Baby Needs a New Pair of Shoes (19 page)

And the thing I heard next made me saddest of all: Mr. Clean saying, “Okay, dear, but if you could just pick up that special plant food on the way home” into the phone as he came into the room to check up on me, and realizing that Mr. Clean's second marriage would go the same way as the first. His obsessions would get the best of him, Sally The Person would get sick of his obsessions even while Sally The Plant thrived under them, and before long, he'd be alone again.

Sometimes, it just didn't do to let obsessions rage out of control.

“I finally found out what was wrong,” Stella said in hushed tones as we were loading up the van side by side; Conchita and Rivera were still folding up their ladders.

“Yeah, you're telling me,” I said. “Mr. Clean is fucking nuts.”

“I didn't mean that,” she said. “I mean about Conchita and Rivera.”

“What's going on?”

“For the first time ever, they're both dating other people…exclusively.”

“Oh, man,” I said.

“Exactly. Each is upset about what the other is doing, each insists she has the right to do it herself.”

“It's like a mammary nightmare,” I admitted.

“What?”

“Never mind. I was just being small-minded.”

“Like, when aren't you? But I've got a business to run here. I can't have them acting like this in front of the customers. Earlier today, Conchita punched Rivera so hard she nearly fell through a window. Thank God, Mr. Clean was too busy inside with you to notice what was going on.”

“Yes, thank
God
Mr. Clean was with me. Really, what would I ever do without him?”

T
he weeks preceding the Vegas trip passed quickly, even if I was often solitary. Hillary now spent so much time with Biff that if it weren't for the fact that there were still two refrigerators in our home, you'd swear I lived there alone. Elizabeth Hepburn had put off my overtures to visit, saying she was recuperating nicely and that she was so busy reading Chick Lit and enjoying her Jimmy Choos, she didn't have much time for chat, adding that Lottie had been just barely tolerable lately (“She may want me to hurry up and die,” she said, “but I don't think she's putting arsenic in my food…yet.”). Conchita and Rivera were engaging in a silent war, both supposedly in love with other people, both acting more miserable than you'd think two people in love would act. Stella was unusually quiet and seemed wrapped up in her own mysterious preoccupation, although she still did have enough time to harass me (“The sun is your harshest critic, Delilah. I can see streaks on that window. Whatever happened to The Golden Squeegee?”).

Of course, The Golden Squeegee had her own preoccupations, being simultaneously obsessed with Billy Charisma and blackjack. The former called her every day and said he couldn't wait to see her again; he even took her—that would be me—on a few dates, but they were always dates that ended chastely with Billy saying he wanted to hold off on the grand event until Vegas. As for the latter, in the hopes of hitting the jackpot in every way with Billy in Vegas, I'd been trying to enlist my dad's aid, but he kept pleading off, saying he had meetings to go to, saying he had to work. I still couldn't believe he'd taken a job as a security guard. Finally, in desperation, on the Monday before I was scheduled to fly west for my big adventure, I showed up on his doorstep unannounced, intuiting that if I called first, he'd only say no again.

“No,” he said as soon as he saw me, after I'd once again pounded on the door for what seemed like minutes.

“I haven't even said what I'm here for yet,” I said.

“I know what you're here for,” he said, starting to close the door in my face. “And the answer is no.”

“God, Dad,” I said, quickly inserting my Nike into the breach so he couldn't close the door all the way, “you're acting like I'm trying to sell you Girl Scout cookies.”

“You're trying to sell me something worse than Girl Scout cookies,” he said, still pushing the door against my foot as though he might push right through it. “You're trying to sell me the road to hell.”

“What are you talking about? I have good intentions!”

“I'm not going back to that life, Baby. I'm finally out. I won't let you drag me back in again.”

“Crap! Who
are
you? Al Pacino? And what have you done with my dad? Where's Black Jack?”

“I'm not Black Jack anymore.”

“What? What are you talking about?”

“I'm Jack. I'm just Jack.”

“Wha—”

“This hasn't been easy for your father,” a voice said, a very feminine if throaty voice, I might add.

