Magdalene (46 page)

He looked up at me. “Yes. They can’t do what
I do. Except Eilis. And Vanessa. They’re both producers. And the
three of us aren’t the only ones. A few more of their cousins,
random people, producers they’ve collected along the way. We’re the
kings on the chess board. Everything they do— All to protect the
producers and keep us producing.”

The testosterone I’d dropped into that day,
wondering who was
the
alpha, never giving any credit to the
man I’d brushed off as ordinary and unassuming—

“So that’s why Sebastian does what he
does.”

Mitch nodded. “He sees himself as a servant
of the producers of the country, the world. It doesn’t matter if
they’re
bad
at it. He can fix that one way or another.”

Why
had I never dug
that
deeply into Taight’s psyche? Too late now, anyway. I’d had enough
trouble just getting the surface theory through with a passing
grade without adding Rand-laden armchair psychoanalysis on top of
it. It did, however, add another dimension to my long-distance
observations and explained a few things I had never been able to
figure out.

“The warrior class,” I murmured. “Guarding
the king. Their moral high ground.”

“Yes. Whatever it takes.” He cast a pointed
glance at me. “And
they
are unrepentant.”

Ah, touché, lover. Any man who claimed
people like
that
clan as family, and could love them for who
they were had a larger capacity for tolerance than I’d given him
credit for.

I looked at the mess around me and realized
that as the day had worn on, my prostitution had ceased to be about
the people I’d fucked that Mitch would run into on a semi-regular
basis. It was now about who had taken advantage of him, when, why,
and how—and what he intended to do about it. For now, anyway.

It’d come back again and again, each time he
met someone on the list and he would know in explicit detail what
I’d done with that person, knowing that person would have a pretty
good idea what Mitch was doing with me.

There was no judgment attached.

He was jealous. Insecure.

No more, no less.

So I asked him again, because he’d already
intellectualized it once, then choked.

“Um...” I gestured to the paper trails when
I had his attention. “Are you going to freak out on me again like
you did Monday?”

He sighed. “I don’t know. It
does
freak me out.”

“And how’d your golf game go yesterday?”

He paused. Thought. “Pretty well,” he
admitted. That didn’t surprise me. “Pierre congratulated me for
being the only man able to get you where everybody else wanted
you.” I raised an eyebrow. “At the altar.”

I snorted. “Altar, my ass.”

“Apparently it wasn’t uncommon for your
clients to fantasize about wrapping you up in a ring and vows.”

“That’s news to me.”

“He said you give off an irresistible
homemaker vibe. Martha Stewart by day and Mata Hari by night.”

“Good thing he doesn’t know how apt the Mata
Hari reference is. But it makes sense, I guess. Sex and food,
appealing to a man’s only two vital organs. The madonna-whore
complex.” I eyed him. “Clearly you’re susceptible to that one.”

He shrugged.

“You know I was named after June
Cleaver?”

“Cassandra
June
. Got it.”

“That’s it. And so?”

He raised his arms and dropped them in weary
defeat. “It helps to know how many of your clients just wanted to
talk.”

“I give good ear.”

He chuckled reluctantly. “I know. And...if
what Pierre said about your appeal applies to some of the others,
that’ll help, too. I’ll get over it. Give me time.”

“Is there anything I can do to help you get
over it?”

“Yes,” he said, his tone now brisk. He
strode over a bunch of paper trails and stopped to pick up one
particular piece of paper, with one particular spot highlighted in
fluorescent orange. “Do that.”

I took the paper warily, gave him a second
suspicious glance, then started to read. I couldn’t stop my smile
from growing if I’d tried any harder.

I looked up at him. “Not tonight.”

“Why not?”

“It requires accoutrements, which I don’t
have.”

“Where would one find such things?”

I smirked. “You have two choices. I can
order them online and wait for them to be shipped or we can get
them tonight, but you’ll have to step foot into a sex shop—at which
you can be seen by anybody driving by. Pick your poison.”

He stared at me, lids lowered. “I have a
very fast car. We could go, say, two hundred miles round trip in
any direction, stop for dinner, and be home by midnight.”

