Make Me Beg, Daddy

Chapter 10

Gulping, I step back and assess the situation. The facts are thus:

For at least fourteen months, my husband has been sleeping with my sister.

They typically booked rooms at the same hotel, the Marriott by the Brooklyn Bridge.

They went to one the night we buried my father.

They wrote jokes about my body the whole time. He wrote as many of them as she did.

At some point along the way, someone whom I assume to be Connor forged my name on a loan document for a company named V Haven Holdings, LLC, taking out an unspecified amount of money in my name.

Tonight, I intend to expose both Vivian and Connor for what they’ve done.

I’ve got the stage set at my mom’s house. A big projector screen patiently waiting to broadcast their lies and adultery.

One question remains. In the grand scheme of things, it might not even be that important.

But it feels important to me.

The question is, Do I include the jokes?

I want to. Oh, God, how badly I want to. I’m the butt of them! The scorn was aimed at me!

But cutting them would mean shielding Connor and Vivian from their own words in order to protect my own feelings.

I’d be doing it to spare myself. And the second I do that, I’ve told them one more time that what they think of my body is the most powerful thing in the room.

No.

Hell no.

I want them to know that their opinions mean nothing to me anymore.

And then I want them to f*****g burn.

“In it goes,” I say aloud. “Nobody gets spared tonight. Not even me.”

So the jokes go in. I crop a few of the most vicious ones and add them to the folder I’m building.

Then I take a dish towel off the oven handle and wipe the iPad down, front, back, edges, the little metal band around the outside.

I don’t know if fingerprints on an iPad are a thing anybody has ever checked in the history of the world. But my sister got caught by a machine doing something she didn’t know about, and I’d rather be paranoid than be her.

I unplug it, coil the cable, and start sliding it back into the drawer under the menus, arranging them the way they were, more or less, which is to say chaotically.

And then the screen wakes in my hand.

A banner slides down at the top.

VIVIAN: what time can u slip away tonight?

The implication is obvious. Hotels aren’t enough anymore; they want to find a closet or a guest bedroom or a well-shaded shrub around the corner to fall into and rip each other’s clothes off.

While I scurry around my mother’s living room, roleplaying as Cinderella.

Every vengeful cell I possess wants to open it and type out a scathing reply to my sister.

But I don’t. It’s not time quite yet.

Instead, I photograph the lock screen. The newest receipt in the collection.

Proof that tonight isn’t just my plan.

It’s theirs, too.

Then I turn the iPad face-down, settle the menus back over it, and close the drawer on everything.

I pick up my keys and my phone and go back to the front door. Next stop: the bakery.

After that, the party.

I check Connor’s dot on my way out. He’s in the parking lot now. Shopping done, I guess.

I can only shake my head. I wonder if he has any clue of what I’m doing, or of just how soon his life is about to go up in spectacular flames.

Then I laugh.

Relax, my sister told him. She never notices anything.

Turns out they never notice anything, either.

“Dee? You still there?”

“Still here.”

“You went quiet on me,” Connor accuses.

I did. But that’s only because I’m dragging a cropped photo of my sister’s bare hip onto a black background and making sure it’s properly centered, which happens to be a silent activity.

“Sorry,” I mutter. “Got a lot of paperwork to get through before the party tonight.”

Not entirely untrue.

My phone is resting face-down on the desk, on speaker. I can talk to my husband just fine as long as I don’t have to look at his name while I do it.

The shop has been dark since noon. I told Priya to close at lunch and lock up on her way out.

“You’re sure?” she asked. “Because I can stay. Amari can do daycare pickup without me. He’d prefer it, honestly.”

I’d waved her off. “Go home, Pri.”

“Alright, if you say so.” She picked at her wind-chapped lip. “Oh, don’t forget that the Nelsons’ second tray⁠—”

“Is done and boxed and in the front cooler with their name on it in marker. I know.”

She frowned and squinted at me. “Everything alright, honey buns? You’ve been weird lately.”

