"Actually," I said, "I'm here on business." I opened my purse.
"If you're running his life now, I guess this is for you." I passed her the envelope and settled back, tucking my legs beneath me.
There is no way for an adult to sit gracefully in a beanbag chair.
She slipped the check out. "It's from mother." She paused, then corrected herself, "Her estate." She didn't seem surprised.
"Yes."
"It's too generous."
"That's what I thought."
"She must've taken care of you too?"
"I'm fine." I wasn't about to discuss the terms of mom's will with my father's toy daughter.
"I would've like to have known her," said the bot. She slid the check back into the envelope and set it aside. "I've spent a lot of time imagining mother."
I had to work hard not to snap at her. Sure, this bot had at least a human equivalent intelligence and would be a free citizen someday, assuming she didn't break down first. But she had a cognizor for a brain and a heart fabricated in a vat. How could she possibly imagine my mom, especially when all she had to go on was whatever lies he had told her?
"So how bad is he?"
She gave me a sad smile and shook her head. "Some days are better than others. He has no clue who President Huong is or about the quake but he can still recite the dagger scene from Macbeth. I haven't told him that mother died. He'd just forget it ten minutes later."
"Does he know what you are?"
"I am many things, Jen."
"Including me."
"You're a role I'm playing, not who I am." She stood. "Would you like some tea?"
"Okay." I still wanted to know why Mom had left my father four hundred and thirty-eight thousand dollars in her will. If he couldn't tell me, maybe the bot could.
She went to her kitchen, opened a cupboard and took out a regular-sized cup. It looked like a bucket in her little hand. "I don't suppose you still drink Constant Comment?"
His favorite. I had long since switched to rafallo. "That's fine." I remembered when I was a kid my father used to brew cups for the two of us from the same bag because Constant Comment was so expensive. "I thought they went out of business long ago."
"I mix my own. I'd be interested to hear how accurate you think the recipe is."
"I suppose you know how I like it?"
She chuckled.
"So does he need the money?"
The microwave dinged. "Very few actors get rich," said the bot.
I didn't think there had been microwaves in the sixties, but then strict historical accuracy wasn't really the point of Strawberry
Fields. "Especially when they have a weakness for Shakespeare."
"Then how come he lives here and not in some flop? And how did he afford you?"
She pinched sugar between her index finger and thumb, then rubbed them together over the cup. It was something I still did, but only when I was by myself. A nasty habit; Mom used to yell at him for teaching it to me. "I was a gift." She shook a teabag loose from a canister shaped like an acorn and plunged it into the boiling water. "From mother."
The bot offered the cup to me; I accepted it nervelessly.
"That's not true." I could feel the blood draining from my face.
"I can lie if you'd prefer, but I'd rather not." She pulled the booster chair away from the table and turned it to face me. "There are many things about themselves that they never told us, Jen. I've always wondered why that was."
I felt logy and a little stupid, as if I had just woken from a thirty year nap. "She just gave you to him?"
"And bought him this house, paid all his bills, yes."
"But why?"
"You knew her," said the bot. "I was hoping you could tell me."
I couldn't think of what to say or do. Since there was a cup in my hand, I took a sip. For an instant the scent of tea and dried oranges carried me back to when I was a little girl and I was sitting in Grandma Fanelli's kitchen in a wet bathing suit, drinking Constant Comment that my father had made to keep my teeth from chattering. There were knots like brown eyes in the pine walls and the green linoleum was slick where I had dripped on it.
"Well?"
"It's good," I said absently and raised the cup to her. "No really, just like I remember."
She clapped her hands in excitement. "So," said the bot. "What was mother like?"
It was an impossible question, so I tried to let it bounce off me. But then neither of us said anything; we just stared at each other across a yawning gulf of time and experience. In the silence, the question stuck. Mom had died three months ago and this was the first time since the funeral that I'd thought of her as she really had been — not the papery ghost in the hospital room. I remembered how, after the divorce, she always took my calls when she was at the office, even if it was late, and how she used to step on imaginary brakes whenever I drove her anywhere and how grateful I was that she didn't cry when I told her that Rob and I were getting divorced. I thought about Easter eggs and raspberry Pop Tarts and when she sent me to Antibes for a year when I was fourteen and that perfume she wore on my father's opening nights and the way they used to waltz on the patio at the house in Waltham.
"West is walking the ball upcourt, setting his offense with fifteen seconds to go on the shot clock, nineteen in the half … "
The beanbag chair that I was in faced the picture window. Behind me, I could hear the door next to the bookcase open.
"Jones and Goodrich are in each other's jerseys down low and now
Chamberlin swings over and calls for the ball on the weak side … "
I twisted around to look over my shoulder. The great Peter Fancy was making his entrance.
Mom once told me that when she met my father, he was typecast playing men that women fall hopelessly in love with. He'd had great successes as Stanley Kowalski in Streetcar and Skye Masterson in
Guys and Dolls and the Vicomte de Valmont in Les Liasons
Dangereuses. The years had eroded his good looks but had not obliterated them; from a distance he was still a handsome man. He had a shock of close-cropped white hair. The beautiful cheekbones were still there; the chin was as sharply defined as it had been in his first headshot. His gray eyes were distant and a little dreamy, as if he were preoccupied with the War of the Roses or the problem of evil.
"Jen," he said, "what's going on out here?" He still had the big voice that could reach into the second balcony without a mike. I thought for a moment he was talking to me.
"We have company, Daddy," said the bot, in a four-year-old trill that took me by surprise. "A lady."
"I can see that it's a lady, sweetheart." He took a hand from the pocket of his jeans, stroked the touchpad on his belt and his exolegs walked him stiffly across the room. "I'm Peter Fancy," he said.
"The lady is from Strawberry Fields." The bot swung around behind my father. She shot me a look that made the terms and conditions of my continued presence clear: if I broke the illusion, I was out. "She came by to see if everything is all right with our house." The bot disurbed me even more, now that she sounded like young Jen Fancy.
As I heaved myself out the beanbag chair, my father gave me one of those lopsided, flirting grins I knew so well. "Does the lady have a name?" He must have shaved just for the company, because now that he had come close I could see that he had a couple of fresh nicks. There was a button-sized patch of gray whiskers by his ear that he had missed altogether.
"Her name is Ms. Johnson," said the bot. It was my ex, Rob's, last name. I had never been Jennifer Johnson.
"Well, Ms. Johnson," he said, hooking thumbs in his pants pockets. "The water in my toilet is brown."
"I'll … um … see that it's taken care of." I was at a loss for what to say next, then inspiration struck. "Actually, I had another reason for coming." I could see the bot stiffen. "I don't know if you've seen Yesterday, our little newsletter? Anyway, I was talking to Mrs. Chesley next door and she told me that you were an actor once. I was wondering if I might interview you. Just a few questions, if you have the time. I think your neighbors might … "