re not stuck with her.”

“If she doesn’t keep her word, you’ll be the first to know.” She gave him an odd, crooked smile. “Now, would you go yell up the stairs? Tell the girls dinner is ready.”

She made it sound so easy, so casual. Bemused by the idea of being able to call, “Dinner’s ready,” and have his daughter come running in good humor, David went to the foot of the stairs and braced himself for the customary rejection.

“Claire? Linnet? Time for dinner.”

“Okay!” Linnet’s voice floated cheerfully down from above.

David didn’t wait. The less obvious his presence was to Claire, the better.

Back in the kitchen, he discovered Grace had the phone tucked between her shoulder and ear as she took a strainer out of the cupboard and set it in the sink.

“Mom, Claire is a very nice girl.” There was a pause as she lifted the huge steaming pan of pasta to the sink and dumped the spaghetti into the strainer. “No, she won’t be here forever.” Seeing David, she rolled her eyes although her tone was very patient. “Mom, I really can’t talk right now. Claire’s father is here to see his daughter, and I’m putting dinner on the table.”

He mouthed, “Can I help?”

Covering the receiver, she whispered, “Will you put this on the table? Are they coming?”

“Linnet answered me,” he said noncommittally.

“Oh, good. Here.” Grace handed him a heaping bowl of sauce. Then, into the receiver, she said, “No, I wasn’t talking to you, Mom. Listen, I’ll call tomorrow. Say hi to Dad, okay?” She listened for another minute, repeated goodbye and set down the phone, shaking her head. “Maybe we forever feel like teenagers in the presence of our parents.” Her gusty sigh told him she did not look forward to speaking to her mother again. “Oh, well. Okay, here’s the spaghetti.” She handed him this bowl in turn, although clearly she was murmuring to herself now. He could all but see her ticking items off on her fingers. “The garlic bread is on the table and all I have to do is dish up the green beans.”

“Smells good.”

So did she. Close to her, he caught a whiff of an elusive, flowery scent. His gaze lingered on the slender, elegant line of her neck, on tiny wisps of hair against the cream of her skin.

Thank heavens, she didn’t seem to notice his momentary reverie…oh, hell, call a spade a spade—what he’d felt was yet another spark of sexual awareness that was, to put it mildly, highly inconvenient. For crying out loud, this situation was complicated enough without her becoming self-conscious around him, or him having to stonewall yet another emotion. As it was, he couldn’t figure out why he hadn’t developed an ulcer.

“Why don’t you sit down?” Grace suggested, smiling at him. “Pick any place.”

The talking-to he’d just given himself didn’t keep him from noticing how pretty that smile made a face he’d labeled plain.

His daughter’s timing was, as always, impeccable. She chose that moment to slouch into the dining room, Linnet at her heels. She had a gift for killing any good mood of his.

“Oh, girls.” Grace bustled from the kitchen. “I hope you’re hungry. I made tons. Sit, sit!”

“Hello, Claire,” David said quietly.

She rolled her eyes and dropped into a chair.

Grace cleared her throat meaningfully.

Claire stirred, shot him a resentful look and mumbled reluctantly, “Hi.” And I wish it was goodbye, her tone seemed to say.

He was too surprised by getting a semi-civil response to take offense.

“Well…” Grace smiled at them all from her place at one end of the table. “Linnet, why don’t you start the pasta? Claire, would you like garlic bread?”

David’s sense of unreality grew as the meal progressed. An outsider would guess this to be a family—Mom, Pop and kids. Grace, with help from her daughter, maintained a cheerful stream of chatter that disguised Claire’s sullenness and David’s monosyllabic responses to his hostess’s occasional questions. He had the queasy feeling that he was delicately balanced over a deadly precipice.

Claire had come to the table. She was keeping her head bent, but she was eating. She even laughed once at something her friend said. She wasn’t refusing to break bread with her father. She wasn’t shooting him dagger looks. She was following Grace Blanchet’s first rule of basic civility.

It stung, of course, to know that she was trying this hard only because she was so desperate to stay here, to not have to go home with him.

But she was trying.

And David knew damn well it would take only the smallest misstep on his part to fuel one of her explosions. So he couldn’t make that misstep. Unfortunately, his care made him a lousy guest. Not by glance or tone did Grace acknowledge that this meal was anything but a pleasure.

The girls were done and looking restless when she said, as casually as when she asked him to summon their daughters to dinner, “David, Linnet’s thinking about trying out for the middle school play on Wednesday. Claire is considering the idea, too. At the very least, she wants to stay and watch the audition. Unfortunately, I have a meeting that might run until almost six. PTA board. We’re planning the autumn dance and carnival. I hate to have the girls hanging around waiting too long. Any chance you could pick them up?”

“A play?” He couldn’t help sounding startled. Claire? On stage? And taking direction from someone in a position of authority?

“I told you he’d be busy,” Claire said, not looking at him.

“No. Of course I can pick them up.” He ventured a toe in the waters, speaking directly to his daughter. “I just didn’t realize you were interested in theater, Claire.”

She slouched lower in the chair and twirled her hair on her finger. “I don’t know if I am.”

Grace was looking at him with obvious appeal. Persuade her, those extraordinary eyes begged. Be a father.

What a joke. If he said a single damned word in favor of the idea, Claire would…

Whoa.

He gave his idea a lightning assessment and deemed it sound.

“It would mean a lot of reading and memorization.” He sipped his wine, shrugged. “And it’s no fun to try out and not get a part.”

Claire’s eyes flashed at him. “That figures! You’re so sure I wouldn’t!”

“I didn’t say that,” he argued mildly. “What’s the play?”

