came bounding up the stairs. She looked to be about twenty, and was considerably younger than Kendall. She was wearing one of Zack’s bathrobes, and looked delighted to run into Kendall, who stared at her father coming up the stairs behind her. This was definitely not her night. She kept running into them, although the boat was certainly not small. Her father rolled his eyes, and sat down at the table as the girl slid over next to Kendall.
“Hi, I’m Brigitte. That looks so good. I’m starving, can I have some? Sex always makes me hungry.” She smiled and without a word, Kendall offered her half her sandwich. The girl had a low-class British accent. “The last time I was on the boat, they made us omelettes and caviar at midnight. Is there no one in the galley?” Kendall exchanged a glance with her father, the point was not lost on her. The girl had been on the boat before. “This is my third time here. We went to Portofino last time.” Zack looked like he wanted to strangle her. Kendall didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Portofino was one of Kendall’s favorite ports too. Meanwhile Brigitte had happily devoured half of Kendall’s sandwich. “We always have such a good time when I come here. Where did you come from tonight?”
“California,” Kendall said, trying to keep conversation to a minimum so her father didn’t have a stroke.
“Zack said he’ll take me to California sometime. Maybe to L.A. I want to go to Disneyland.”
“Oh, you’ll love that,” Kendall said, and her father interrupted. Brigitte had done enough damage for one night. Kendall found it interesting that he had promised to take her to California, but to L.A., not San Francisco.
“We should go to bed now,” he said sternly to Brigitte, and she giggled and acted like it was a sexual invitation, which it probably was. Brigitte got up and waved at Kendall, as she headed for the stairs and Kendall’s father followed her, without looking at his daughter or saying good night.
“Nice to meet you!” she called back over her shoulder, and Kendall waved. She sat at the table for a few minutes, thinking about the whole experience.
Her father’s head popped back up a moment later and he looked uncomfortably at his daughter. “You can stay if you want to,” he said stiffly, and Kendall shook her head. It would have been agony being on board with them, with all the sexual innuendo. Tonight had been bad enough. She didn’t want her mother to hear about it later and think that she had been in collusion with her father and his floozies.
“I’d rather not, but thanks anyway.” He disappeared down the stairwell again, and she left a note for the captain to call her a cab at six in the morning, and she set her alarm for five. All she wanted to do now was get back to Nice, and from there she’d get a flight to either Paris or New York, to connect to San Francisco. It had been a totally wasted trip except that it gave her new insight into her father. She wondered how long it had been like this and if it was partially or fully responsible for the disintegration of her parents’ marriage.
The cab showed up on time in the morning, and the captain saw her off. He seemed surprised to see her there, but less so at her rapid departure in the circumstances.
She was at the Nice airport by seven, and caught a flight to Charles de Gaulle which connected to a flight to San Francisco. With the time difference, she would be back in the city by one-thirty in the afternoon, which would be ten-thirty at night for her. It had been an expensive escapade for nothing. After she checked in, she called her brother in the Cotswolds. She hadn’t talked to him in months, and wondered if he would pick up when he saw the call was from her. Their conversations were never pleasant, usually about their parents. He answered sounding guarded, and had let it ring, as if he wasn’t sure whether to pick it up or not.
“Hi, I’m in Antibes, I thought I’d give you a call.”
“Are you on the boat?” Nicholas asked her.
“I was for about five minutes. I think I owe you an apology,” she said, “about our mother.”
“What about her?”
“I just dropped in on Dad, for an unscheduled visit. He came over for a long