The press is digging deep. Talking to everyone. But they’ve got everything wrong. For example, Delaney’s mom, Amber, died when Dee was eleven, not eight—we girls had just started middle school. I was spying out my front bedroom window one night back then, and saw Tom Sharpe tonguing a skanky redhead in a blue van parked up past the Leons’. I told my mother. She told Amber. Amber died. Not just like that. But in stages.
After the affair with the redhead was out in the open, Tom asked Amber for forgiveness in front of the whole congregation at Sacred Heart. She forgave. They hugged it out and everyone cried and clapped—not that I was there, but I heard all about it. Business at Sharpe Mercedes went up thirty percent. Lookin’ Sharp! Snap. People love redemption. And public confession. I remember the dinnertime conversations between my parents around that time. Sherman was Jesus-Christing his way all over the house about what an idiot his friend was. Jesus Christ, what was Tom thinking? Jesus Christ, poor Delaney. Jesus Christ, Amber must be humiliated. All for a piece of ass? Jesus fucking Christ.
My mother loved my father’s outrage over the affair so much I’d had to put three pillows over my AC vent to cover the sound of the headboard in their room. Ugh. The truth is I also found my father’s disgust about Tom Sharpe reassuring. Sherman would never risk hurting me or humiliating his soul mate. He would never, ever, in a million years, risk everything for a piece of ass.
Tom Sharpe was repentant at church, but he actually kept up the affair with Kinga, a twenty-year-old waitress from Sagebrush Cantina, and everyone, including Dee’s mom, knew it. One rainy morning Miss Amber was heading home after car pool when she got an alert on her spy app: texts between Tom and Kinga. She called her therapist for an emergency phone session and stupidly thought she could drive home in the middle of her breakdown. She lost control of her Mercedes SUV and landed in a ditch—broke both of her legs and one of her arms and hit her head hard on the dash. She was in traction for two weeks. The day before she was supposed to get out of the hospital, she died from a blood clot. Delaney blamed her dad. She doesn’t know that my spying was the thing that opened the Pandora’s box in the first place. I guess she will when she reads this. If she ever reads this. I’m sorry, Dee. I’m so fucking sorry.
She was pretty shattered by it all, but her prescription for Wellbutrin seemed to help. Her hatred for her father simmered, but didn’t boil over the way mine did when it happened to me. Brooky and Zara had hated Tom Sharpe for breaking our friend’s heart and for ruining our portrait of perfection. And then, when Sherman left Shell and me for Sugar Tits, we all blamed Mr. Sharpe for infecting my father with upgrade syndrome.
Fee never quite hated him, though. She’s always been respectful and grateful to Mr. Tom in a way that none of us are to our own fathers. A few years ago she joked about getting a saliva swab and sending it off to Paternity so everybody would just shut the fuck up about him being her father. Sometimes I wonder if she did. And he is.
Cable news keeps replaying vid of Mr. Sharpe in his white tuxedo in the parking lot last night, throwing his hand up in front of his red face, saying, “No comment.” His cheating crimes offered him a chance at redemption, but his association with the Villains in Versace has people calling for a boycott of his dealership. He must be worried. And pissed. But still—why doesn’t he stand up for Fee? Biological or not, he’s always called her his “other” daughter.
* * *
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Being here, bloody and gross in this small, dirty shed, makes me long for the cloud of my canopied bed. I know that makes me a princessa, which is something I’ve obviously struggled with. On the one hand I really like my beautiful house and nice clothes and designer purses, but on the other hand I know I kinda suck for having so much shit. I talk about it with Aunt Lilly, who shakes her head a lot when she visits Calabasas, and sums her feelings up by saying, simply, “You live in a bubble. This isn’t real