Dear George Clooney: Please Marry My Mom (8 page)

Mohamed had just put his client under a hairdryer, so Mom came and joined us. She was wearing a shirt that covered her spare tire today, which was a relief.

“Do you want that trim now?” she asked me.

“Sure, thanks.”

Karen made a face as my mom started trimming my hair. “It looks better longer, Violet. You should let it grow out. Boys like girls with long hair.”

“Then this is perfect because I don’t want boys to like me.”

“Why? Are you gay?”

“Karen –” my mom began.

“I’m not gay,” I replied. “I’m just not interested.”

“Seriously? Man, I was boy crazy by the time I was five,” Karen said, chuckling at the memory.

“Yeah, and look where that’s got you.”

Phoebe snorted from behind her magazine. Karen opened her mouth to retort, but Mom cut her off. “Enough, you two. Violet, remember you have to call your dad when you get home.”

I didn’t answer.

“I’m serious. After making your sister lie for you yesterday …”

“She didn’t lie. She said,
She says she’s not here.
”

“Don’t argue with me. He’s expecting your call after school today.” She tugged gently on my ear. “You can’t avoid him forever, Violet. You need to clear the air.”

“Don’t tell me you still haven’t apologized?” asked Karen, incredulous.

“Shut up, Karen,” I replied. Which was just another way of saying no.

When we got home, I gave Rosie a glass of milk and a granola bar from the Costco mega-pack in the cupboard and sent her down to the basement to watch a video. Then I ran upstairs to my bedroom and grabbed my Magic 8 Ball.

Phoebe was already sitting on the gold couch when I came into the living room. I sat on the red couch.

“Are you sure about this?” Phoebe asked.

I shrugged. “It’ll keep things interesting. Ready?”

“Ready.”

I picked up the phone and dialed.

“Hello?” I heard my dad’s voice on the other end. So did Phoebe, since I had us on speakerphone.

I didn’t reply.

“Violet, is that you? We have call display.”

I shook the Magic 8 Ball.
“It is decidedly so.”

“I’m glad you called. We have lots to talk about. How are you?”

I shook it again.
“Ask again later.”

There was a pause. “Hey, I’m directing an episode of
Glamour Girl
starting next week. Isn’t it your favorite show?”

It was. But since the Magic 8 Ball was providing my answers, I said,
“Don’t count on it.”

There was another pause. I could tell he was trying really hard not to sound frustrated, which gave me a great deal of satisfaction. “Yeah, I guess your favorite shows change all the time. Too bad, I got you Carly Joseph’s autograph.”

Phoebe and I looked at each other, our eyes wide. We loved Carly Joseph.

“Maybe I’ll send it anyway. If you don’t want it, Rosie might.”

“It is certain.”

There was another pause. “Are you answering me from a Magic 8 Ball?”

“Signs point to yes.”

“Well, cut it out, okay?” he said, and this time he didn’t hide his frustration. “We have to talk about what happened when you were here. Jennica’s still really upset, and no wonder. You owe all of us an apology, Violet. Especially your little sisters.”

I shook the Magic 8 Ball.
“My reply is no.”

Dad took a deep breath. “Look. You and your sister are supposed to be coming down for March Break. But until you apologize … I can’t allow it.”

To be honest, this stung a little, but I kept my expression neutral for Phoebe’s sake.

“How could you have done it, Violet?” he continued. “They’re
two years old
. They’re your sisters, for crying out loud!” He sounded genuinely upset now.

Phoebe covered her face with her hands, peering through the cracks between her fingers like she was watching a horror movie.

I didn’t answer. Part of me wanted to shout that of course I was sorry, that I knew it was a terrible thing I’d done. But part of me wanted to shout that what he’d done to us was
so much worse
, and nobody had ever made him apologize.

“Fine,” he said. “I’m done. Just remember that I love you.”

I shook the ball one last time.
“Highly doubtful,”
I said. Then I hung up.

Phoebe looked at me, a cushion crushed against her chest. “Wow,” she said. “That was better than TV.” She shook her head. “You’re truly awful.”

But the way she said it, I could tell it was a compliment.

A
fter Dad moved to Los Angeles to be with Jennica, I made like a turtle and went into my shell. I spent most of my spare time alone in my room, reading or doing weird obsessive reorganizing of our clothes, our books, our toys. When I was done with the stuff in our room, I’d sneak into Mom’s room and organize her shoes by color, or line up everything in the medicine cabinet in the bathroom according to size. It wasn’t so much about cleaning as it was about wanting everything to be in its proper place.

Phoebe tried to pull me out of myself for the first couple of weeks, but when she realized it wasn’t working, did she abandon me? No. She’d just come over with a book of her own, and the two of us would read in my room for hours without talking. If I needed
to take some time out to reorganize all the towels and sheets in our linen closet, she wouldn’t say a word. We traded books we liked, and by the end of those first few months, I’d read the
Narnia
series, the
Alice, I Think
trilogy, plus everything Judy Blume and Roald Dahl had ever written.

Mom was worried about me, but she had a lot of other stuff on her plate. She had to look after Rosie; she had to think about going back to work; and she was dealing with her own grief. At first I thought
grief
was a weird word to use because it wasn’t like my dad had died or anything. But Amanda explained to me one night that
grief
was the perfect word.

“Your mom has suffered a big loss. You all have.”

