Dirty Scoundrel

Maybe . . . maybe I should go to Stanford.

I cry until someone comes and knocks on my door an hour later. “Miss Natalie?” It’s Jenny, the maid. “There’s someone at the front door for you.”

“Tell them to go away,” I call out, sniffing.

“I told him you were unavailable but he says he won’t leave.” Her muffled voice is worried. “Should I call the police?”

I fling myself off the bed, suddenly furious. I know exactly who’s waiting at the door, and how dare he think he can come over here and just try to smooth things over after dropping that bomb in a conversation with my father? Stay home with him? What about what I want? Did he never stop and think that maybe he should ask me how I feel? I storm past a bewildered Jenny and down the stairs, heading for the carved double doors that lead to our covered front porch.

When I fling them open, sure enough, Clay Price is standing there.

His hands are stuffed in his pockets and he’s wearing an oversized dress shirt that’s now wrinkled, and his hair—always a bit wild and unkempt—flies about his head. “We need to talk,” he says in a flat voice. His face is blank. That’s the thing with Clay Price. He never shows you what he’s really thinking.

My back goes up. “I don’t think there’s anything to say,” I tell him icily.

“So it’s true, then? You’re gonna go off to Stanford?”

He sounds pissed. Good, I’m pissed, too. I’m hurt and angry that he’d think my opinion matters so little that he could decide my future for me. “I just might,” I say lightly. “What, you think I should stay here and marry you?”

The moment I say it, it feels like a mistake. The knot in my throat increases, and I can see him visibly flinch as the words come out. And I’m surprised, because it seems like for the first time, Clay looks vulnerable.

“No,” he says softly. “I guess not.” He puts a pair of fingers to his forehead and gives me a mock salute. “Have a nice life. I’m heading to West Texas with my pop.”

“Bye,” I tell him in a flat tone. “I’m going to Stanford.” And I turn around and slam the door behind me.

The moment I do, I burst into tears again.

* * *

Hours later, I’m all cried out. I realize we’ve both been acting childish and I want to talk to him. Maybe we can work things out. Maybe I can make him see that my education is important, and what I want is just as important as what he wants. Maybe we can still get married and I can go to college part-time while we make a home together. Sniffling, I pick up my phone to text him even though it’s late.

All I know is that I love him and I don’t want this to be the end between us.

Before I can hit the “Send” button, there’s an urgent knock at my bedroom door. “Natalie?” It’s not Jenny, but my stepmom, Johanna. “Natalie, open up! It’s your father! There’s something wrong with him!”

My father? Oh no. He’s old, but he’s still so vibrant that it doesn’t seem like he’ll ever age like normal people. This can’t be happening. I rush to the door to find Johanna’s teary face. “What is it?” I blurt out, racing past her toward their bedroom.

“I think he’s having a heart attack!” she wails in my ear.

Texting Clay is completely forgotten.

Chapter Three

Present

Natalie

I know it’s going to be a bad day when I wake up to find my dad standing over my bed.

I sit up, rubbing my eyes, and glance at the alarm clock. Five in the morning. “Dad?”

“Where’s the cat?” he asks. “I heard it meowing.”

Biting back my sigh, I get out of bed and put on my slippers. “There’s no cat, Dad.”

“Of course there’s a cat, Jenny. I gave it to you for Christmas. Remember? You said you wanted a cat and I paid one of Frankie’s friends to bring you one.”

“Right,” I say, since it’s better than arguing with Dad. I’m not Jenny, first of all—that’s the maid we had who retired over six years ago. And I’m betting “Frankie” was Frank Sinatra. At any rate, there’s never been a cat in all of my twenty-five years. “I’ll go find it. You go back to bed, okay?”

My father continues to argue with “Jenny” about the cat as I take him gently by the arm and lead him back to his room. Even though he protests, I help him back into his bed and tuck the covers around him like he’s a child. This is a typical “bad” morning for us, though lately they’ve been becoming more the norm. He holds my hand, mumbling about the cat for a bit longer until he falls back asleep, and then I’m able to tiptoe away . . .

Right into a warm puddle on the floor.

Oh no. Because that’s how I wanted to start the day—stepping in pee.

