quite clearly, that he would never have left Jessica, that he loved her more than anything and that this wasn’t his choice to live in a small apartment in a different, less expensive neighborhood. He’d give anything, he said, to move back into their home, to be a family again, but it was her mother who had told him to leave, who was driving this.
Jessica wasn’t particularly surprised to hear that. She knew her father loved her too much to leave, knew it had to be something to do with her mother.
“I hate you!” she screamed at her mother soon after her dad left, daring to say those words out loud for the first time. “You’ve ruined my life and I hate you!” She ran up to her room, expecting her mother to come racing up the stairs after her to punish her, or shout at her, or something. But there was silence.
Jessica sobbed loudly into her pillow, then stopped after a while because no one was coming up to see if she was okay. She tiptoed to her door, cracked it open very gently, and heard her mother crying quietly downstairs.
Good. She felt a glimmer of remorse, quickly covered up by a smug sense of satisfaction. Her mother deserved to feel the pain that Jessica felt every second of every day since her mother had thrown her father out. There was nothing that he could have done that would have justified that, and so Jessica continues to blame her mother, trying to figure out how she can get to live with her dad full time.
“Can we go to Four Brothers?” Jessica asks, the amusement arcade having become one of her favorite places. When they had been living together, she had rarely been allowed to go there, only as a special treat once in a while, and once there her parents had never paid her that much attention. Like every other place they had gone to when they were a whole family, they had gone with other people, friends, so the grown-ups could hang out together and the kids could go off and do their own thing.
Jessica doesn’t ever remember her dad playing arcade games with her, for example. Doesn’t remember her parents sitting at the diner and talking to her as if she were an equal. She remembers them going out a lot at night while she stayed home with a babysitter, remembers them going away for weekends while she went to her grandma’s.
Now her dad does everything with her. Jessica is not old enough to understand about guilt, but she is old enough to reap the benefits, and old enough to know how to manipulate so she always gets what she wants.
“Daddy?” she will say breathlessly as they stand outside Kool Klothes, the coolest store in town that her parents always said was horribly overpriced and ridiculously trendy. “Who shops in there?” her mother used to say, glancing disdainfully through the window at the sequinned tiny T-shirts and low-slung studded denim skirts.
“Can I?” And she has learned that as long as she shows enough excitement and a wide-eyed gratitude, as if to say she can’t believe how lucky she is, he will buy her whatever she wants.
A curious mix of adult and little girl, at thirteen she has curves, breasts, a budding interest in boys, but the divorce has brought about a regression, and she now attaches herself to her father like a limpet, curling herself around him when he stands, sitting on his lap and leaning into him, sucking her thumb while he sits on the sofa to watch television.
She has developed a new routine when she is with her father. She reaches out her arms to him at bedtime and he lifts her up and carries her upstairs to bed, lying down behind her and stroking her back until she falls asleep. I am so lucky, she thinks, as she lies there—the only time in her life she feels absolutely safe and secure. I love my dad and he loves me, and no one can take that away from me.
“So? Can we?”
“Can we what?” Richard seems distracted.
“Dad!” she whines, rolling her eyes. “I just asked you if we could go to Four Brothers.”
“Maybe later, sweetheart,” he says. “I thought we could go to Belucci’s for lunch today.”
Jessica’s face falls. “Why Belucci’s?” she says. “We always go to the diner.”
“I know, sweetheart.” He smiles at her indulgently. “But today I want you to meet a friend of