It was the only word that came to mind, popping into her head in neon colors. A girl should never hear of her father’s death quite like she did, Madeline Pruett would tell her best friend Trudi a few hours after the fact. Especially when she didn’t even know she had a father. And what made it spectacularly unreal was that there were strings attached to her father’s death. Big strings. Enormous, bungee-cord-jump-off-a-bridge strings.
There was a long silence on the other end of the phone as Trudi took this news in. Madeline could hear Trudi’s two-year-old daughter in the background banging cups on the tile floor. Then Trudi said, “Are you going to soccer practice?”
It wasn’t exactly what Madeline would call “practice.” She volunteered with Camp Haven, an organization that mentored at-risk youth. Camp Haven sponsored afterschool soccer camps, and Madeline coached little five-year-old girls. Not that Madeline was an outstanding soccer player—she was mediocre. But the coaching challenge was getting the girls to run in the right direction. The payoff was spending time with them. “Yes, I’m on my way,” she said to Trudi.
“Okay, so here’s what you do. When practice is over, I’ll meet you at Paco’s Cantina. Order two gold margaritas. I’m calling Rick right now.”
Thank God for Trudi Feinstein, because Madeline really needed to repeat back the things the man had said about her father, to hear it out loud again, to make sense of it. She needed some moral support, someone to gasp and exclaim that it was all so unreal right along with her.
Madeline had tried to find that moral support from her mother when she’d called her just a couple of hours earlier, but Clarissa Pruett had cheerfully announced that she and some guy named John were about to go and “party” and to make it quick.
“Okay. My father died,” Madeline said.
“Huh? What do you mean your father died? Who are you talking about?”
In her mother’s defense, it was a legitimate question in a family of exactly two. Not that Madeline had lacked for dads—in her life, she’d been subjected to four that her mother had said she should call “Dad,” and that didn’t even count a few men in between. And quite obviously, Madeline had been produced with the help of an actual father. Turns out the one who had died was the absent sperm donor, the deadbeat the state could never track down to collect child support. Madeline had only one memory of him: a stack of gold chains around a thick neck, the reek of cigars, and a beefy hand with an endless supply of candy he dispensed like a broken gum machine. There was only one fuzzy picture of her parents—her mother with long hair, big floppy hat, a cigarette, and cocktail, and a man, whose face was partially obscured by her mother’s hat.
“My real dad, Mom,” Madeline said. “My sperm donor. He died.”
“Well, I’m sorry to hear that,” her mother said. Madeline heard the pop of a beer can over the cooking show blaring in the background from the enormous flat screen TV some man had bought her mother. Clarissa Pruett never actually cooked anything that Madeline could remember, but she watched that channel religiously.
“So how’d he die?” her mother asked before slurping from the can of beer.
The bigger question to Madeline was how did he live? Where had he been? It had not occurred to Madeline, in the shock of hearing about him at all, to ask how he’d met his demise. “I don’t know.”
“They didn’t say?”
“It wasn’t a they. It was one guy. Jackson Crane.”
Jackson Crane had shown up late to the realty offices where Madeline worked. She was the fairly new agent who always took the people who came in after the other agents had left for happy hour. It was a trick that had landed her a few good listings, including her prize, the DiNapoli house.
“Now who is Jackson Crane?” her mother asked. Madeline heard the sound of a lighter, the quick inhale of breath as her mother lit a cigarette.
“My father’s business agent or something like that,” Madeline said, and told her mother how the handsome, tanned man wearing a tailored suit coat and crisp white shirt open at the neck had walked into her office. He’d reminded her of one of those sitcoms where four guys live together in a loft and have hilarious girl troubles, and she’d even assumed he was looking for a new bachelor pad somewhere in Orlando. She told her mother how he’d shaken her hand vigorously, thanked her for seeing him, and then said, “I flew in from Colorado and came straight here,” and proceeded to announce that he had some unpleasant news about her father.
He’d said it with dimples and white teeth, as if his unpleasant news could be softened by a Crest toothpaste smile. Madeline had been suspicious of him—she was generally suspicious of all men—and had feared his was one of those awkward smiles people get when they hear bad news and they don’t know how to take it in. He clearly thought she would be very upset with hearing her father had died.
“I told him I didn’t have a dad.”
“I wish you wouldn’t say that, Maddie,” her mother said disapprovingly. “You make it sound like I was sleeping around. You obviously had a father.”