Free Days Like This by Laurie Breton Page B

Cheerios, rinsed the bowl and spoon when she was done and left
them in the sink.  Somebody in this house, probably Casey, was a serious neat
freak.  Wasn’t it usually the woman who kept the house in order?  Not that she
actually knew.  The closest she’d ever come to a normal household, with a
mother and a father, was all those TV sitcoms she’d grown up watching.
    Paige glanced around the
kitchen.  Her Walkman had died yesterday.  Somewhere in this house, there had
to be a package of batteries.  They’d most likely be found in the junk drawer,
and even rich people had junk drawers.  Although this didn’t look like a rich
person’s house, she knew he—her father—was worth beaucoup bucks.  His
wife was probably even richer; Danny Fiore had been a huge star, and when he
died, all that money must have gone to his widow.  Why had they buried
themselves in this half-assed town, when they could have lived in Paris or London
or frigging Hollywood?  There were cows— cows, for Chrissake! —just up the
road.  The road itself wasn’t even paved.  Who in their right mind would choose
to live in a place like this?
    She began opening drawers in
search of the holy grail.  After several false starts, she found what she was
looking for.  The drawer held an assortment of mismatched screwdrivers, a
pencil with a broken lead, a random selection of screws and nails and cup hooks,
a piece of sandpaper, slightly used, and beneath that, voilà!   An
unopened 4-pack of AA batteries.  She popped it open, dropped a couple into her
palm, and returned the pack to the drawer.
    With her Walkman revived, Paige took
a long, hot shower, dressed in cut-off jeans and a Metallica tee shirt, and stepped
outside to see just what she’d gotten herself into.  She was immediately struck
by the quiet; it was a little creepy, the complete absence of car horns or sirens. 
Instead, there was the buzzing of insects and the annoying chirping of birds.
    The grass was soft and springy
against the soles of her feet.  She circled the house, moving toward the only
other human who seemed to exist in this rural hell.  Casey was on her knees in
the garden, methodically murdering weeds and tossing them aside. The resulting
pile of dead soldiers reminded Paige of a photo her eighth-grade history
teacher had shown the class of one of the death chambers at Auschwitz, limp bodies
stacked like firewood.  Her father’s wife was wearing some kind of lame-ass
wide-brimmed straw hat.  Its pink cotton print straps, designed to tie under
the chin, instead fluttered loose around her face.
    The two of them—her father and
his wife—had hovered over her last night like a pair of fussy old hens, pouring
on the niceness and the bogus concern until Paige was ready to scream.  Did
they really think they were going to win her over with pizza and fake smiles?  He
had made a huge deal out of helping her set up her stereo (as if she didn’t
know how to do it herself!), even going so far as to unearth a dusty set of
speakers that were twice the size of hers and could really bark.
    She’d offered him a stilted
thank-you.  She didn’t even know what to call him.  Dad?   Not in this
lifetime.  Father?   Too snobby-rich-socialite.  Rob?   That seemed
far too friendly.  Mr. MacKenzie?   Utterly preposterous.  She’d finally
settled on the generic pronoun:  Him.  He.  You.   It seemed the most
appropriate choice.  Just because they shared DNA and a last name didn’t mean
he could waltz into her life and take it over, as if the first fifteen years
hadn’t meant a thing.  He was not her dad, and would never be; she’d gotten
along quite nicely for fifteen years without a father.  Rob MacKenzie was
nothing more than some random stranger who had once known her mother, and who
looked a little—okay, if she wanted to be honest, a lot—like Paige herself.  A
sperm donor.  They did not have any kind of father/daughter relationship, and
she intended