“Or get a hotel room.”

“Even better.”

“His majesty wants to play with his
mistress, I see.”

“Oh,
yes
, he
does
.”

* * * * *

Apron
Strings

April 1, 2011

I intended to spend Friday, Saturday, and
half of Sunday in my New York office because that weekend the
Church held something called “General Conference” that required
Mitch’s presence Friday evening for the men’s meeting, and for
meetings all day Saturday and Sunday. From what I could gather, it
was a semi-annual thing wherein all the head honchos in Salt Lake
gave world-broadcast talks all weekend.

It was all I could do to make it through
three hours on Sunday. I sure as hell wasn’t up for the masochism
of an eight-hour weekend marathon, and I wasn’t going to sit around
in an empty house all weekend with nothing to do while my husband
went off and played with God.

More than usual.

I was tempted to talk to him about asking to
be released from being bishop, but he was a grown man and if he
wanted to spend a good portion of our year together at church, that
was his business.

I didn’t have to like it.

Clarissa popped up from the couch when I let
myself in the townhouse Friday night after work. “What are you
doing here?” she demanded.

“Uh... I live here?”

“Uh... No, you don’t?”

“Are you expecting someone? Should I make
myself scarce?”

“No,” she said with a strange edge to her
voice that made me look closer. I dumped my stuff on the kitchen
island and went to her. I took her chin in my hand and tightened my
grip when she would’ve jerked away.

“What’s wrong with you?” I asked, noting her
red-rimmed eyes and disheveled appearance.

“Nothing.”

I looked around. The coffee table, floor,
couch—all strewn with empty ice cream cartons, beer bottles (the
expensive stuff, naturally), pizza boxes. There were textbooks, a
laptop, an iPad, and an iPhone piled in a chair at the end of the
couch.

“Okay, so either you’re having a pity party
or you’ve been smoking too much weed and you got the munchies. Or
both.”

She jerked her face out of my grasp
successfully this time, and arose to busy herself picking up the
mess. “I don’t smoke pot,” she muttered as she worked. “Makes me
puke and fucks around with my grades.”

That had to be the truth, because while she
might only take six hours a semester to prolong her aimlessness,
they were hard ones and she maintained a 4.0.

Her pride would not allow her to be less
than perfect.

“I also quit smoking,” she admitted.

Ah, well. That explained a lot. My Botox
lecture must have worked. “What happened to the boyfriend? The one
who—”

“Gone. Two boyfriends ago.”

Several DVDs from Netflix were strewn in
with the mess and I picked one up.
Maid in Manhattan
.

I sighed. “Go take a shower,” I said
abruptly.

“But—” She snapped her mouth shut when I
raised my eyebrow at her, and went up to her room. Maybe all that
time in sacrament meeting watching Prissy control her children was
paying off. I started clearing up the mess and soon I heard the
sound of water through pipes.

“You and I,” I announced when she was
showered and dressed, and I was likewise showered and changed, “are
going out.”

She looked at me suspiciously. “Is this the
mom version of a pity fuck?”

“Take it or leave it.”

“What happened to my new stepfather?”

“Mitch. God’s not going to strike you dead
for saying his name.”

“Fine.
Mitch
.”

I explained the whole General Conference
concept to her and she stared at me, clearly as mystified as I.
“Oh,” she said when I finished. “So, you’re not
back
back?”

“No.”

“Oh.”

I had to forcibly drag her into the bowling
alley, but by the time I’d taunted her through her first two
frames, she forgot herself and began to really bowl, taunting me
back whenever she bested me a frame. But...I’d taught the girl to
bowl and apparently she’d kept up because it finally dawned on me
she might beat me.

We drank beer and stuffed ourselves on
nachos. A collection of college-age boys took the lane next to us,
and it wasn’t long before they decided they were interested in
flirting with Clarissa. She participated with great enthusiasm—

—until one of them decided to hit on me.

I like it when twenty-year-old kids hit on
me. It means I don’t have to shell out for plastic surgery yet.

