She tried to keep talking, but it got swamped by another tsunami of crying. I sat down hard on a bar stool. Olivia kept her eyes away from mine and rocked Holly back and forth, stroking her head. I could have done with someone to give me the same treatment, preferably someone with very large bosoms and a massive cloud of enveloping hair.
Eventually Holly wore herself out and moved into the shuddery-gasp stage, and Liv steered her gently upstairs to bed. Her eyes were already closing. While they were up there I found a nice bottle of Chianti in the wine rack-Olivia doesn’t stock beer, now that I’m gone-and cracked it open. Then I sat on the bar stool with my eyes shut, leaning my head back against the kitchen wall and listening to Olivia making soothing noises above me, and tried to work out whether I had ever been this angry before.
“So,” I said pleasantly, when Olivia came back downstairs. She had taken the opportunity to put on her yummy-mummy armor, crisp jeans and caramel cashmere and a self-righteous expression. “I think I’m owed an explanation, don’t you?”
She glanced at my glass, eyebrows going up delicately. “And a drink, apparently.”
“Oh, no, no. Several drinks. I’m only getting started.”
“I assume you don’t think you can sleep here if you get too drunk to drive.”
“Liv,” I said, “normally I would be more than happy to fight you up and down as many sidetracks as you choose, but tonight, I think I should warn you, I’m going to be sticking fairly closely to the point. How the sweet shining fuck does Holly know Kevin?”
Olivia started pulling back her hair, winding an elastic around it in crisp deft flicks. She had obviously decided to play this cool, calm and collected. “I decided Jackie could introduce them.”
“Oh, believe me, I’ll be having a chat with Jackie. I can see how you might just be naïve enough to think this was a cute idea, but Jackie’s got no excuse. Just Kevin, or the whole bloody Addams Family? Tell me it was just Kevin, Liv. Please.”
Olivia folded her arms and set her back flat against the kitchen wall. Her battle stance: I’d seen it so many times. “Her grandparents, her uncles and aunt, and her cousins.”
Shay. My mother. My father. I’ve never hit a woman. I didn’t realize I was thinking about it till I felt my hand squeezing the edge of the poofy little bar stool, hard.
“Jackie brought her over for tea on the odd evening, after school. She met her family, Frank. It’s not the end of the world.”
“You don’t meet my family, you open hostilities. You bring a flame-thrower and a full set of body armor. How many odd evenings, exactly, has Holly spent meeting my family?”
A little shrug. “I haven’t kept a tally. Twelve, fifteen? Maybe twenty?”
“Over how long?”
That one got a guilty flicker of her lashes. “About a year.”
I said, “You’ve been getting my daughter to lie to me for a year.”
“We told her-”
“A year. Every weekend for a year, I’ve been asking Holly what she did this week, and she’s been giving me a big steaming heap of crap.”
“We told her it would need to be a secret for a little while, because you’d had a fight with your family. That’s all. We were going to-”
“You can call it keeping secrets, you can call it lying, you can call it whatever the fuck you want. It’s what my family does best. It’s a natural-born, God-given talent. My plan was to keep Holly as far from it as possible and hope she would somehow beat the genetic odds and grow up into an honest, healthy, nontwisted human being. Does that sound excessive to you, Olivia? Does that really sound like too much to ask?”
“Frank, you’re going to wake her up again if-”
“Instead of which, you dumped her right smack into the middle of it. And hey presto, surprise surprise, the next thing you know, she’s acting exactly like a fucking Mackey. She’s taken to lying like a duck to water. And you’re egging her on every step of the way. That’s low, Liv. It really is. That’s just about the lowest, dirtiest, shittiest thing I’ve ever heard.”
She had at least the grace to redden. “We were going to tell you, Frank. We thought, once you saw how well it was working out-”
I laughed loud enough that Olivia flinched. “Suffering Jesus Christ, Liv! You call this working out? Correct me if I’m missing something here, but as far as I can see, this whole wretched cluster fuck is very, very far from working out.”
“For heaven’s sake, Frank, it’s not as if we knew that Kevin was going to-”
“You knew I didn’t want her anywhere near them. That should have been more than enough. What the hell else did you need to know?”
