Chapter 22

We were clear of the desk just as Cecilia and Marty got off the elevators. Cecilia took one look at Jane and grinned dazzlingly. She came over to her and wrapped her arms around her. “How’re you doing?” she asked, kissing her cheek as they hugged.

“So sore!” Jane groaned. “So worth it.” They laughed together at that and Marty went to check out with a knowing smirk for me before he went to the desk.

Barb and her parents appeared a few minutes later, still wearing last night’s formal attire. They didn’t look particularly thrilled that everyone else had fresh clothes and realized that they had no one to blame for not planning.

Barb took a look at the three of us and looked like she had more that she wanted to say, but went to check out instead. When Marty and Barb rejoined us, seven of us went into the restaurant to have breakfast. I noticed that Arthur appeared to be suffering a little this morning and thought he probably deserved that, but wasn’t sure how much of the upcoming lecture he’d really earned.

We were seated at a large table and mercifully, it looked like the place was mostly empty. There were a couple of people at tables, but the staff was keeping everyone spaced out. We sat down and started looking over the menus. I closed mine fairly quickly, deciding on the big breakfast. I’d burned a lot of energy last night. I thought I’d earned it. It seemed like everyone except Barb and Arthur were feeling hungry this morning. I knew Arthur was hung over, but I suspected that Barb was mostly just upset at the note of finality that her conversation with Jane had put on our situation.

We had coffee brought, put our orders in and then the shit hit the fan.

“Dad,” Jane started, her tone deceptively soft. When he looked up at her, she unloaded. “Don’t you EVER pull a stunt like last night again, you HEAR me?” she barked at him, raising her voice enough to make him wince. “The crack you made about John was rude, snide and out of line. Who the fuck are you to sneer at ANYONE’S marriage?!!? Last night was probably the first time you’ve taken Mom out on a date that didn’t involve clients of yours in five years. To stand there and tell John that Barb’s affair is HIS fault ... You should thank him for not punching your drunk ass out.”

Barb sat back and watched her sister rip into her father and sipped her coffee. “She’s right, Dad. That was a shitty thing to say and I don’t think you would have said it if you hadn’t been drinking.” She wasn’t speaking as loudly as Jane was, but Jane was trying to aggravate her father’s hangover. “You were the one that told ME that I’d pushed him too far. You told me that I’d been abusive and that John couldn’t see anything for the future but more abuse if he stayed.”

“Could you not talk so loud?” he asked, still wincing as he nursed his coffee, trying to recover while he was under siege.

The rest of us stayed well out of the line of fire. Sissy and Marty had no dog in this fight. They were just happy spectators. I was keeping my mouth out of it too. It involved me, but I was made a spectator. Janice met my eye and smirked a little before she buried it in her coffee, taking a lingering sip. Some days it was hard to tell a player without a program. Barb and Jane were united now against their father, but the battle-lines would shift as soon as the topic of Jane and I took center stage.

He crumbled before our orders arrived. “Okay! Okay!” he said piteously. “I’m sorry! I didn’t mean it. I’d had too much to drink and wasn’t thinking clearly. John, I’m very sorry, SO sorry, for accusing you of being at fault for all of this. I promise, I’ll never suggest it again!”

“It’s okay, Arthur,” I said softly. “I know how much you love Barb. The possibility that you’d want to find a way to make this someone else’s fault is something that has been considered.” Jane looked like she was warming up for another charge, but I laid my hand over hers and gave it a squeeze. “I think he’s had enough,” I told her gently.

She looked at me and then reluctantly nodded, but gave him another scathing look, before letting the matter drop.

Janice took the opportunity to stir the pot, now that Arthur was done with his verbal beating. “Jane dear, I noticed that you don’t seem to be moving all that well this morning. Did you twist your ankle in those heels last night?”

“Nope,” she said with a sweet smile. “John and I had DEADLY sex all night and again this morning.”

If Arthur had been deflated under the twin assaults from his daughters, this declaration puffed him back up. “What?!!?” he demanded loudly, wincing from the effect it had on his hangover.