Then the door swung open and I saw behind my dad, who was dressed in his security guard's uniform, a pretty older woman, about ten years younger than him, with auburn hair and sparkling blue eyes. Oh, and she was wearing the velour robe my dad had been wearing the last time I visited.

Uh-oh.

“Who are you,” I asked, “and why are you wearing my dad's robe?”

“It's my robe, actually.” She thrust out a confident hand for a shake and I took it dumbly. My dad was sometimes wearing some woman's robe? “Vanessa Parker. And I know who you are. You're Baby. Your dad talks about you all the time.”

He did?

“Come in,” Vanessa said.

I entered, still dumbly, feeling odd to be invited this way into my dad's home as though she lived there and I was the guest.

“Something to drink?” she offered. “Diet Pepsi Lime? Jake's Fault Shiraz?”

“I see he has been telling you a lot about me,” I said.

“Michael Angelo's Four Cheese Lasagna?” my dad offered, hopefully. “If you're hungry, I can whip some up in six minutes, tops.”

“Thanks, no,” I said. “I seem to have lost my appetite.”

“I'm sorry, Baby. I kept meaning to tell you, but the time never was just right.”

“You could have called, you could have sent a letter. It's not exactly like I'm the hardest person in the world to get a hold of. Tell me what, by the way?”

Vanessa took my dad's hand as though one of them needed support for the announcement they were obviously about to make.

“I've been living here,” she said defiantly.

“Well, apparently,” I huffed. “My dad's been wearing your robe.”

“I knew she'd be upset,” Vanessa said, turning to my dad. “I told you that even if she is twenty-eight years old, she wouldn't like the idea of someone taking her mother's place, not after having you to herself for ten years.”

“Nobody's replacing anybody,” my dad said. “You and Lila, you're like those apples and oranges. She's dead. You're here. That's hardly what I'd call replacing.”

“I don't care about that!” I interrupted their little tête-à-tête. I mean, I
did
care about it, just not right then. “What I care about—” I looked straight at my dad, ignoring That Other Woman “—is that for weeks now, I've been trying to get a hold of you, I've been trying to get your help with something I desperately need your help with—” it was true, for while I might have been Billy's talisman, I felt as though my dad was the talisman I needed to win enough to impress Billy, or at least I felt as though I couldn't take on the mecca of Vegas without the benefit of my dad's expertise “—and you keep being unavailable—”

“I can't be available for you in that way anymore, Baby. I'm sorry. I'm giving all of that up.”

I looked at Vanessa. “What kind of witch
are
you?”

“A good witch,” she said, “a very good witch who loves your father.”

“Don't talk about the woman I love that way, Baby,” my dad admonished.

It really was too much.

“I met her at Debtors Anonymous,” my dad said.

“Bettors Anonymous,” Vanessa corrected. “And we didn't meet there. Remember?”

This was just getting worse and worse.

“She's right,” my dad said. “We met in the supermarket. She made those cherry tomatoes look like just so many cherry tomatoes.”

“I invited him out for a drink.”

“I said yes.”

“I had a strawberry milkshake.”

“For me it was the coffee.”

“One thing led to another.”

“She found out what I did for a living, what I
used
to do.”

“I told him he couldn't have both me and the gambling, that he had to pick between the two, that I didn't mind living in a tiny apartment with him for the rest of my life but I'd be damned if I'd ride the emotional-financial roller coaster of bouncing back and forth between apartment and mansion, apartment and mansion.”

“So I promised I'd go to Debtors Anonymous meetings with her.”

“Bettors Anonymous. I used to be a gambler myself.”

“And now we go together, a couple of times every week.”

“You're evil!” I said to Vanessa.

“Stop that right this minute, Baby.”

“But don't you realize how bad the timing
sucks
for your…your…your…your
conversion?
”

“Hey, I'm never too old to learn a new trick.”

“But I'm going to Vegas this weekend!”

“Vegas? You want to talk Vegas?” Without comment, he left the room.

“Where's he going?” I asked.

“Who knows?” Vanessa shrugged. “He's your father.”

A minute later, he returned, his hand clutching several small slips of paper.

