Chapter 4

Bill’s turn:

Surprises. That’s what I need in my life. More surprises. Marrying Haley? Not a surprise. It’s going to happen. The little brown-haired darlin’ treats it as inevitable. Since she’s got me wrapped around her little finger, I guess it really is inevitable.

She’s the one that broke the news to Deena in a roundabout manner. When I called Deena to talk with her about us getting married, she launched into me about what she’d heard at school.

So, okay – daughter’s good with it. Deena’s always been a quirky kid, a little spoiled because I had the tendency to do everything she wanted to compensate for being the absent dad, right up until I moved next door to Haley and SHE got involved in my life. From that point on, I colored my actions with Deena a bit to make room for Haley. I think Haley was a good influence on Deena.

The news about me marrying Haley, that was received as good news by Deena. Her mom, on the other hand, well, Laney and I have NOT been friends. Out of sight and hearing of Deena, I regarded Laney as a whore of the gravest sort.

She launched into me viciously, threatening to keep Deena from me because of my moral lapse of marrying a girl only two years older than my daughter. That was her first kick out of the gate. However, after a bit of me NOT going off on her the way I desperately wanted to, she started coming down off her rage. That got me the permission Haley and I wanted for Deena, Haley’s best friend, to be at the Saturday informal wedding.

The surprise, though, is that somewhere in the previous night’s conversation, Deena announced that she had wanted to move in with me. That she’d been thinking about it before she found out – officially – that Haley and I were getting married.

Turns out that she’d suspected. I don’t have a stupid daughter. But she was STILL considering moving to my house, even when she suspected that there was something going on between her best friend and me.

That news makes me nervous as a cat.

Child custody. My attorney during the divorce told me, “Bill, you could have videos of her giving free blowjobs in front of the courthouse every Friday and the family court judge would award custody to her. We can fight it. Cost you money because when you lose, the judge is going to rule that you pay HER fees, too.”

“Sucks,” I’d said then.

Now? Deena said that her step-dad, cheesy lawyer that he is, in her words, ‘would be happier if she didn’t have ME, ‘ so maybe there’s the possibility that I could gain custody without an expensive court battle.

So that’s a plus.

The minus, of course, is that she and my new wife are two years apart in age and have treated each other like sisters or best friends or a combination of both for a few years. Since I moved into this house and somehow ended up with Haley in my life, I cannot remember a weekend excursion or a longer trip that I’ve taken with Deena that didn’t include Haley.

And I’m marrying Haley, an act which means that the status changes. Instead of Haley and Deena sitting up at night, giggling and talking about things I probably didn’t want to know about, Haley will be in MY bed and Deena will be in her room at the other end of the house, knowing that her dad and her friend were up the hall having, among other possibilities, SEX.

I’m a dad, the saddest variety of a dad, in fact, a dad with a not unlovely teenaged daughter. A dad who’s supposed to, along with her mom, present an example of the sanctity of sex within the proper boundaries of love and marriage. Oh, yeah, I’m a hypocrite, but at least I thought I was hiding it. When Laney left me, she and her lawyer gigolo were cohabiting immediately.

Matters not. As they say, the optics are not optimal.

I voiced my concerns to my partner. Well, she dragged some of it out of me. She knows me, okay?

“Let me get this straight,” she said. “You’re worried that she’d be HERE and know that we’re doin’ it in the same house?”

“Yeah,” I nodded.

“But you’re okay with her staying with her mom and knowing that you ‘n’ me are doin’ it here while she’s there, an’ her mom is doing her stepdad in THAT house?” Giggle. “Do you have a geography problem? Proximity issues?”

I rolled her over and kissed her. “Just love a girl who knows the word ‘proximity’.”

“Stoppit!” she squealed. “We’re trying to figure out something. You have a GOOD girl for a daughter, baby. She’s had sex with one fewer guys than me. So she’s a nicer girl than I am.”

“The guy you marry doesn’t count,” I said.

“Then I’m a nice girl, too,” she smiled.

“Very nicest girl.”

“I feel like it, baby,” she returned. “I never did think I was being nasty for doing that ‘forbidden fruit’ thing. I knew I loved you and I wanted to love you in every way I could.”

I kissed the crown of her head.

“Doesn’t mean I didn’t giggle inside sometimes when I thought about it. I mean, all those girls talking about sneakin’ around and how experienced they were and how nasty and all. And every night I was curling up in our bed, making love, enjoying way more sex than they ever dreamed.” She kissed me. “And neither of us could say a thing about what was going on.”

