Tides of the Heart Read Free Page B

charge.
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    She supposed she’d have to keep Consuelo on even though they’d never gotten along, even though the housekeeper/cook/laundress had never really liked Ginny, only tolerated her on account of Jake—the man she’d lie down and die for because if it weren’t for him she’d never have her green card. Jake had un-alienated her in a world of illegals; he had made her someone, a Californian, an
American.
And aside from the fact it had most likely been Consuelo’s cooking—her overindulgence of Jake by way of breakfast steaks and fried eggs—that had logjammed his arteries and crushed the life from his heart, the woman was probably entitled to some payback for her loyalty.
    Shit
, Ginny thought, surveying the heaping platters of postfuneral noshes spread out for the guests like barley for geese, she might as well keep her because she couldn’t stand her own cooking and she’d never lifted a dust rag in her life. Besides, Jake would probably have wanted it that way. Consuelo, after all, had no one else: her revered Jake, his two totally fucked-up adult children, his unfortunate choice of a second wife, and the wife’s illegitimate daughter had become the woman’s family, like it or not.
    Ginny plucked a stuffed artichoke leaf and wondered why those who serve ultimately are transformed into those who need to be served. It had been the same way with her mother: the woman who had once nurtured her little girl had ended up needing that same little girl to work her ass off to keep them in frozen dinners and booze, to keep bringing home tissues into which her mother hacked God-only-knew-what, until there was no more air left to come out of her lungs, until her liver was swollen beyond repair, until she was dead. Like Jake was now.
    “Ginny,” Lisa said, guiding a bald, bulky man toward her, “I’d like you to meet Harry Lyons, my director. Harry, this is my mother, Ginny Edwards.” Ginny frowned at the daughter who oddly resembled Ginny’s mother more thanherself, then moved her gaze to Harry Lyons, the man who took credit for making Lisa a star. Ginny knew it had really only happened because of Jake. Jake, who had tirelessly bled his Hollywood connections until Lisa had screen tests secured from one end of town to the other. Jake had done it for Lisa, and he’d done it for Ginny, so she could be near the daughter she’d only just met.
    But that had been almost five years ago, and it was Harry Lyons—a fat man with big teeth and jello-like jowls—who stood in front of her now, who had taken the credit for Lisa’s fast rise to fame.
    “Mrs. Edwards,” the somber-face said perfunctorily, “I am so pleased to meet you. And I am so sorry about your husband.”
    Sucking the stuffing off the artichoke leaf, Ginny wondered why he cared. “Thank you,” she said between the cream cheese and rosemary. “I’m sorry about him, too.”
    He cleared his fleshy throat and eyed the hors d’oeuvres. “Lisa tells me you were an actor, too. You must have trained your daughter well. Or you must have fantastically creative genes.”
    It came as no surprise that Harry Lyons was more interested in talking about Lisa—his abundant meal ticket—than in trading musings about dead Jake. But Ginny was too weary to explain that she’d never even laid eyes on Lisa until a few years ago. That she’d never planned to, that she’d never wanted to. “She’s my daughter, all right,” Ginny replied as expected, though a small part of her would have loved to watch his porky face fall if she told him that Lisa’s “fantastically creative genes” were the product of Ginny’s rape by her stepfather with a bit of her alcoholic mother thrown in for good measure. But that was cocktail party talk, and this was not a cocktail party. Not that any of the food-grabbing, drink-guzzling guests seemed to realize it.
    “Lisa,” Ginny asked as she bypassed the artichokes andscooped up a pair of cheesy, gooey quiches,