Chapter 22
Without Bill Diamond or Taylor in it, Sake’s world narrowed down to only two things: working and studying.
Yet despite her best efforts, Bill was rarely out of her thoughts. It was all she could do not to pick up his calls. But judging by the casual tone of his texts saying lame things like, how are you? and keep in touch, nothing had changed.
She worried about Bill and wondered how he was recuperating, but between his parents and Dr. Deb, he had all the help he needed. She could only hope that if Taylor miraculously returned to his apartment, he’d have enough decency to spell that out in no uncertain terms.
“I’ve been thinking,” commented Jeanne during one of their light suppers in the kitchen. Papa was gone somewhere, Char and Meri were working late, and Savvy was still on her honeymoon. “Sauvignon will soon be back. Wouldn’t it be a good idea if her sisters planned a shower for her baby?”
“A baby shower? Savvy just got married. What makes you think she’s pregnant?”
“But everyone knows that she was already two or three months along on the day of her wedding.”
Sake couldn’t believe it. First Meri wasn’t perfect, and now Savvy wasn’t either?
“I’m somebody, and I didn’t know.”
“Pardon me.” Beneath an arched brow, Jeanne’s eyes danced playfully. “You most definitely are somebody.”
Since they’d been thrust together with only each other for company most of this summer, Jeanne had thawed toward her a bit. They’d even found a certain respect for each other.
“Now that you know you have a little niece or nephew on the way, don’t you agree that a baby shower would be a lovely gesture for you three to make toward your oldest sister?”
“Um, sure.” Around here, Jeanne’s word was gospel. Even Papa deferred to her, weirdly enough. The longer she was here, the more Sake realized she had to learn about her family. “But do you really think Savvy would want me involved? And what about Meri and Char? Maybe they’d rather plan this fête without me.”
Jeanne laid her hand atop Sake’s. “Au contraire, ma chérie.”
Sake looked up from her salad. Jeanne had never called her “dear” before.
“What better way to get to know one another than planning a party?”
With Jeanne vouching for her, maybe her sisters would be more receptive to including the outcast.
The next day was Saturday, Meri and Char’s day off. Following Sake’s shift at Mon Rêve, Jeanne met her inside the front door.
“We’re out by the pool. Join us after you change out of your uniform.”
When she got to her room, Sake found a garment bag draped across her bed with a handwritten note.
***
The dress was black-and-white polka dotted with a short, swingy skirt, just the style she liked. She gulped when she saw the price tag.
Before she could change her mind, she slipped the soft fabric over her head and went down to join the others, hoping her nervousness didn’t show.
“Wine?” Char asked, holding the bottle of St. Pierre poised over the glass at Sake’s place setting.
Should she? That wasn’t just a bottle of wine. It was a powerful symbol. Sharing the product of their own father’s blood, sweat, and tears might help them to bond. She was already an outsider, and to turn it down might send the wrong message. But in her experience, the stuff inside that bottle tended to tear people apart, not tie them together.
“I’ll stick with iced tea.”
Char didn’t even blink before passing the bottle over Sake’s glass to Jeanne’s. “Love those kitten-eared sunglasses. Where’d you get them?”
“A little vintage place in The Haight.”
“I’ll bet you know lots of good places to shop in the city.” Char glanced at the others. “Sake should take us on a tour sometime. Wouldn’t that be fun?”
“Awesome,” said Meri. “I’m in the city all the time, but I didn’t grow up there like you did, Sake. It would be great to see the city through the eyes of a home girl.”
“Any time.” Sake imagined the stares her sisters would get if they showed up in some of the holes-in-the-wall Sake frequented.
“Salut,” said Jeanne when everyone had a drink.
“To sisters,” added Char.
Sake had been living at Papa’s for several weeks, but she still hadn’t spent much time in the presence of both Meri and Char. Now, it felt to her as if she’d only just arrived. She sat quietly in her elegant surroundings—the outdoor living room, complete with rug, the fresh fruit heaped on the table between them—and drank in her sisters’ every detail . . . the way they held their wineglasses, the soft, low registers of their eastern accents, their choices of words.
