Page 55 of Bonds of Shame, Bonds of Lust

She told the story of how they'd met instead. At her church. Bob had taken six months to ask her out, in the church parking lot, in a manner Carol described as like a kid asking for a prom date and not sure he should.

Dad turned slightly red.

"That is not how it happened."

"That is exactly how it happened."

"It was a perfectly normal—"

"It was perfectly normal for a fourteen-year-old, Bob."

I laughed. I'd laughed more in the last ten minutes than I'd laughed at lunch in a year.

Over the next fifteen minutes I noticed that Carol touched my father a lot. Her hand kept finding his forearm. It found mine twice, briefly, when she was making a point. She wasn't aware of doing it. It was how her body knew how to talk.

Then Carol made one more too-eager joke, this time about a wedding planner she'd already spoken to, and heard herself doing it. "Oh, not for us. We're not. We've barely. Not yet." It came out in pieces, and for once she had no graceful way back from it. Dad's strained laugh. A silence half a beat too long. Then she reached over and squeezed his knee under the table, and his laugh turned real.

"He's a sweet sleeper," she said to me a minute later, conversationally, as if it were the next sentence in a conversation we'd been having. "Bob. Did you know that? He sleeps like a dropped coat. I'd never met a man who sleeps like that. I told him I was going to write a poem about it."

Dad turned the color of red wine.

"Carol."

"Sorry. Sorry. I forget. You're right. Sorry."

She caught up to herself a half-beat slower than she had with the stepdaughter joke. She wasn't embarrassed enough. There was about a third of the embarrassment the moment called for, and the missing two-thirds was the first thing about Carol I knew I'd have to live with.

She loved my father.

It leaked out of her in everything, the hand that kept finding his arm, the sentences she finished for him and then made herself stop.

I'd come ready to dislike her. I wasn't going to manage it.

What I was going to do about my father was the harder question.

25 - TERRIBLE BEAUTY

Lacey

Ricardo wasn't coming. Janice explained en route that he was working a session that couldn't be moved.

I walked up to the door of the Second Circle in heels and the black silk dress Janice had bought me earlier in the week.

The same hostess, only this time she slid a slim red bracelet toward me without asking. "Congratulations," the hostess said. "And welcome."

I looked at it. Then I looked at the one on Janice's wrist. Then I looked up. "Is this right? I'm a visitor."

The hostess's smile shifted by a degree. "The bracelet isn't given by mistake."

Janice leaned in. "Lacey. You're a member now. Accept it and relax."

The hostess studied me with amusement. "You're one of us," she said, and this time it wasn't a script.

"But it costs, there's a fee…" Janice. Of course. "Janice, I can't accept this. It's too much." I moved to give it back, even though I wanted it.

Janice refused, of course. "No, Lacey, you belong here. You can pay me back once things with Douchebag Brad are fixed."

I had to laugh despite myself. I shouldn't accept it. It was lighter than I'd expected and heavier than I'd planned for. I slid it over my wrist, and it hugged me like it had been measured for me.