Read Online Any Place I Hang My Hat by Susan Isaacs - Free Book Online

and pointed it at me. “Fuck that ‘you owe me’ shit, Amy. I was a good father to you whenever I was out. I never hit you. Not even once. And we had a lot of fun.”
    “I agree. You were a terrific father. Honestly, I never once doubted you loved me and wanted the best for me. But you gotta understand—” Too much emotion and, presto, my pre-Ivey diction took over. I began the sentence again. “You have to understand, Chicky, I love you. You did the best you possibly could for me. Bad times, good times, if a girl knows her father is on her side, it’s a very big deal.”
    “I’m not stupid, babes. I know Grandma Lil wasn’t any bargain and I’m sorry you got stuck with her. It must’ve been even harder for you than it was for me and my sister when we were kids. I mean, you being such a genius and my mother being—do I have to tell you?—dumb as shit.”
    “Grandma Lil did her best,” I told him.
    “Her best stank,” he responded. “You know it. I know it. The smartest thing you ever did was get outta there. You know, when I was inside that time, when you were thirteen or fourteen, right before you went to that boarding school. You were getting to be a, you know, young lady, I kept worrying, Jesus H. Christ, what if Amy gets herself knocked up or something?” I must have looked surprised because he said gently: “Listen, those things happen. Or else I thought, What if Amy runs off with some schmuck—or worse—just to get out of having to listen to my old lady’s fucking stories about Mrs. Hoo-ha’s yacht?”
    “Chicky, I knew your mother. I need to hear about mine.” He shook his head. “What don’t you want to tell me? What could be the worst thing you could have done to her? Beat her up?” His expression collapsed into a sappy, slack-jawed duh look. So I said kiddingly: “You arranged from prison to have a couple of your high school friends hide her under ten feet of landfill?”
    “Shut up!” He was so loud I was startled. An older woman in the booth opposite us stopped in midbite of an oatmeal cookie the size of her head. The counterman turned his back to us and got busy scraping the grill. “I never laid a goddamn hand on Phyllis. Ask anybody. I treated her like a queen.” Best, I thought, not allude to the fates of Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard. “Like a goddamn empress, Amy. If you saw the pearls I bought her on the honeymoon you’d know how good she had it.” He lifted his hand high and scribbled in the air. The international I-want-the-check sign. He couldn’t wait to get away from me. “All these years, you think I had her killed?”
    “Of course not!” Well, now and again, on long nights with too little homework, I had mulled over the possibility. “That was my point, Chicky. You didn’t do anything so terrible that you can’t talk about it. She was the one who took a walk on us. Believe me, nothing you tell me will make me think less of her than I already do.” He was preparing his no. “Trust me,” I continued. “And nothing I hear could ever make me love you less.” His feet did an aw-gee-whiz shuffle.
    “Let me tell you something psychological I learned, Ame. Before Oprah. Right after I got out the first time, there was another lady had a show in the afternoon. A talk show, except this lady was white. With a face to stop a clock and skinny legs. And if that wasn’t bad enough, she kept interrupting whoever was on with a lot of dumb-ass questions.” He caressed the diamond on his earlobe between thumb and index finger. “So she’s talking to some guy about Children of Divorce.”
    “Were you and my mother ever divorced?”
    Chicky cocked his head to the side, his attitude of intense cerebration. “Not really. But see, it was just the same because we didn’t get married anyplace actually real. We went to this little dip-shit town in Maryland because she was sixteen and a half.”
    “She was sixteen and a half when she married you?”
    “Yeah. We