Meanwhile, Jeanne, in turn, watched Sake, noting her every reaction. That’s when the real reason for the new dress hit her: it was a booster for her self-image. Jeanne wanted Sake to feel good, sitting next to these two glamazons. Sake sent Jeanne a smile of pure gratitude.
The shower business came first. Chardonnay volunteered to be in charge of the guest list, Merlot the décor, and Jeanne the catering.
Thanks to Jeanne’s gift, Sake found the courage to raise her hand. “I can make cupcakes.”
Once all that had been decided, Char asked Meri how her new line of jewelry was selling. Then Char talked about Juan and Amelia, her favorite kids down at her foundation.
“Sake is making progress toward her goals, too,” said Jeanne.
Meri and Char turned to Sake with what appeared to be genuine interest.
“Tell them what you’ve been doing, Sake.”
What was she supposed to say? She gulped. She couldn’t make them understand what a monumental leap up her job at Mon Rêve was without going into some background. But how could she tell them that while they’d been at the best prep academies money could buy, she’d been washing dishes after school at Balboa High?
She began on a deep inhale. “Growing up, it was just Haha and me. My mother is kind of—eccentric? But back then, I didn’t know any different. Where I come from, everybody’s a little eccentric.”
While Char smiled politely, Meri, who was younger and a skosh less proper, asked, “Haha?”
Sake had forgotten. “Like ‘Mama.’ It’s what I’ve always called my mom.”
“Oh.” Her sisters nodded in unison.
They thought they understood, but they didn’t. Not really. San Francisco celebrated eccentricity, but Haha was edgy, even by her city’s standards.
“Sometimes Haha would go off on her own for a while, to do whatever it was that she did. When I was real little, she always dropped me off at someone’s house to make sure I was taken care of, but when I got older and balked at staying with strangers, she would let me stay on my own. Well, not totally alone. She gave me a dagger that had belonged to her father and told me to keep it under my pillow, to use for protection.”
Meri inhaled sharply.
Char’s fingertips flew to cover her mouth.
“Mon Dieu,” breathed Jeanne, hastily making the sign of the cross.
“I never meant to leave school. Just sort of drifted away after I turned sixteen, the winter that Haha went AWOL for so long. After a couple of months, the landlord ran out of patience. I found another place to stay, but it was outside my school district, and I didn’t have enough money for even the student rates for MUNI or BART. I probably should’ve started at yet another new school, but just showing up at some principal’s office by myself would’ve got Haha in trouble. That’s when I started working more hours in restaurants.”
Jeanne downed half a glass of wine in one gulp.
Like an automaton, never taking her eyes off Sake, Char refilled it.
“One day, the place where I was serving was short-handed, and they asked me to help out in the back of the house. The head pastry maker was no prince, but I totally ‘got’ baking. I loved the warmth of the ovens, that yeasty smell. The way pastry always comes out right if you follow the recipe . . .”
“Is that where Papa found you?” Meri whispered.
“Not exactly.” Her sisters’ faces looked like they’d just seen a horror movie. “It gets worse?” asked Char.
She wasn’t about to describe the night before Savvy’s wedding, when Papa had stormed into the jail with his lawyer and demanded that Sake be released or he’d sue the city.
She laughed wryly. “Let’s just say, the place I was staying when he found me didn’t look nothing like this.” She gestured toward the water of the pool, twinkling aquamarine and white in the blinding August sun.
Char took a deep breath and said, “Savvy should probably be here for this conversation, but I can’t not bring it up. It’s been brushed under the rug for far too long.”
In anticipation of what Char was about to say, Jeanne sat perfectly still, while Meri bit her upper lip.
“How long have you known about . . . us?”
Sake took off her sunglasses and laid them on the table. “I was probably, oh thirteen or fourteen. We were taking computer classes at school. Haha was staying away longer and longer. I missed her.” She looked at the others. “I was in middle school, and I was practically raising myself. Maybe if she’d told me where she was going . . .” She shook her head. Too late to think about that now. “Finally, I had this great idea. If I couldn’t find Haha, maybe I could find Papa, somewhere on the Internet.”