I didn’t tell Amanda that I sometimes wished Dad
was
dead. Killed in a car crash, or struck by lightning. I thought it would be easier to grieve if he was dead and buried, instead of alive and well and living in L.A. with a bimbo who was about to give him a new set of children to love.

Eventually, on Amanda’s advice, my mom sent me to a therapist to help me work through my feelings. The therapist’s name was Dr. Belinda Boniface, which was a pretty fabulous name. She was nice enough, I guess. I only went a handful of times because Dr. Belinda Boniface charged a lot of money for her services, which didn’t make a lot of sense to me since all she did was ask questions and watch me play with dolls.

One day she asked me to draw a picture of our family. This is what I drew.

She noticed that my dad wasn’t in the picture, so she asked me to draw a picture of him. This is what I drew.

Afterward, Dr. Belinda Boniface told my mom that these drawings indicated that I was feeling a lot of anger toward my dad.

Duh,
I remembered thinking. I hardly needed expensive therapy for someone to tell me that.

“W
hat’s your alias?” I asked Phoebe. “Nancy,” she said.

“As in Drew?”

“But, of course.”

“And what are you looking for?”

“A gift for my mom’s birthday.”

It was a Tuesday night, and Rosie and I were hanging out at Phoebe’s house. We’d just demolished one of Cathy’s delicious stir-fries and were working our way through wedges of Günter’s apple pie. We’d come by after school so I could do a couple of loads of laundry, and when Cathy had heard that my mom was going out with Dudley again, she’d invited us to stay for dinner.

“Remember to bring binoculars,” Phoebe said.

“Binoculars, check.”

“I’ll bring walkie-talkies.”

“Walkie-talkies, check. I’ll bring sandwiches.”

“And I’ll bring cookies and juice boxes.”

“I like Dudley,” Rosie piped up, her mouth full of pie.

“I know you do. But we have to make sure he doesn’t have any nasty secrets. Remember Jonathan?”

“He hurted Mom’s feelings.”

“Exactly. We don’t want that to happen again, do we?”

Rosie shook her head. She stuffed her last bite of pie into her mouth, then jumped out of her chair to find Günter, who’d promised to play a game with her on the Wii.

“You know, we wouldn’t need to do any of this if George would just answer my letter,” I said. It had been almost a month since I’d sent it, and I still didn’t have a response.

Phoebe shrugged. “He’s probably really busy. Anyway, I’m glad we’re doing this. I’ll finally get to see what The Wiener looks like.”

I sighed. “He looks like a wiener.”

I couldn’t believe my mom was still seeing Dudley. She definitely wasn’t doing it for his looks. And she certainly wasn’t doing it for his stupid gifts. We were now the proud owners of a matching toothbrush holder to go with the soap dish, bathtub stickers, a toilet brush
(! seriously), and toilet paper with hearts printed all over it.

And she couldn’t be seeing him for his money because if he had any, he clearly didn’t like to spend it.

“We went to a free jazz concert in a church,” Mom told us one night.

Or, “We went for a long walk down at Jericho Beach in the rain.”

Or, “He took me to a free lecture by the Tree-Hugging Granny.”

And she absolutely, positively wasn’t seeing him for his sense of humor. I’d recently had my darkest suspicions confirmed: Dudley was a punster.

While he’d waited for Mom to get ready one night, Dudley played Go Fish with Rosie in the living room. “This game is starting to give me a
haddock,
” he said. “Hey, you just had your
tuna.
Do you think I
cod
have my
tuna
now?” Rosie, of course, thought this kind of wordplay was hilarious. He had her in hysterics. When Mom joined them, he said, “Rosie’s giving me a
halibut
hard time here, Ingrid.”

Mom had actually giggled.

“You do realize that puns are the lowest form of humor,” I said.

He’d nodded happily. “I know. But sometimes I just can’t help myself. I love words! I love the English language.”

Then stop massacring it!
I’d wanted to shout.

Tonight The Wiener had taken my mom to the Vancouver Art Gallery. Why? Because it was pay-what-you-can Tuesday. Phoebe and I had decided that since the next day was a Professional Development day and we didn’t have to go to school, we would seize the opportunity to spy on Dudley.

It wouldn’t be the first time we’d spied on one of Mom’s boyfriends, and we were quite good at it. We’d read the ultimate detective handbook,
Harriet the Spy
, at least three times each. And between us, we’d devoured a bunch of Sherlock Holmes stories and about ten of the Nancy Drew mysteries, after I’d discovered a box full of them at a yard sale two summers ago. Nancy was a little outdated, but some of her techniques were still relevant.

Most of Mom’s dates had simply provided a chance for Phoebe and me to perfect my list of questions for interrogation purposes. For example, we didn’t add the question about addictions until after Carl, and we only added
Are you married?
after Larry the Unibrow. Most of them hadn’t lasted long enough for us to go into detective mode. Except for two.

Guy was pronounced the French way, like “Gee” with a hard
G.
Mom met him on Havalife. Guy had lots of thick black hair and designer glasses, which made
him look smarter than he really was. He wore expensive suits and worked in an office building downtown, and he must have made a lot of money because he drove a very expensive sports car that had only two seats, which was the first clue that he wasn’t child-friendly.

Guy hated Rosie and me. Oh, he’d fake it in front of my mom, but whenever she left the room, he’d go all cold and weird. Once, I’d simply asked him if he had a criminal record or any aliases we should know about, and he’d said to me, “Too bad your mom couldn’t put you up for adoption.”