Reading

Steven observes his daughter Nicole reading a book on the couch, reflecting on the distance he feels between them, caused by the divorce and his remarriage.

It was three-thirty on a Thursday afternoon, his wife was home early from work, his main characters refused to obey any of the plot elements that he had spent hours devising, and Steven would be damned if he wasn't entitled to an early glass of Scotch.

He walked into his den and bent at the cabinet to pull out one of his tall glasses. A rustle to his left, out of sight, startled him, and the glass slipped from his hand. "Damn it!" he muttered, diving for the glass. It landed firmly in his grasp, mere inches from the ceramic tile that would have caused it to shatter into a thousand irreparable pieces.

 

Steven fixed an irritable glare at his sofa as he straightened and reached for the Scotch. It wasn't the sofa itself that irritated him, but the fact that a certain long-legged, blonde fifteen-year-old was curled up at one end, completely engrossed in some book he was sure was yet another of her trashy teenage romances. He was also certain that this particular fifteen-year-old was not so engrossed in her book that she hadn't realized his presence in the room. She was ignoring him.

 

"Nicole," he said firmly.

 

With a resigned sigh (of epic proportions), the girl doggy-eared her page, snapped the book shut and looked up, her eyes bright with as much irritation as Steven felt and, he thought, something more.

 

"What have I told you about my study?"

 

Nicole's lips pressed together tightly for a moment and then relaxed, and she replied calmly, "Since when was this a study? You don't do anything in here except drink and get cozy with Rara."

 

Steven felt very tired all of a sudden. "Don't be pert with me, Nicky. You know I don't want you using my study as your personal hangout. It's my thinkspace. I don't like it disturbed."

 

She snorted. "Thinkspace. Right." She opened her book, resolutely unfolded the top corner of the page, and fixed her eyes on some spot near the spine. Steven knew that this was just for show. While her face had an impressive expression of focus, her eyes didn't move.

 

How does Isabel put up with this? Steven wondered, feeling defeated as he slumped down into his armchair with his Scotch. He would be the first to admit that he never truly understood women - which was why he often avoided writing them as characters at all cost - and now it seemed he understood teenaged girls even less. How was it possible for Nicole to sit in such a seemingly relaxed position and yet exude sheer tension? She looked stiff, reluctant, and completely unapproachable. The fingers that gripped the edges of the book cover were white and cold and her mouth was set in a grim line. Her eyes still didn’t move from their single focus point on the page. Had it not been for the slight rising and falling of her chest as she breathed, she could have been in a photograph, unchanging and frozen in time.

 

However, as Steven sipped his drink and watched her, Nicole seemed to realize that the battle had been short-lived and that her father wasn't in the mood for a second round, and the tensions eased out of her posture. Her shoulders rounded, her head bent, and her eyes slowly scanned the page of her book, no longer pretending for the sake of some point only comprehended by other teenaged girls. Steven had the curious sensation of having turned invisible: Nicole made no indication that she even remembered that he was there. He felt as though he should make conversation - say something, anything - but he couldn't think of a single word.

 

There had been a time, he mused, taking another sip of Scotch, when he wouldn't have had to say anything. Nicole would have been happy to natter on about school, girlfriends, boyfriends, her sister, her mother, and why couldn't they have a dog? There had been a time when Steven would have been able to natter right back, to the point that Isabel would have had to lean into the living room or the bedroom or the den and tell them to break up the party because supper was ready. There had been a time when their lives had been so closely intertwined that sometimes they didn't have to talk at all, and the silence would have been comfortable.

 

But that time had ended over a year ago. That had been a time when Isabel was still Mrs. Walton; before she changed her name back to Ms. Isabel Morro. Back when Steven had lived in a comfortably small house on the other side of town, before his darling, talkative Nicky had matured into the stubbornly silent Nicole now curled up from him on his couch in his large townhouse where he lived with Barbara, the new Mrs. Walton.

 

Barbara, who he could hear down the hall doing God-knew-what, formerly Barbara Sheen, who had taken over his life by force. They had met at a writers' convention and, as Barb liked to say, ''the rest was history.'' He was remarried eight months after his divorce.

 

Nicole had never offered an opinion on Barbara, nor on his relationship with and subsequent marriage to her. She treated Barbara with all the cordialitythat Steven and Isabel had raised her with... and nothing more. But sometimes she slipped up in her façade of indifference. The amount of scorn she sometimes mustered when saying Barbara's name, or the brief flash of distaste he sometimes spotted when he held Barbara's hand. These things revealed her true feelings. Steven may not have had the most intuitive sense of the female brain, but this was one case in which he was absolutely sure.

 

She hated Barbara, and she hated the fact that her father was married to her. She hated the new house and dreaded the weekends she spent there. She probably begged her mother not to make her go. She felt estranged from Steven, with this new life he had created with Barbara. A life she wasn't sure she was apart of anymore. She didn't understand why his marriage to Isabel had fallen apart and why they couldn't patch it back up.

 

Sometimes, Steven didn't understand it either.

Author's Note

I actually really, really love this chapter, and I really, really love Steven, too. He's such an awkward soul.

Reviews

[Jean]

Never failing to disappoint. :]
Again, flawless characters. You went perfectly from the 13 year old stage to the 15. Not many people can capture that quite as well as you did.
Great closing. Makes the reader just itch for more.
Haven't met Barbara yet, but I'm sure she'll get explained.
This book seems to portray a strong aura of change, and you describe it wonderfully.
Maybe next time you could actually give me something to critique you on, geez. :P
But anyways.
Keep going! :D