“And Saturday it changes, sweetness,” I said.

“It does. And then I’ll have a step-daughter in an unusual family arrangement.”

“Yeah,” I said. “So what are your thoughts? How would that work?”

She smiled. “Just like any other family. Husband and wife, daughter.”

“There are interesting details.”

“I know,” she said, “but honestly, babe, what’re the other options? You say ‘no’, how’s that going to play out? You chose your new wife over your daughter? Her mom says ‘no’, the courts agree, which they might or might not, she stays there, unhappy about the situation. Choose carefully.”

“Did I ever tell you that I adore you because you can THINK?”

“Yeah, uh-huh,” she giggled. “All that thinkin’ is messing up a set of bedsheets right now.”

“Didn’t say it was the ONLY reason I adore you.”

Giggle and a flurry of kisses. “Seriously, babe,” she said, “All I’m saying is that one thing I see you do that just melts me is the way you treat your daughter and I never want to stop that if there’s any earthly way possible. So if she wants to come live here, we’ll make it work. It’ll take all three of us sometimes, but if there’s a problem, we can fix it. Family. We’ll be a family.”

Deena’s turn:

Dad’s getting married. That’s a good thing.

Okay, I’m Deena Simon. I know, everybody else in America thinks that’s pronounced ‘Seye-mun’ like in ‘Simon says’ but Dad’s roots are Cajun and so it’s ‘SEE-moan’ but I’ll answer to either one in school, but I reserve the right to correct the pronunciation. Politely, of course.

I’m like so many of the kids my age – parents divorced. Mom’s remarried. Sad story. I was seven. Mom worked at a law firm. Dad’s an engineer. He spends some time on the road from time to time. Mom started leaving me with her sister when Dad was out of town. Next thing I knew, Mom and Dad split up. Dad moved out. Divorce. Mom sold the house when she moved in with Harv.

Dad cried over me. I don’t think he cried much over Mom after he found out about her and Harv. I dunno. Like I said, I was seven.

Mom remarried. Dad didn’t. For a while he rented an apartment and he got me every other weekend and he sometimes got me during the week, and he took vacation in the summer so we could go off an adventure together.

When I was nine, he bought this house. There was a girl living next door. The first time that Mom saw that house next to Dad’s, she said something about rednecks and trailer trash. I guess for a while some of that rubbed off on me, because I met the girl, Haley, and she’s two years older than me and there are no other kids on the street that are even close to our ages.

She tried to be my friend and I tried to like her, but like I said, Mom rubbed off on me. It took a while, but Dad rubbed off, too. Haley was sort of my friend, then, but when you’re two years apart in age and one of you is ten, that’s a big gap. Still, Dad kinda pushed, so a lot of times when I was there on weekends, if we went to a movie or something, Haley came with us.

When I went home after every visit, Mom always asked me if Dad met a girlfriend. She even asked me to get a peek at Dad’s bathroom to see if there were extra things like shampoos or extra toothbrushes.

I thought about that. I mean, other friends at school in similar circumstances tell about going out to eat or to a movie or more with their parent’s new significant other. Five years. Dad never showed me a significant other.

Dad has this explanation about reality. He says reality is like it’s inside a box and everybody gets to poke a hole in the box and look at reality, but a person can only see through his little hole, so I can see some things that the person looking into the box from another hole can’t see, and vice versa. I listen. Dad’s not stupid and I love him, so I listened to that.

Now I realize that what he said was true.

You see, I kept waiting for the girl who would be my dad’s mate to show up one day, and there she was, right there beside me.

It all started to add up. We’d go to a movie with Dad, she started sitting on one side of him with me on the other. Same thing at home watching TV. If we talked him into sitting on the sofa with us, he’d end up in the middle, with me leaning into him from one side, Haley from the other.

Same thing when he was in his recliner. I know we’re teenaged girls now, but I still love my daddy, so I’d go sit on one arm of his recliner and when I did that, Haley’d get on the other, then we’d giggle and fall in on him until he hollered that he couldn’t breathe.

Goodnight kiss? I got one. Haley didn’t get left out. Same thing, in the morning. I always loved crawling into Dad’s bed, snuggling against him in the morning. Haley did that with me, too.

I should’ve paid attention to what I was seeing right in front of me sooner, but it slowly dawned on me. When I spent the night on my weekends with Dad, Haley would come over sometimes and we called it our two-girl slumber party. We’d sit in bed and talk, and when I talked about Dad, her face sort of lit up. I realized I’d seen that look before when one of my classmates ‘fell in love’.