It took everything I had to shrug it off. “Just a Christmastime funk. It’ll pass.”

“Well, alrighty. But I’ve got a futon at my place if tonight goes badly.”

“It’s a party at my mother’s house,” I’d drawled. “It’s always bad.”

“Delilah Dorsey.” She jabbed a finger at me. “Swear right now you’ll text me in case of emergencies.”

“Yes, yes, yes. Cross my heart and hope to die. Now, go home. Merry Christmas, love.”

Finally, she’d left. I immediately extinguished all the lights, drew the blinds, and flipped the sign on the door to CLOSED.

Then I retreated to the office.

The front half of tonight’s petard-hoisting PowerPoint is ten years of Dorsey extended family chronicles. Christmases, birthdays, the summer at the lake, the year Dad wore the reindeer antlers to dinner and wouldn’t take them off.

Vivian is in the middle of almost every frame. She’s never once had to be told where to stand.

I’m in some of them, too, though usually as an elbow at the edge or a hand holding a platter. Mostly, I’m the person who took nine of the ten pictures and only made it into the tenth by accident.

That part went quickly.

But before I could get into the scandalous part of the slideshow in earnest, Connor called, so now, I’m stuck pretending all is well in the world.

“So what time do you want to head over?” he asks.

“I’m going straight there from here. I’ve got the food to bring at four.”

“Right. The three trips.” He laughs. “You want me to swing by and grab a load?”

I stop dragging photos for a second. That’s weirdly thoughtful of him.

“No,” I say. “I’ve got it.”

“You sure? I don’t mind.”

Ten years of marriage and he has never offered to help me haul a tray. Now, he’s got a whole courier service running.

There’s an ulterior motive here. Has to be.

He wants to know where I am and what I’m doing. That’s all this is.

“I’m sure,” I tell him. “You’d only rearrange my trunk and then I’d have to redo it.”

I click the photo into place. My sister’s naked waist, dead center, black background. Undeniable. I can even see that stupid heart tattoo just above her hip bone.

“Did your mother say what time dinner is?” he asks.

“Seven.”

“Gotcha. And then what, the whole thing after? Dessert, coffee, the slideshow?”

Ah. There it is.

He’s asking about the schedule. Because he wants to know when the gap opens up for another edition of Sneak Around Behind Delilah’s Back. When fifty people will be busy looking at graduation photos so he and Vivian can go find a coat closet to bone in.

I keep my voice bored. “Yeah. Dinner at seven. Slideshow after. Same as every year, minus one person.”

“Yeah. First one without him.” I can hear him wince. “You gonna be alright filling his shoes?”

Bitterness pours out of me. “Gee, I dunno. My dad’s dead, and it’s Christmas, and I’m currently slaving away at the shop by myself. So if that’s ‘alright,’ then yeah, I’m alright.”

The awkward pause that follows is too much—as is the risk of me saying something even more scathing—so I decide to wrap it up.

“I gotta go, Conn. I’ll see you at my mom’s.”

I don’t know or care what he’ll say to that. I just hang up and get back to work.

Little by little, it all starts to come together. It’s painful to relive these memories now because they’re all so tainted, but I bite down and white-knuckle my way through.

Here’s 2017, my mother’s fiftieth. Two dozen people in the photo, and there’s Viv, dead center with her chin up and her hand on her hip like the photographer flew in for her.

Here’s Easter. Viv is on the arm of Dad’s chair and I’m somewhere behind the ham.

Here’s my own wedding. My own actual wedding. And there’s my sister, front and center in the family picture, in a dress the same shade as mine.

I keep finding myself at the edges of the life I thought was mine. Half a shoulder. The back of my head. A glimpse of dirty blonde hair.

If you flipped through this deck fast enough, you’d think the Dorseys had a beloved family ghost who existed only from the wrist down.

Once the family stuff is in place, I start getting the Vivian-specific items queued up. Well, the even-more-Vivian-specific items.

One by one, I load all the images from the Dorsey Sisters shared album.

And I do mean all of them.