Au Revoir, Crazy European Chick by Joe Schreiber Read Free Book Online

both hands on the wheel, cutting off the cab behind me on my way left. "Hello?"
    "Perry?"
    "Dad?"
    "I hear car horns. Where are you?"
    "We, ah..." I threw a frantic look at Gobi. She shook her head, which could have meant anything, but which I interpreted as Improvise, stupid. "We had to leave the prom. Some stuff happened."
    "Some stuff? What are you talking about?"
    "We're sort of in the city."
    "What city? You're in New York? " His voice sharpened, becoming more angular with every syllable. "May I remind you that you're driving the Jaguar, Perry."
    "Dad, I know ... Look—Gobi asked me to take her to the city, and, uh—"
    "I don't care if the ghost of Frank Sinatra extended you a personal invitation to Carnegie Hall," Dad said. "I want to know what you're doing, driving my car into New York without conferring with your mother and me?" The anger in his voice was a controlled burn. "Now I want you to listen to me very carefully. As quickly and as safely as possible, I want you to turn around and come home, right now, where we can discuss the consequences of your rash decision. Do you understand me? Perry?"
    The light changed and I took a left onto Fourteenth Street. Before I could answer, Gobi took the phone away and brought it to her own ear. She was still on speaker.
    "Hello? Mr. Stormaire? This is Gobija."
    "Gobi, put Perry back on the phone, please. This is a private matter."
    "Mr. Stormaire, you must understand something. Your son is a good boy. All his life, he has dedicated himself to making you proud of him." She gestured up ahead where Fourteenth fed back into Broadway, continuing downtown. "Tonight I asked him to show me the city one last time before I flew home."
    "Gobi, no offense, but this doesn't involve you in the least." I could hear his temper slipping a notch and felt the tightening in my sphincter that always preceded the instinct to do whatever he said. "Now put my son back on the phone."
    She actually seemed to think about it. "No."
    " No? "
    "Not until you apologize for the way you have treated him."
    There was a second of silence, and my dad said, "Come again?"
    "For nine months I see things in your home, Mr. Stormaire, and I watch how you treat your son. I see that you want the best for him, but you have crushed his spirit with your expectations, and you have discouraged him with your restrictions. Family is important, but it is not immune to the indifference of a cold-hearted parent."
    "I see," my dad said. "And you're an expert on this, are you, Gobi? On my family?"
    "I know that the man who does not put his family first places his own soul at peril. I have been watching and listening. And while that may not make me an expert, I would say that I know what I am speaking of." She shifted her weight around in the seat, and I saw her face, the way she was focused intently on the phone. "There is a proverb in my country, Mr. Stormaire: The faithless husband poisons his family at the roots. "
    "The faithless..." My dad stopped. "Wait a second. What are you talking about?"
    "I believe we understand each other. I hardly think we need to go into the specifics of your ongoing relationship with Madelyn Kelso, do we?"
    It was quiet for a long time.
    "Excuse me?" Dad said. "Did you say Madelyn Kelso?"
    "You heard me."
    "Now you listen here. I don't know what you're referring to, or what you think you know—"
    "I am referring to the events of April sixteenth," Gobi said without so much as a pause for a breath. "And your business trip to San Diego on the twenty-eighth, as well as your weekend at the Hotel Monaco with Ms. Kelso in Chicago on May third. Would you like me to continue?"
    "How do you know about that?"
    "May I inform you that you are on speakerphone, Mr. Stormaire."
    Dad didn't say anything for a long time. When he finally did, his voice sounded completely different, unfamiliar from any type of fatherly intonation I'd ever heard before. It sounded gut-punched, out of breath. "Perry?"
    "Perry will be