Girl Power

After her one-night fling in Mexico, Amanda led a chaste life. Amazing to recall this phase, since ten years later, she’d be marrying her fourth husband.

But after Evie and DeeDee returned from Disney World, laden with merchandise, Amanda devoted everything to them. She had set up their home, including covering one wall of each girl’s bedroom with wipe-clean wallpaper, designed for colored markers.

[Click here to read the first episode, or here to read the previous one.]

Her job and its ten minute commute matched her daughters’ schedule so well, she gave thanks to a nebulous God fading in and out of her mind.  Except when the girls visited their father, they always ate dinner together. DeeDee scraped carrots, washed the lettuce, and made a wettish salad in big wooden bowl. Evie stood on a step-ladder to stir the pots and pour milk. Both girls set and cleared the table. Amanda relished reading to them, an hour minimum, asking them to cuddle in close. 

She allowed them two hours of TV a week, provided they could agree on the shows. Mike, however—as they told her every day—let them watch all the TV and DVDs they wanted.

Amanda laughed at this. She depended on Mike to balance her strictness with indulgence. “I bet he lets you eat brownies for breakfast. And ice cream whenever.”

“Yep,” DeeDee said. “And 7-Up and potato chips.”

“Nadia calls him Mr. Junk Food,” Evie added, “because he eats so many Snickers and takes us to McDonalds.”

Nadia Hinton, fitness instructor and fortune-teller, was still Mike’s personal trainer and  girlfriend, although he had quit adhering to her rules and predictions.

In fact, Mike said, telephoning when he knew both girls were out, he could never live with her nonstop bossing and fussing. Please, he asked Amanda, reconsider getting together with him now and then. No one needed to know.

“Mike, you have to realize that’s over. As in never again.” She would always love him, though, for being such a good father.   

During Mike’s weekends with the girls, Amanda went out with her friend Farrah to concerts and movies and any restaurant with a busy bar scene. They always drove in separate cars, because Farrah often hooked up with some guy she knew from conferences, reading or sports clubs, or even a friend of a distant friend.

But she wasn’t like Amanda’s mother, always pushing for more. Farrah said, “I hated being married and never, ever wanted kids.”

Farrah was thirty-five. Amanda would turn twenty-eight in October. Farrah tended to treat Amanda as if she was much younger, which sometimes bothered her. “You get carded for good reason,” she liked to say. 

But a month before Olivia’s wedding, Amanda liked the idea she might seem younger than she was. Early on, she had confessed the story about Walter: how he had taken care of her for a year and how afterward he had paid for a crime he never really committed while  she and her mother absconded to Wisconsin.

“I haven’t seen him in sixteen years,” she said sipping her one glass of wine. “But I will at Olivia’s wedding. O wants me to, that’s part of why I’m a bridesmaid.”

Gulping her wine, Amanda revealed a secret. “And seriously, I want to look beautiful for him. Is that creepy?”

“Not at all,” Farrah said. “He was your father, technically or not. He’s about to meet you as an adult for the first time. Naturally, you want to impress him.”

“It’s more than that,” Amanda said.

“Well, yeah.” Farrah stretched her arms, playing the heroine. “You want to enchant the man.”

“Like in a fairy tale.” Amanda focused on the floor.

“And why on earth not, darling?  Most daughters would. So before you go, let me be the Fairy Godmother.”

(Click here to read the next episode.)