“She’s married,” Clarissa snapped at him.
“Note the four-carat rock on her finger?”

Clearly, the boy didn’t know how to process
this unexpected attack, and I simply watched it play out.

“Why do you care?” he asked her, genuinely
puzzled. “Sissy can’t speak for herself?”

“She’s my
mother
, not my sister.”

The boy looked me up and down. Slowly. “No
shit
...” he whispered.

Well, my bank account might thank me for
basking in a little flattery in lieu of a surgeon’s bill, but
Clarissa would not. If I didn’t put this boy down hard and fast,
she would conflate that failure to me flirting with him. Or
worse.

“Okay, look, kid, thanks,” I said. “But I’m
pushing fifty and I have better things to do than babysit, here or
anywhere else.”

Red suffused the boy’s face, and he turned
away while his buddies howled, poked, and elbowed. He might never
live it down.

I regretted that, but a mother’s gotta do
what a mother’s gotta do.

They were done with us, but it didn’t
matter. The evening was ruined.

It wasn’t until we had put away our bowling
things, endured a silent ride home, and were each getting ready for
bed that she knocked on my bedroom door.

“I, uh...” She looked around at the new
suite as if she’d never seen it. “Would you have— If that guy had
asked you— Um...”

“No,” I said as I toweled my hair. She
wouldn’t look at me. “I made a promise to Mitch and I’m going to
keep my promise.”

“Do you love him?”

“No. I’m attracted to him, and I respect him
more than anyone I’ve ever respected in my life.”

She stared at me for quite a while as I
prepared for bed, her expression indecipherable. At least she
wasn’t sneering or angry. It surprised me when she said simply,
“Okay.”

“Clarissa,” I said briskly, “you know you’re
always welcome at your dad’s and Nigel’s if you don’t have a date.
Don’t sit around here being lonely. There is no reason a smart,
beautiful woman should be sitting home alone on a Friday night
watching chick flicks and getting plastered on expensive beer and
cheap pizza.”

She shrugged. “Better than expensive pizza
and cheap beer.”

That made me laugh. “Are you even speaking
to your dad yet?”

“Some. Helene won’t.”

Mmmm, well, that would take time. “Just
remember he loves you dearly.”

She ignored that. “I’m graduating in
May.”

“I know. I have the date marked.”

“And I got into UMKC law school.”

I’d known that weeks ago. “Was there ever
any doubt?”

“You seemed to doubt.”

“I doubted your motivation and timing, not
your ability.” She said nothing. “Well, let me know when you want
to go to Kansas City and find an apartment.”

“I’m staying with the Kenards.”

I blinked. “Um, good. Great. Whose idea was
that?”

“Dr. Hilliard’s.”

“Are you sure you want to do that? Living
with strangers is a lot different from living on your own. Their
house, their rules.”

She shrugged. “They seem like nice people,
and they live close enough to the law school that I can walk. I
guess they have a little boy.”

“Don’t let yourself become a nanny just for
a roof over your head.” Her mouth pursed. “And if that happens,” I
continued blithely, as if I couldn’t figure out her fears, “either
you present them with an invoice or find a way to move out on your
own or call me. Don’t babysit unless you’re paid. Find out what the
going rate is and charge four times that if he’s a good kid and ten
times that if he’s a monster. If they say no, then you don’t have
to babysit. If they say yes, then you have a decent gig. Win-win.
Do you understand what I’m saying?”

“Yes,” she whispered.

I stopped what I was doing and looked at
her, standing in the doorway there uncertain of her future, shoved
into it when her mother had turned her world upside down by getting
married so abruptly—

Clarissa wasn’t prepared for this. She
couldn’t even bring herself to sleep away from home for more than
four days, even though it was just at her dad’s. I blinked and saw
a small girl standing in my door, wearing Hello Kitty pajamas, her
raven hair in two tight braids and her green eyes big with fear.
Mommy, can I sleep with you?

—a mother who had failed her utterly by
allowing her to live in the well-appointed nest far longer than she
should’ve.

“Go get your PJs on,” I murmured. “You can
sleep with me tonight.”