"I won't let anything go wrong. I'll take care of it."
"I've got to be careful. Not yet, PLEASE. Just be patient a little longer. Greg, sweet, I want you too." She kissed him tenderly and he didn't respond. "After what Mom did to us, to Dad, her going off like that . . . God. If something would happen. It would totally bum Dad out for good. I can't take any chances. Just be patient."
"I don't know if I can," he said, darkly, with just the right degree of urgency. And the next morning they skipped classes and Tiff had him take her all the way downtown to the Free Clinic so she could get some birth control pills. It was the beginning of bad times.
She would be a long time forgetting that day. She could feel her face burning every time she thought about it for weeks afterward. She'd gone out of the house like she always did, heading for school. And Greg picked her up in Roger's wheels and they took off for downtown.
"Wow. It's truly gnarly." The Free Clinic was right out of Dickens and in a rough neighborhood. "You want me to go in with you?" She could tell by his tone he wasn't about to.
"No. Just wait for me, okay?"
"Yeah."
They kissed and she plunged ahead. You had to answer all these questions and this woman was going on and on telling her about everything and she sat there with a slowly building feeling of dread and apprehension creeping up on her, hearing the lady talk to her with half an ear —
"... and this is called an IUD, which means . . . " — and wishing it would all end. And wondering what it would be like between them. The dark cloud of her mother's guilt hovering over her all the while.
"... and this is a diaphragm . . . " And be sure to chew each bite 32 times, and look both ways before crossing the street.
And then it was over and she had The Pills and Tiff was excited and scared and very much fourteen years old as she hurried out of the Free Clinic and ohmigod, OH, NO, DAD!
Greg was nowhere in sight. Her dad, looking about ten feet tall, about to boil over with anger, was waiting for her.
"What are you doing here —"
And he cut her off with a thumb jerked at the car, meaning get your butt in here now. "Get in," he snarled.
"Where's Greg? What are YOU doin' here?"
"GET IN."
"Dad." Nothing. The car starts and he whips away from the curb and into the downtown traffic. "Dad? What's this all about?"
"That's really choice, Tiff. Shouldn't I be asking you?"
"Did you follow me. Dad? I mean, man, that's about the lowest —"
"No, dear. I didn't have to follow you. I knew exactly where you were going this morning."
"Did Amber —"
"Never mind how I found out. I could have picked up the phone and started to call out and heard you say birth-control pills and overheard by mistake, couldn't I? I could have seen you were acting suspicious as hell the last couple of days and I might have caught you in a couple of lies and I might have found out you were seeing this punk Greg when you were supposed to be at your friend's house — I mean, there's a hundred ways I could have found out. When you lie all the time you can expect to get caught. No?"
"Greg's not a punk. Don't call him that."
"Oh. I think he's a punk, all right. I think that is precisely, exactly, and absolutely what he is. A snot-nosed, lying, sneaking, no-good little punk who is about to get his butt in some serious trouble for molesting a fourteen-year-old girl. AM I MAKING MYSELF CLEAR?"
"You don't have to scream. I'm sitting right here next to you, Dad."
"You little lying whore!" And before he could control himself he lashed out at her, backhanding her and hearing her head crack against the window on the passenger side, hitting her a lot harder than he meant to, slapping her involuntarily, lashing out at her before he could think to stop himself, slapping his errant daughter, slapping Pat, slapping her lover Buddy, slapping the stewardess who had touched him on the plane, letting all his anger and rage and frustration whip out at his little girl.
"I HATE YOU," she screamed at him between sobs. It was a slap he could never take back. Not the smack with the back of his hand or the tooth-rattling headache. That was nothing. It was what he called her. No matter how much she would ever want to, she knew that would be the one thing she'd find the hardest to forgive.
"Do you know the kind of thoughts I had about you on the way down here? The things I thought about while I was parked over across from the clinic waiting for your to get your little slut pills so you could give yourself to that — that boy? It was like realizing for the first time that I'd never known you. You were a total stranger living under our roof. My roof," he corrected. "And now I'm going to have to treat you as if you were a stranger. I'm going to have to make rules. Firm rules."
"I hate you, you know that," she spat, glaring at him with her narrowed cat's eyes, still sobbing and out of control.
"And I love you, and that's why —"
"No you don't," she sobbed ruefully, "you lying old bastard," and the word bastard was the last word she spoke to him for a long, long time.
He went ahead to lay down his new, iron-clad rules, so ridiculous they made his previous constraints seem positively reasonable by comparison. The rigidity he'd shown toward Tiff since Pat ran off to be with her real lover man would appear benign when compared to the stern measures he was going to take to "control" his wayward, delinquent fourteen-year-old.
Spain continued talking, commanding, when he should have been listening, asking. Instead of understanding or gentle guidance, he was making demands she knew she couldn't swallow. He'd taken a loving daughter and used her as a release for his bottled-up anger. And the harsh abrasiveness of this confrontation slammed the door on her once and for all.
"How you could do something like this to me when you know this sort of crap is the last thing I need right now and ..." She only heard a blur of words. But wasn't that just like her father? The last thing HE needed. Never mind what anybody else needed. He could go to hell for all she cared.
She'd tried so hard to give him extra love when Mom had left. The little extras. Worked so hard to be home for him. Clean up after him. Feed him nourishing meals. Do all the things her mother had done around the house. She tried to talk to him, and he didn't want any part of it. When she was solicitous and sympathetic, he'd responded by pulling himself inside the shell of a shattered ego where she couldn't get at him. Now this.
They rode in silence for another half-hour and each kept their own raging counsel, sitting there unspeaking, seething with anger and frustration and self-pity, fuming with bitterness, and the hacksaw edge of their actions and words severed the last of the bonds between father and daughter.
When they pulled up in front of the house, she was out of the car and the front door was slamming before he's reached for the automatic garage-door opener up on the sun visor. And by the time she heard him come in the house, she'd already run upstairs and put some of her mother's old medicine in the case of birth-control pills and hidden her goodies safely away. Eventually he'd get around to asking for them. Or more likely, he'd open her purse and confiscate them without saying anything.
As soon as she heard him back in his office and she'd double-checked that the door to the office was shut, she quickly dialed the Dawkins number.
Greg's mom answered, "Hello?"
"Hi. Is Greg there?" she asked quietly.
"Sure, hon. Oh, do you know what your dad wants with Jerry?"
"Huh?"
"That's okay. I thought maybe this was about the other call. Just a second, Greg's on his way." And she heard him take the phone away from her.
"Yeah."