Jane rolled her eyes. “What did you THINK was going to happen after the dance? John would slink back to the suite Barb booked to have sex with her?”

“I THOUGHT,” he growled and regretted it, “that he would have been enough of a gentleman to see you to your door and then make other arrangements.”

“I’m sorry, Dad,” Jane said with sympathy on her face. “Part of this is my fault. I think I forced you to watch too many Disney movies when we were both younger, so now you think that’s how things work. I’ve been in love with John since I was 13 and Barb first brought him home. I kept it to myself because he was with Barb and she was my sister. I wasn’t gonna poach him while they were together. The second he decided that it was over and told her that he wanted the divorce, it was game-on and I play to win.”

“Ridiculous!” he sputtered. “A schoolgirl crush that you’ve been nursing all these years and you think that’s the basis for a relationship? Grow up, Jane! When you graduate, you’re coming back to the Bay area to work with me. What’s he gonna do? Commute? Move up there?”

I noticed that Janice had been silent through this argument, but she didn’t look surprised by the revelation. Barb and Marty were engrossed in the back and forth between Jane and her father, but I glanced at Cecilia and she was watching Janice too. I smiled to myself and took another drink from my coffee.

“What are you smirking about?!!?” Arthur demanded, catching my look.

I looked at him across the table and shrugged. “Jane’s been coming to spend the summers with us for the last five years except last year,” I pointed out to him. “You think she was doing it because she loved Disneyland THAT much?”

“Meaning?” he demanded, his eyes narrowing.

“She was getting a good long look at what it’s like to be married and how young people in love are supposed to act. She stopped coming when Barb confessed to her that she’d found someone else,” I said calmly. “My point is that Jane’s not jumping in with her eyes shut. She’s done thousands of hours of recon and decided that she liked what she saw, rough spots and all.”

We tabled the discussion while breakfast was served and once the cups were refilled and the waitress retreated, Arthur went back on the attack.

“None of that changes the fact that you should have had the sense to leave her alone. She’d been drinking.”

“She had two glasses of Champagne,” I said dryly. “She was sober when she arrived, sober when she packed us a change of clothes, sober when she checked into the room and sober when she took me to bed.”

He didn’t like that, but he was running out of objections. “And what about after graduation?” he barked at her. “You were planning on getting involved in the business with me.”

“That was your plan,” she told him. “My plan was to move to LA. I already have contacts here.”

“How do YOU have any business contacts?” he wanted to know.

“I’m not the only person in the world to go to school in Chicago,” she said dryly. “One of my professors is part owner of a company here that imports furnishings from all over the world and he’s offered me a job. My roommate, Marcy, is already hired by an import company that specializes in toys from Japan for resale over here. I have options here in LA. Even if those fall through, there’s other places to work.”

He didn’t like that at all. “We talked about you coming home to work for me,” he reminded her.

“You talked, Dad,” she said. “You just expected me to listen. Surprise! I have things that I want from life too and they don’t involve living under your roof and working for you. That’s not a life. It’s called being controlled.”

“Young lady, I want more for your future than this,” he said, trying to tamp down his irritation.

She shrugged. “You want me to find someone that makes more than John, lives in a bigger house, drives a nicer car and generally has a better lifestyle? Why? John’s good to me, after this past six months, he’d never in his life cheat on me, if he hasn’t hit Barb by now, he’ll never hit me, he has enough money for both of us to live on and he’d protect me with his life. What more do you want for me?”

He fell silent at that and looked like he’d suffered a devastating setback. “Janice,” I said. “You’ve been awfully quiet through all of this,” I pointed out. “What are your thoughts?”

She looked at her daughters and at Arthur and she shrugged. “I’ve been reading Jane’s diary since she started keeping it,” she said and made a soothing gesture to her suddenly irate daughter. “I wanted to make sure you weren’t getting into anything dangerous like drugs or sex that you weren’t talking to me about,” she told her. “Did I ever once use those pages to punish you for the things you wrote about doing behind our backs? No. It was a tool to keep you safe without smothering you.” She gave Jane a wry smile. “Ironically, your feelings about John were the thing you wrote about that made me most wary. Still, nothing ever happened between you two ... until this week. I’m not surprised. When you told me you were coming down here to spend Christmas with him and why, I knew that you were planning on stalking your prey until you were ready to strike. I think it’s too soon for comfort after everything that’s happened and I worry that you’re relationship with your sister will suffer for it, but this is clearly what you want and you’re not going to reconsider. You haven’t so far and it’s been seven years.”