Sake stared at the glittering pool, mesmerized, recalling the image on the screen burned into in her mind’s eye. “That day, I saw a photo of him with his arms around three girls about my age, standing in front of this very pool. The caption said they were the St. Pierre family.”
Char closed her eyes. Meri’s hand went to her forehead.
“But Xavier visited you after that,” said Jeanne. “You didn’t bring up the picture?”
“And say what? ‘Hey, Dad, how come you keep me separate from your other kids?’ I had eyes. I could see that I didn’t belong. If I did, he’d have brought it up long before then.”
Char put her hand on Sake’s arm. “We never knew,” she said, shaking her head slowly, gazing earnestly into her eyes.
Sake’s lips twitched with an attempt at a smile, but just ended up trembling instead.
“No,” agreed Meri. “He only told us when Savvy got pregnant and decided to get married. He said he’d always planned for us girls to meet when the first of us got married, but he’d lost track of you. He had a team of lawyers looking for you. We assumed that’s why you were here now—because they’d found you.”
“Hmph. Something like that.” Sake did smile then, a smile filled with irony. Before asking the next thing she needed to know, she looked down, to gather hope and strength. “So you aren’t mad at me?” she ventured, gazing from one sister to the other.
Char and Meri looked at each other in wonderment. “Mad?” asked Char.
“Why should we be mad?” Meri chimed in.
“Uh, isn’t it obvious? Your father had an affair with my mother!”
“Among others,” said Char, with a raised eyebrow.
Sake almost bored a hole through her. There’d been others?
“Ask Jeanne. She’s been here in this house practically the whole time our parents lived here.”
From the time Char had started down this road, Jeanne had sat mute and motionless save for her eyes, which flickered like bluebirds between the three siblings, assessing their reactions. Now, even at Char’s invitation, she still kept her counsel.
“Besides,” added Meri, “that was a long time ago. Our mother’s been gone for over a decade.”
Sake’s voice went down an octave. “I did know that.” Again, thanks to the Web.
Char said, “I can’t believe you thought we were mad. You’ve been living here for over a month.”
“What about Savvy? I barely said two words to her before she left for her honeymoon.”
“Nobody’s mad at you. Trust me.”
Sake felt as though a weight she’d been carrying for years had just been lifted off of her. Still inferior, but no longer wary of simply crossing paths with her sisters in the hallway for fear of feeling their resentment.
“And now you are at Mon Rêve,” Jeanne finally spoke up.
“Now I’m at Mon Rêve, which is just like it sounds—a dream—even though all I’m qualified to do there is wait on customers. And studying online for my GED.”
“Wow,” said Meri. “You are amazing, to have survived all of that.”
“It wasn’t as awful as it sounds,” Sake said, dialing back. The reluctance to paint an ugly picture of Haha was hardwired.
Above all, she didn’t want their pity. Sake didn’t do pity.
“If you don’t mind my asking, where is Haha now?” asked Jeanne.
Sake shrugged. “I haven’t seen her in almost a year. But my birthday’s coming soon. I’m hoping she’ll resurface for that, if not before.”
Char said, “Well, I think it’s great that you’re getting your diploma.”
“What else do you have to do to get into the CIA?”
“Six months’ experience in non-fast food service, which I already have—assuming I can get my old boss to vouch for it—and a letter of recommendation.”
“You could ask Mr. Volant for a recommendation,” said Meri. “But what about your old boss? The one you said was ‘no prince’?”
Char turned to Meri. “The financial records from her previous place of employment would prove that she’d worked there. Wage slips, taxes . . .”
Sake shook her head. “Teeny wasn’t heavy into record-keeping. He paid us in cash.”
“Once you’re at Mon Rêve for six months, you won’t need your old employer to vouch for you,” said Jeanne.
“Whoa.” Sake’s palms went up in self-defense. Six months? She’d gradually been giving more thought to the CIA. But all this talk made the prospect seem frighteningly real. “One step at a time.”
What if she failed?