Father Of The Brat

Carver stared hard at the girl, trying with all his might to be sympathetic. But he could no more remember what it was like to be twelve years old than he could imagine a mother who wasn’t around. Ruth Venner had always been there for her kids, no matter what kind of demand they were making. She had been June Cleaver, right down to the pearl necklace. And although, thanks to his job, Carver knew a lot more about the world than most people, he still had trouble dealing with the whole neglected kids thing.

“She traveled a lot?” he asked. “Who took care of you?”

Rachel rolled her eyes again, and Carver thought that if she didn’t cut it out, they were going to roll to the back of her head and get stuck for good, and then where would she be?

“It’s not that Mom wasn’t around,” she said. “It’s that she just wasn’t there. You know?”

For some reason, Carver understood exactly what she meant, and he nodded.

“I mean, they told you how she died, right?” Rachel asked.

He nodded again. “Drunk driver.”

“Did they tell you she was the drunk driver?”

Carver looked up into clear, matter-of-fact eyes, eyes that held not a clue as to what their owner might be feeling. “No, they didn’t tell me that.”

“Yeah, well, so now you know.”

“I’m sorry,” he said, the phrase all that came to mind.

“Look, don’t get me wrong,” Rachel told him, her gaze dropping to study the toe of her boot. “She wasn’t a bad mom. She just wasn’t like most moms. She loved me and all that, but I don’t think it ever occurred to her that she was the one who was supposed to be responsible.” She shrugged philosophically. “I learned to look after myself.”

Carver hesitated only a moment before asking, “Do you miss her?”

Rachel shrugged again—a gesture Carver was already beginning to realize meant that she was stalling until she figured out what to say—and stared at her feet some more. “Yeah. I guess so. She was pretty tight. All my friends liked her all right.”

“How about you?”

“I liked her, too.”

Carver sighed and tilted his head back to study the ceiling. “Yeah, so did I. I’m sorry she’s gone.”

The two of them sat in silence for some moments, until Rachel finally broke it by asking, “So, are you really my dad?”

Carver turned his head to look at her, to see if there was anything of Abby in her at all. He was shocked to realize he couldn’t even remember what the mother of his daughter looked like. But there was a sprinkling of freckles over Rachel’s nose, and her eyelashes were impossibly long. He supposed she’d gotten those features from her mother. Everything else about her screamed Carver Venner.

“Looks that way,” he said after a moment.

“Mom told me you’re a journalist, too.”

He cocked his head to one side thoughtfully. “What else did your mom tell you about me?”

“Not much. Just that she met you in Guatemala, that you wrote for some left-wing magazine, that you were a great kisser, and that she didn’t see any reason why you had to know I was around. She never told me your last name or where you lived.”

He expelled a single, humorless chuckle, wondering if Rachel might have tried to look for him if she’d known who and where he was. All he said in reply though, was, “I guess she covered all the important stuff then.”

Rachel dropped her gaze to her feet again, tugging on a loose thread that pulled a small hole in her fatigues. “After she died, I found her stash of some of the articles you wrote. You work for that magazine, Left Bank, right? The one that’s getting sued by the GOP for defamation and slander?”

Carver’s brows arched in surprise at they casual way she tossed out the question, as if she understood perfectly what the lawsuit involved. “You seem to know a lot about it.”

“Politics were a pretty big deal to my mom. She thought the Republican party was made up of a bunch of fascists who wanted to turn the world around and go back to the way it was in 1951.”

Carver smiled to hear such a young kid spout such adult rhetoric. “Well, it is, isn’t it?”

Rachel smiled, too. “I don’t know. They seem harmless enough to me. Stalling the crime bill that way was a pretty crummy thing to do, though. The gangs in L.A. are incredible. A bunch of pin-striped old guys wouldn’t last a minute in some of the neighborhoods I’ve lived in.”

She was way too grown up for a twelve-year-old, Carver thought. She shouldn’t even know about things like crime bills and gangs. She should be worrying more about how to get a playing card to make just the right clicking noise when inserted into the spokes of a bicycle wheel. Even during the turbulent sixties, he and other kids like him had managed to hold on to some of their innocence. Nowadays, it seemed, kids had to cash in their innocence early in order to survive.

“You do a lot of stories about foreign countries for the magazine,” Rachel continued, stirring Carver from his reverie. “Human rights and stuff.”

“I cover a lot of ground, I guess, yeah.”

“So that means you’re gone a lot of the time.”

He nodded. “I’m out of the country a good part of the year. And there are times when I have to do a lot of domestic traveling to research and back up my stories.”

Rachel nodded, too. “That’s okay. I can look after myself.”

“So you’ve said.”

She tilted her head and lifted her chin defiantly, but she still didn’t look at Carver. “Well, it’s true.”

“I believe it.”

He wanted to say more, but had no idea how to address a twelve-year-old girl he had just discovered was his daughter. Fortunately, Maddy chose that moment to join them, and cleared her throat discreetly to announce her arrival. Carver smiled his gratitude, then realized she couldn’t possibly understand how much she’d just helped him out.

“Uh, Maddy,” he said, standing awkwardly. He gestured toward the girl who remained seated. “This is Rachel. My daughter.”

Maddy arched her brows inquisitively, but didn’t ask what had convinced him to change his mind so quickly and irrevocably. Then she looked down at Rachel, and he could see by her expression that she noted the dramatic resemblance between father and daughter as well as he. She looked back up at Carver and smiled, then turned her attention back to the girl.

“Nice to meet you, Rachel,” she said, extending her hand.

Rachel stood, looked at Maddy’s hand for a moment as if she didn’t understand the gesture being offered, then brushed her own palm against Maddy’s. “Hi,” she said a little breathlessly. “Are you my new stepmom?”

Maddy bit back the furious denial she felt coming, and tried to tamp down the odd sensation of delight that threatened to spiral out of control at hearing the suggestion. “Uh, no,” she said. “I’m Maddy Garrett. I work for the Child Welfare Office of Pennsylvania.”

“Oh, the social worker,” Rachel said with a knowing nod.

Yeah, the social worker, Maddy thought, squelching a wistful sigh. She supposed that was all she would ever be to anyone. Still, that was something. There were a lot of people out there who needed her, kids who wouldn’t stand a chance without her. Unfortunately, thanks to the society and bureaucracy that went along with her work, there were a lot more who fell through the cracks, too, a lot more who were let down.

“Yes, I’m the social worker,” Maddy told Rachel, trying to inject a little more fortitude into her voice than she felt. “I’ll be helping you and your father out for a little while, to make sure everything runs as smoothly as possible.”

She glanced at Carver, and her heart turned over at the look on his face. He was staring at his daughter as if he couldn’t quite believe she was real. He looked confused, tired, shocked…and…and kind of proud, she realized. Something in his demeanor told her he wasn’t quite as unhappy about this situation as he’d first let on.

“Looks like the two of you are off to a pretty good start,” she said.

Rachel turned to look at her father. “So how about the nose piercing thing?” she asked. “You never said for sure.”