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“I can’t put off that trip to Hawaii any longer,” he told her. “It’s too big an opportunity for us to lose. Are you or are you not coming along?”
“I can’t just now, Donald,” she said, nodding at me.
“You have doctors, tutors, servants looking after her, Jordan.”
“I just can’t,” she said.
Mrs. Duval came in with the cake. It was chocolate with raspberry and looked scrumptious. Mrs. Caro had drawn my name with the raspberries. Now I was glad Kiera had left. She would probably have thrown it up later.
“How beautiful,” Mrs. March said.
After we had dessert, Mr. March said he had to make some calls and rose. He looked down at me and said, “It was nice meeting you.”
He had been quiet the whole time we were eating dessert. Before he reached the door, Mrs. March said, “I’ll be right back,” and followed him.
I wheeled myself away from the table and turned toward the door, too. I thought I might wheel myself outside to the patio. I stopped before I reached the door, because I could hear them arguing in the hallway.
“Can’t you be nicer to her, Donald?” Mrs. March said.
“I don’t know why you’re making us do this.”
“We can’t escape our responsibility, Donald.”
“Who says we should? We can simply set up a trust for her and have her live with some foster family, can’t we? You can involve yourself in all that, if you like.”
“That’s what she’s doing here now, Donald. We’re her foster family, but you’re right. We should set up a trust for her as well.”
“I don’t know, Jordan. You saw how Kiera’s reacting to all this. I don’t know.”
“I do. It’s good that she isn’t permitted to forget, to ignore and minimize what a terrible thing she has done, Donald.”
“How can she forget with you harping on it so much?” he said sharply. I heard him walking away.
I knew I would be embarrassed to be caught listening and started to turn. Mrs. Duval was standing right behind me. She had heard everything, too.
“People say things they don’t really mean,” she told me.
Mama did, I thought, but she was half out of her mind with cheap gin.
What’s his excuse?
13
Family
Why stay here now? I asked myself. For the big room, the clothes, the food, my tutoring, and my doctor, another part of me replied. Remember Jackie’s advice. No matter what, take everything they want to give you. You deserve more than what they give you. Take it.
I really didn’t know what I should do. Except for Mrs. March’s obvious sense of guilt over what Kiera had done and the servants speaking some kind words to me, I felt not only unwanted but in some w
ays even more invisible than I was when Mama and I lived in the streets. How lucky other young girls my age were to have loving parents and caring friends to whom they could go for advice and sympathy. I had only the memory of Mama when she was healthy and strong, now speaking to me from the grave.
“Oh, did you want to go up to your room?” Mrs. March asked when she returned to the dining room. She saw Mrs. Duval standing there, but Mrs. Duval went immediately to supervise the cleaning of the dining room. I saw that Mrs. March suspected that I had overheard the argument she had just had with her husband.
“I was going outside for a while first,” I said.
“That’s such a good idea. Let me take you.” She got behind my wheelchair and started pushing me through the hallway, but this time she turned right. “We’ll go to a different patio this time,” she said. “This side of the house is better lit, and if we look east, we can see the lights of downtown Los Angeles.”
She continued to talk, almost babbling, as we proceeded to another exit. The house did seem like a hotel to me. No wonder I couldn’t think of it as someone’s home. She pointed out some guest bedrooms and another, smaller living room.
