“So you got all worked up over nothing.”
“I’m sorry, Mandy.”
“And we are sitting pretty, aren’t we?”
“If we are.”
“Well? Are we or aren’t we?”
“I don’t know, I don’t know! Mandy, I’m shot.”
“...You mean... you got hit?”
“I mean I’m jittered. Bad.”
“Oh! You scared me there for a minute.”
At last I calmed down, then took off my clothes and went marching around naked. Then I put my pajamas on and got in the other bed. Sitting pretty or not, I felt like holy hell and wanted arms around me. I own up he didn’t turn me on, at lease not much, but any port in a storm, and I’d been through one. I was hoping he’d come to me, and if it meant that other, then, OK, I’d even have stood for that. But nothing happened. I didn’t know why, especially after that pass that he’d made the night before, talking about my legs and then making a pest of himself to get me in bed with him. He just lay there, now and then sipping his drink. He wasn’t drunk and he wasn’t taking too much, but he seemed to need it, the way he was acting. He said he’d ordered it up from room service, along with the afternoon paper, and signed for it, tipping the boy out of the money I’d given him while we were buying our things at the plaza. He had put the tray on the luggage rack, the sawhorse thing with tapes, and offered me a drink, but I told him I didn’t like it. So it went on for some little time, him sipping and thinking and me sighing and hoping, and then all of a sudden I knew why he was not coming over, not slipping into my bed when he must have known I’d say yes. It was because he was scared, or “shot” as he called it — not on account of me, of that, or of anything in particular, but of everything, especially the cops. And I thought about last night, the way I’d thought about it, on account of being mad. And I realized if a girl gets mad enough, she won’t, and if a guy gets scared enough, he can’t.
After a long time, he said, “Mandy, I’ve been thinking about it, ’specially about him, this guy today, Vernick. I mean he could be right. Maybe he’s not your father.”
“He has to be! He and mother were married!”
“That don’t prove anything.”
“Well, why wouldn’t he be?”
“He told you. He knows stuff, of course, that he didn’t mention to you, but on top of that your looks told him, so he said. You don’t look like his kith or kin.”
“What’s kith?”
“I don’t rightly know. Friends, maybe.”
“His friends could be my father? Was that it?”
“Mandy, I don’t know what it was.”
“Well, what was he getting at?”
“That some other guy is your father.”
“Oh! That’s all!”
“Mandy, it could be true. And it would help, I would think, if you got with it now, ’stead of cussing him out about it.”
“You mean if I believed it?”
“Well? I believe it.”
“...You believe it? Why?”
“The stuff you told me, Mandy, about yourself, about your mother, about him, and about Steve, this guy who beat you up who seemed to know more, to know a whole lot more, than he was telling you.”
“And it’s supposed to make me feel better?”
“At lease you’d quit plaguing yourself about him.”
“But then I wouldn’t know! Who my father is!”
“I was coming to that.”
For the third time I’d been hit in the stomach and started to cry again. When I could talk I said, “Here it’s all I’ve thought about, this last year and a half, my father, my real, sure-enough father, how I would go to him, how he’d ask me in real nice, how he’d take me in his arms, and how we’d be happy. And now look how it’s turned out!” I told him then, for the first time, about the desert island and how I’d dreamed about it, that my father and I would swim there after our plane was forced down, and we’d stay there and live, eating clams and drinking coconut milk. I said, “Maybe we never would, maybe it was just silly, but I would imagine that we were there and laugh to myself about it, thinking how we would live there.” He listened and didn’t make any cracks, just let me talk along. Then he got out of bed and sat on the floor beside me, there between the beds, in front of the liquor tray, so his face was close to mine. Then he took my hand and kissed it. Then he said, “Mandy, why can’t I be your father?”
“...You! You be my father, Rick?”
“Yeah, starting right now.”
“You’re not much more than a boy.”
“I’m that much more than a boy that I can eat clams with you and drink coconut milk on that island we’re going to have.”
“You mean you’re not laughing at it?”
“I mean we’re going to have one!”
“...When? And where?”
“In Florida! Now! Now we know where we’re going! Mandy, they have them down there! Cays, they call them — big ones, little ones, whatever size you want, some with palm trees on them, some with nothing but grass, but all of them with clams! We’ll buy ourself one! We got money, haven’t we?”
“Oh, Rick, you make me so happy!”
Because I knew, of course, that this was his way of doing, to kind of make it look different, his not coming in with me, as, of course, if he was my father he couldn’t come to my bed, and it would be for that reason, not on account that he couldn’t, that he didn’t. So OK, I wasn’t kidded. At the same time it was just what I wanted if he and I were to go on. I mean that other was not what I really wanted, though I would have stood for it regardless to get what he was giving me now, kisses and pats and love. So now I had what I really did want, without having to do that other. So it helped, in the most wonderful way. I said, “Rick, I think that’s the nicest thing that’s been said to me, that ever was said to me, in my whole life until now.”
“Then OK. Now, little daughter, sleep.”
“You make me want to cry. But happy.”
He held me close in his arms, and next thing I knew it was dark. I whispered, “Rick, are you there?”
“Yes, Mandy. You’ve been asleep.”
“I’m sorry. I’m kind of tired, I guess.”
I looked then, and when I saw he was in his bed asked, “Did you sleep at all, Rick?”
“I guess so, little bit... much as I could, worried as I am. I can’t help how I feel. Tomorrow, if we get out of town, if nobody stops us, I mean, if we get started for Florida, I imagine I’ll feel different. Then it’ll be the worry was just for nothing.”
“I’m sorry I caused it, Rick.”
“Listen, what’s done is done, and when no harm is done, don’t beat yourself over the head. That’s how I look at it, Mandy.”
“What time is it?”
“Well, you got the watch on. Look.”
“It’s five of ten.”
“You hungry?”
“Rick, I hadn’t thought. Yeah, little bit.”
“I’ll order something sent up. How you do, you call room service. They’ll get you a paper too — I think I’ll have one sent up. The five-thirty if they still have one. It’ll tell more than the one I have here, the same one you read, I guess.”
“Have two sent up, one for me.”
“What do you want to eat?”
“The identical same I had in the coffee shop — tongue sandwich, buttermilk, and apple pie a la mode. It was all wonderful, and the pie was out of this world.”
“Guess that’s what I’ll have too.”
So he called down and ordered, and then we got up. It was fun walking around in pajamas and barefoot, with no reason to worry about a swipe being made at my breastworks. He had money, as I’d given him a package of five-dollar bills there in the plaza, but when the food came he signed, giving the waiter a five-dollar tip. It was a very nice guy who said he was going to college and seemed to know we were new at hotels. So he told us what to do with the tray when we finished our supper, to put it out in the hall on the rolling table he brought, and in the night they’d come and get it. So then we ate our sandwiches, and everything tasted so good. We put the tray out, then sat talking about our island, Rick in one chair, me in the other, our bare feet curled up under us. Then I said, “Rick, there’s just one thing.”