Arthur dropped into an indignant silence after that, ignoring us in hopes that we’d all go away. Barb was a little subdued too, but she’d known that we spent the night together. Janice seemed to be taking it well, but I chose not to dig too deep. Marty and Cecilia were polite to them and engaging to us.

“I should probably apologize for last night,” Sissy said when we were all a little more full. “I invited Jane out with me for the day yesterday. By the time we’d done our nail appointment, I figured out that she was in love with John, so I decided that I’d give a little nudge and help them along. We got her a dress, had her hair and make-up done and gave her the Cinderella treatment. John had no idea we were doing it until we got here, far later than I’d hoped, but still in time to salvage his evening. I won’t tell you that I didn’t think there’d be anger over it, but I know John. I saw how they reacted to each other yesterday and decided he needed last night as much as she did. He’s eaten more than one shit sandwich since this started. If someone else had to eat one so that he had a good night, then I was okay with that.”

She shrugged. “I’m not sorry I did it,” she clarified, “and I’d do it again in a heartbeat, but I do wish it had gone over better. It would have made them happier.”

Janice smiled over her coffee at Cecilia. “You and John both speak very highly of each other,” she said.

“Of course,” she said lightly. “I’m back with Marty because of him. He helped me work out a lot of my feelings so I was ready to talk when Marty came back to work it out. That didn’t work out so well for him and he was always good about it, so when I can do something for him, I’ll do it.”

I noticed that Arthur was just staring at his plate and Barb wasn’t much better, looking like she was on the outside of the conversation as Janice and Cecilia sized each other up.

“You okay, Arthur?” I asked softly, not wanting to disrupt the interrogation going on across the table.

He looked at me sourly. “Peachy!” he said. “You’ve managed to find your way into both my children’s beds. What father wouldn’t be thrilled?”

I laughed a little at that. “It’s not like I snuck into her room when she was thirteen and forced myself on her. She’s twenty, nearly done with college and has career plans for after she graduates. Hopefully once the shock wears off, it’s not so bad.” I turned to Barb and nudged her. I’d been seated between her and Jane, in case a ref was needed, but no one had gotten upset enough to get out of their chair ... yet. “You okay?” I asked her.

She shrugged. “I guess,” she admitted. “I’d been hoping that we could make this work, but last night, when we danced, you told me that you were angrier than I knew. I looked up those fights online after I went upstairs and watched them on my phone. I’d seen the televised one at Cecilia’s, but I didn’t really pay attention to your other fight. It was ... violent. Disturbingly violent.”

“What did he do?” Arthur asked, speaking up. Barb got her phone out and found the clip, playing it for her father. He watched the fight and shook his head. “What did HE do to piss you off?” he asked, a little shaken.

“Not a damn thing,” I said. “I had no idea how big he’d be before I got there that day. When they locked us in together, I started thinking of it as one more fight I couldn’t win. Barb and her lover were doing whatever the fuck they wanted and I had no way to fight back. This was the same. He was huge. I couldn’t fight him. Just another match rigged so I lose. That pissed me off. I started to think about her lover and what I’d like to do to him.”

I noticed that the rest of the conversation stopped and everyone was listening. That was fine with me. “I guess that was the moment that I found that killer instinct that got me noticed. I looked across the cage and saw my wife’s lover. Then I went to work on punishing him. I didn’t care about getting hit, getting hurt, winning or losing. I wanted him to hurt, I wanted to punish him and make him suffer and make him afraid to look me in the eye ever again. The first guy, he quit fighting and went back to the Midwest. The second guy, he said he never wanted to fight me again. No idea how the next guy’s gonna feel, but I bet it won’t be good.”