“Much Ado About Nothing,” Linnet contributed, her anxiety about the new-sprung tension evident in the way she hastened to fill the silence. “You know. Shakespeare.”

Grace made a sound that might have been a suppressed laugh, buried in her napkin.

“I know that one,” David said, straight-faced. “Beatrice and Benedick. The wimpy Hero and the jerk…what’s his name?”

“Claudio,” Linnet supplied. She frowned. “You think Hero is a wimp?”

He saw the error of his ways. Hero was undoubtedly her dream part, and with reason: she was no Beatrice. “Actually,” he said hastily, “she is probably a realistic product of her time and class. She didn’t have much choice but to marry the man her father chose.” Not an idea Claire would embrace, he realized belatedly, and not a good idea as a topic at this dinner table. Turning to her, he asked, “Which part were you thinking about?”

Her chin shot up. “Beatrice.”

She had the fire, in a preteen sort of way. He found that he badly wanted her to go out on a limb and try for this.

He nodded, managing to make his expression subtly doubtful.

Fury on her face, Claire said to Grace, “I am going to try out.”

“Oh, good.” She smiled warmly. “Darn. I wish I could see the audition. Except Linnet would be embarrassed if her mom was there. For which I don’t blame her. Listen, do you want me to be an audience tonight when you practice?”

“Yeah, cool,” they said almost in tandem.

“Then I’ll clean the kitchen if you two want to go take your showers and get ready for school.”

Silverware clattered and chairs scraped on the wood floor as they raced for the door. David watched them go, then braced himself yet again. He hated this feeling, as though he was a high school kid in trouble waiting outside the principal’s office. He resented the fact that this woman, a stranger, was able to sit in judgment of him.

Grace said not a word until the thunder on the stairs was followed by a slammed door upstairs. Then she grinned. “Well done.”

Some of the tension in his neck eased. “I expected you to chew me out.”

“It’s hardly my place.” She laughed. “Well, maybe I would, in my bossy way. But I could tell what you were doing. You won’t get away with it very many times. She’ll start to catch on.”

David grimaced. “I just hope she actually gets a part. If not Beatrice, at least the maid who plays foot-sie with the scumbag. What’s his name. Don John.” He got back to the point. “Her ego is delicate right now, to put it mildly.”

“Mmm,” she agreed. “I hope they both get parts. They’re getting along great right now, and we don’t need any jealousy to interfere.”

Another horrifying possibility.

Slowly he said, “Maybe I should have kept my mouth shut.”

“Heavens, no!” Grace stood. “Would you like a cup of coffee? I’ll just clear the table and—”

“I’ll help.”

Against her protests, he gathered dishes and even insisted on rinsing them and loading the dishwasher while she put leftovers in the refrigerator and got out cream and sugar for the coffee.

There seemed to be no polite way to excuse himself although he guessed she was no more excited about a further tête-à-tête than he was.

He felt raw in her presence. She knew more about him than anyone but his closest friend. Not many people knew even the basic facts: that his ex-wife was an alcoholic, that he’d sloughed off responsibility for his daughter, that she’d come to live with him because she was in trouble at school. Never mind that she had run away three times.

But this woman had seen how desperate Claire was to escape him, how pathetic he was as a parent and had been, presumably, as a husband. She had a clear gaze that seemed to see right through what few pretenses he still possessed to wear as protection. She must despise him, but unless she wanted to be saddled with Claire permanently, it was smart of her to encourage his effort to build some kind of decent relationship with his daughter.

He gave a soft grunt of rueful amusement. No, Grace Blanchet would not want his sulky daughter permanently.

In the interest of speeding up this obligatory social interlude, he took a gulp of his coffee.

Grace sat back down at her place at the table. “Tell me, what do you do for a living?” she asked, her gaze inquiring, interested, all that a good hostess’s should be.

“Didn’t Claire tell you?”

“She said you’re a businessman.” Enunciating the one word with a hint of distaste, Grace suggested the sneer his daughter had worn when she spoke it.

“I’m a vice president with International Parcel Service. We focus primarily on quick service for businesses, versus the birthday gift to Tulsa.”

She nodded. “The law firm where I work uses IPS.”

“I’m in charge of day-to-day operations as well as some long-term planning. If an airplane is grounded in Boston because of ice, it’s my problem.”

“That sounds stressful.”

“I like problem solving. I don’t find the job stressful in the sense that it’s affecting my blood pressure.” He made a sound. “If I’m getting high blood pressure, it’s this thing with Claire doing it to me.”

“Do you work really long hours?” She sounded tentative.

He realized with a start of irritation that she was, in a sense, interviewing him. He was being judged again. The counselor had asked him the same question. Was he supposed to quit his job? Claire was a teenager! It wasn’t as if he was leaving a two-year-old in day care fourteen hours a day.

“Sometimes,” he said tersely. After a moment, he decided reluctantly that she deserved better. Shrugging, he expanded. “Long days—and sometimes nights—goes with the territory. On the other hand, when the weather is good, the pilots aren’t threatening a strike, and we haven’t committed some PR faux pas, my schedule isn’t too bad. When a crisis threatens, sometimes whether I can get home for dinner or not is out of my hands. That’s a drawback when you’re a single parent.”

Grace made a face. “No kidding. I may be the only parent of a teenager in this town who can’t wait until her kid gets a driver’s license.”

Claire behind the wheel…he shuddered.

Almost apologetically, she said, “Linnet has common sense. Knock on wood. It’s always scary, I imagine, but she’s not the kind to drink and drive or speed.”

He could live without hearing about the perfect kid. The way Claire was going, by the time she was sixteen, she’d have her eyebrows and nose pierced, be pregnant by a nineteen-year-old boyfriend who played drums in band, and be a high school dropout.