The Most Dangerous Thing - Laura Lippman [34]
But if an eleven-year-old girl could figure that out, imagine what the rest of the world intuited. They saw Mickey being pitied, that was what, which wasn’t fair at all. Mickey’s mother might have been a little on the trashy side, but she was pretty steady for a divorced woman who needed a man around. And Rick, the stepfather of record for most of those years, was a good guy. Too good for her mother. He was sincerely kind to Mickey, not fake kind, and when baby Joey arrived, he did what he could to keep her from feeling left out. If anything, he went out of his way to make her feel even more like his daughter. Even after he left, he stayed in touch.
Then, when Mickey was going on nineteen and Rick long gone, an attorney had contacted her. “About custody,” he said, and at first Mickey had this crazy feeling that Rick wanted to adopt her all these years later, make official the status he had sworn was hers all along. Rick had done okay for himself, maybe there was some money coming to her.
It turned out that Rick had hired the attorney because Rita was now saying that Joey wasn’t his and he was trying to figure out if he could recoup the child support he had been paying her. Legally, the case was kind of interesting, sort of like the Solomon story in the Bible, only instead of offering up a baby that would be sliced in half, it was an all-or-nothing decision about the relationship between Rick and Joey. Rick could have a court establish he was no longer Joey’s father and stop paying child support, although he would have a hell of a time getting back what he had paid in. But if he did that, he would have to abandon the relationship, too. It was real fucked-up stuff. Rick, of course, did the right thing. He decided he didn’t care what the blood test said. He was Joey’s father and he would continue to be, even if that meant paying support to a kid that he seldom got to see. Her scheming skank of a mother really played that poor guy.
Scheming skank of a mother? Have those words really run through McKey’s head as she gathers newspapers and trash from the passengers who were sentient enough not to throw their teeth into the bag? She’s being unfair. Her mother wasn’t a schemer, wasn’t skanky. Well, maybe a little skanky. She had been sleeping with Rick and Joey’s father at the same time. But she made a genuine mistake about Joey’s paternity, and it was harder to test for those things then. Besides, that mistake kept Rick in the fold until McKey went to high school, and she was glad for that. He was a good man. He protected her. He believed her, always.
She catches a man coming out of the lavatory, the smell of smoke clearly on him. She pulls him aside. He looks so furtive and guilty that she doesn’t have the resolve to write him up, but she explains to him in an urgent, intimate whisper that she’s doing him a favor, that he could be flagged in the reservation system if she reported the infraction as required.
His furtive look switches to flirtatious. Great, now he thinks she’s hot for him because she cut him a break, when it was merely her generosity toward her mother overflowing into the world. She goes back to the galley, tells a surprised