Aftertaste - Meredith Mileti [63]
“For what?” I ask him.
“For rolling your eyes when she mentioned her Vegas trip, for one thing. Your disdain was palpable.”
Richard continues on, suggesting that I’ve underestimated Fiona’s intelligence. “Not everyone is good at languages,” he explains, and I think for a minute he’s going to remind me of the D I got in high school French. “You,” he says in a supercilious tone, “are a snob.”
This, from a man who wears Prada sneakers and has his shirts hand tailored, facts I lose no time in pointing out. “Listen, what makes you sure she’s so smart? What did you do, give her an IQ test while I was changing Chloe?”
Richard snorts.
“Well, maybe she’s an idiot savant,” I say, thinking about her insightful comment about families, which I don’t mention to Richard, so as not to concede the point.
I really don’t know what bothers me about Fiona. Yes, she’s different from my own mother, but there was a time when that was the chief criterion necessary to secure my friendship. Chloe had warmed to Fiona right away, fascinated by her dangling plastic earrings and bangle bracelets, which Fiona quite generously allowed her to gnaw upon.
And why should I care who my father dates? I know it’s selfish, but part of what bothers me is that I’d rather not have to deal with anyone else’s relationship at the moment. Also, it’s difficult when your father, who has been a widower for the last eighteen years, suddenly starts strutting his stuff like some randy peacock.
The real problem, I finally decide, is that I’ve come back to a place I thought I knew, only to find it different. I’d visited, of course, but I haven’t lived here for almost twenty years, and the last time I did, my mother had been alive. I’ve felt her pull all these years, as if some vestige of the woman she was, a woman who had filled our lives for better or worse, still lingered in these walls, in the fabric of the curtains, or in the chipped china teacups in the kitchen cabinets. But now her presence has gone cold, just like that. And if I’m disconcerted to find that her ghost has dissipated, it’s due as much as anything to the fact that it has been chased away by someone as banal and mild-mannered as Fiona O’Hare.
Fiona and my father spend most evenings together, but fewer nights. Sometimes he calls on his way home and invites Chloe and me to meet the two of them for dinner out, and sometimes they come here for dinner. When my father drives her home, he returns late. Once I saw him coming home early in the morning, just in time to shower, change, and go to work. It’s nice that he seems to want to include us, but most of the time when he calls to invite us out, I decline. I feel guilty having disrupted the only social life I can ever remember my father having.
And what do I do to fill the hours and days? I cook. I cook until my father’s entire refrigerator and downstairs freezer are stocked with restaurant-quality food. I’ve made several cheesecakes, some sweet, some savory, at least five different kinds of lasagna, and ten different types of soup, enough for a whole chapter in a cookbook. In fact, that’s exactly what I tell my father and Fiona I’m doing—writing a cookbook—and that I need to try out the recipes.
“Well, then I think we should have a party,” Fiona says when, while helping me clean up after dinner one night, she’s forced to put the leftovers in the bin of the automatic ice maker because there’s no room anywhere in the fridge. “We certainly have enough food!”
At which point I burst into tears.
“Mira,” Fiona says, coming around to the table, where I’ve slumped, head in my hands. Teetering on her high-heeled sandals, Fiona bends over me and envelops me in a hug, pressing me so close to her that I can smell her perfume, a sweet, musky scent. This makes me cry even harder as now, on top of everything else, I feel guilty that I don’t like her more.
“Bunko, next Thursday night,” she whispers into my hair. “It’s my turn to host, and I think you should come. Meet some of the girls. We could make it a dinner party. Put some of this wonderful food