“Here,” he said.

“What's this?” I asked.

“That's Vegas,” he said. “You're holding Vegas right in your hand.”

“Gee, it doesn't look like an oasis with casinos and neon lights in the middle of the desert. Who would have thought that Vegas was just a bunch of little white slips of paper?”

“Believe me, that's Vegas. Read 'em and weep.”

I looked at the slips of paper. They were dated receipts from ATM machines.

“I bring them to meetings with me,” he said. “They're a reminder of how sick I am.”

“I'm still not sure what I'm supposed to be seeing.”

“Every ATM receipt tells a story,” Vanessa said oh-so-helpfully.

“Thank you, Rod Stewart,” I said, “but I still don't—”

“It's a record of my last trip to Vegas with Dan The Man,” my dad said.

“Dan The Man is Jack's football bookie,” Vanessa said.

“I know who Dan The Man is,” I said. “Believe me, I've been hearing about Dan The Man for a lot longer than you have.”

My dad grabbed the receipts back from me, studied them. Sure, it was rude for him to just grab like that, but at least he wasn't admonishing me again to speak nicer to Vanessa. As for Vanessa, I didn't really mind that my father finally had someone to fill the vacancy my mom had left—
much
—but I minded a lot that she was keeping him from fulfilling his duties to me, his only child and blackjack heir. Color me selfish, but I had Choos to win.

“No wonder you couldn't figure it out,” he said, shuffling the order of the slips of paper. “They weren't arranged properly so a person could read the story in order, kind of like a book that jumps all over the place. Here, try again.” He handed the papers back to me.

But I guess he still didn't trust me to be smart enough to figure it out on my own, because he stood beside me, pointing with his finger so I wouldn't miss a thing as he narrated his tale.

“This is Saturday afternoon, at two-fifteen. We'd arrived late the night before, so all was good up to this point. I started out winning right off the bat, nearly doubled my stake before packing it in for the night. But the next morning, who knows what happened? First the losing started in dribs and drabs, or five-dollar chips and ten-dollar chips, but then by the time I hit the ATM for the first time, my stake was gone.”

The first receipt was for one hundred dollars. What's a hundred between friends? But hadn't Black Jack always said you should walk away if you lose your stake?

“What's a hundred between friends, right?” he echoed my thoughts. Then he shuffled to the next slip. “But as you can see,” he said, “six hours later, having multiplied my hundred as high as a thousand, it all disintegrated and I was back at the ATM.”

This one said two hundred dollars.

And from there on, the slips decreased in time intervals while increasing in withdrawal amounts. The last, for five thousand dollars, was on Sunday afternoon.

“That was right before heading for the airport. It's amazing how quickly you can blow through five thousand dollars in chips at the high-stakes tables.”

“Wow,” I said. If I'd been doing the math right, he'd lost ten grand in a single weekend. Sure, he'd lost more in the past. But he'd also had more to lose in the past.

“Oops, one more,” he said.

This one, time-stamped four-eighteen, was at the airport ATM and was for fifty dollars.

“Parking at the other end?” I asked.

“Nah, it was for the airport slots. I was hoping to at least recoup a little while waiting to board, but no such luck. At the other end, I had to borrow from Dan The Man to get my car back from extended parking in White Plains.”

“How'd Dan do?” I asked, vaguely curious.

“Oh, his ATM story was even worse than mine. But you know Dan. He's got the book behind him, so he can afford it.”

True.

“So,” the man formerly known as Black Jack Sampson sighed, “that's how I lost the house.”

“Wait a second. Back up. What do you mean you lost the house?” I studied the slips. “You didn't
lose
the house on this trip. You lost the house last year. These slips are dated a little over a month ago. Besides, ten thousand dollars isn't exactly a house. Not since around 1950, it's not.”

“True, but I'd been planning on winning the house back. Well, not the same house, but at least
a
house. I had it all planned out. If I kept doubling my money over the course of the weekend, by the time I left I'd have enough for a down payment on a new place, a place that would make you proud to come to see me.”

“I'm always proud to come see you, Dad.”