But my father can’t help it. He’s eighty-seven now and his Hollywood looks have gone. His shoulders are hunched, part of his face is still slack after his stroke, and his dementia has been worse every year. It’s a long fall for someone as proud as Chap Weston, so I do my best to make things easy for him. Not that he knows who I am most of the time. He’s lost in memories, and I can’t hold it against him if he can’t hold his bladder. So I get towels and clean it up, then wash my feet before getting dressed and heading downstairs to start the day. I’m not going to let this morning’s episode with my father depress me, even though it’s obvious he’s getting worse.

One crisis at a time.

I make myself a cup of coffee in a Chap Weston souvenir mug, choke down a cold Pop-Tart, and gaze at one of the posters on the wall as I eat breakfast. This one’s from one of my dad’s biggest hits in 1952—a musical about sailors in a submarine. His handsome, strong form is in the center of the photo, with a cute girl clinging to his arm. No wonder my dad likes to live in the past.

I have to admit, the present isn’t exactly my favorite, either.

Back then he was world-famous, rich, and popular. Now he’s just a senile old guy with a too-young daughter and a mountain of bills. I glance at the overflowing inbox on my desk, tucked into the corner of the kitchen, and try not to shudder. I’ll look at them later. Maybe.

I make three dozen oatmeal-walnut cookies—the Chap Weston favorite—for the gift shop and wrap them with colorful Saran wrap and stickers of my dad’s face from a black-and-white Western movie, Big Sky Callin’. I put them in a basket, take them to the front parlor (which has been completely revamped as the gift shop) and then begin the process of cleaning up our large ranch since tour groups will be coming in starting at ten in the morning. There’s a lot to do between now and then. I move through the twenty rooms of our twenty-five-room ranch that have been designated as the “Chap Weston museum tour” and begin picking up trash from the night before. There’s always crap that guests have left behind—gum stuck to antique furniture, candy wrappers tucked away in corners, cigarette butts . . . I even found a used condom in a bedroom once.

People are freaks.

I continue on, dusting props, vacuuming, straighten up the velvet cordoned ropes that guide the guests through the home, and make sure that none of the movie props been moved to the wrong room. Each of the rooms is set up with a theme from one of Dad’s biggest movies, complete with cardboard cutouts of my dad in the appropriate costumes. It’s corny as hell but people get a kick out of it. As I pass through each room, I turn on the music from each of the movies. Big Sky Callin’s soundtrack in the Western parlor, Little Tiki Princess in the hula room, Ahoy, My Lady in the submarine room, and so on. Even the guest restrooms have a theme—The Adventures of Roy Danger, another cowboy movie musical that made my dad a star. Unfortunately, the restrooms also have leaky toilets and tend to get clogged, and so I spend a good portion of the morning scrubbing the horseshoe-pattern tiles on the floors before heading upstairs to change into my work uniform.

Oh, the work uniform. How I hate it. It’s humiliating to have to dress like Loretta Paige from Roy Danger, but it sells tickets and makes people open their wallets in the gift shop more than the regular dumpy, too-young daughter of Chap Weston does. And these days, everything I do is designed to bring money in. So I suck up my pride and dress like the redneck cousin of Elly May Clampett, because that’s what makes people really enjoy the “experience.”

I have to do all of this to pay for my father’s medical bills. Because even though he was a huge star in the fifties and sixties, my dad also lived like a movie star all his life. Before his stroke, he had a constant entourage of at least five to six people at all times—accountants, agents, assistants, publicists, you name it. There were lavish vacations to private islands and endless gifts for wives, ex-wives, girlfriends, and anyone else Chap Weston wanted to impress. After a string of questionable life choices and a string of even more questionable ex-wives, he’s flat broke, senile, and has to rely on his daughter turning his home into a museum in order to keep the lights on.

It’s not exactly how I envisioned my dynamic father’s twilight years.

For a moment, I stare into the mirror at my reflection—the brunette in a shirt that looks like a cross between a fringe explosion and a pink sausage casing—and I feel so much older and far more tired than I should be. Sometimes I just want to get up and run out the door and never look back. I can’t, though. I’m trapped. My skin prickles and I feel hot.

Trapped. Twenty-five years old and trapped. There’s no escaping the crap-fest my life has become.

I close my eyes, take a deep breath, and then exhale, calming myself. There’s nothing I can do. My dad doesn’t have anyone else to lean on. Managers, agents—those people disappeared when the money did. All he’s got left are a few ex-wives that call once a month for their support checks—and his lonely, lonely daughter.

So I suck it up and take care of things the best I can. Chap Weston’s got no one else.