Chapter 2: Helena

Helena was tired of waiting. It seemed to her like she had been sitting, or more accurately slumping, in one of the stiff leather chairs in the waiting room of her father’s office for hours, but when she checked her phone for the umpteenth time, she realized it had only been fifteen minutes.

“You’re kidding me,” she muttered under her breath but audibly.

Her father’s secretary, Genevive , looked up from her computer. “What’s the matter?”

“Nothing, I guess,” Helena answered with a defeated sounding sigh. “Just that I’ve been sitting here forever. I’ve never been so bored in all my life.”

“My god, I didn’t know people of legal drinking age could sound like whiny teenagers.” Genevive didn’t even glance in her direction as she flung each barb. In fact, she never looked up from her work. “If this is how badly you revert waiting for your father in his office, you’re probably in diapers at home.”

“Don’t start with me, Genevive . I’m not in the mood.”

“Poor baby,” Genevive replied.

“It wouldn’t be so bad if my dad would actually get some comfortable chairs for this damn waiting room.”

Helena shifted her weight, crossing one leg over the other and settling on the outer flank of her thigh. Her father liked having stiff chairs; he told her it sent an important message to anyone preparing to have a meeting with him: he didn’t care about their comfort. Helena, having put up with the man for nearly twenty-six years, had long since understood that everyone’s comfort was second to her father’s. To be fair to him though, she never saw him as someone who was very comfortable.

She knew he wouldn’t admit it, but Helena suspected her father kept everyone tense and on edge because that’s how he always seemed. Even the way he sat made her think he couldn’t tell that his chairs were uncomfortable; relaxing into a soft, comfy pillow of furniture wasn’t a possibility. He’d prop an elbow on the table or desk in front of him and sit too far forward as if he was always in the process of standing up. Helena was more inclined to sink as far into a chair as she could, her long legs fully extended in front of her no matter if they were in the way.

“Do you need water or something?” Genevive asked as Helena scrolled through Instagram without double tapping on anything, even the photos she actually liked. “Ya want a coffee?”

“A latte would be amazing right now.”

Genevive managed a bitter grin that slashed across her face and faded just as quickly. “I said coffee, Helena. You’re not the one paying me. I’m not running to Starbucks for you.”

“I wouldn’t drink that shit anyway,” Helena answered, lurching herself upright and shaking her shoulders to knock her long blond hair down her back.

Genevive ’s angular face twitched, her tightly stretched mouth curving upward in a spasmodic jump. “Well good because I’m not going.”

From the bowels of the front office came the scratching carpet of a door being opened. Two male voices spoke in rapid successions before they were interrupted by a booming cough. A long, pregnant slab of silence hung in the air, then the voices started up again. Helena sighed but straightened her skirt and shirt that had gotten twisted as she sank into the chair. Her father was pushing people out of his office; this was not a new pattern to her.

Two men passed Genevive ’s desk, speaking to each other as quickly and quietly as they could. One of them gave Helena more than a passing glance. It was her legs that got the most attention or at least what got the first attention. She thought they were pretty nice legs, but she suspected people saw them because of how she sat. Helena was not interested in sitting prettily.

“You’ll consider it then, Tom,” the guy who stared at Helena’s legs said. He stopped the other guy by the door and spun on his heels to face someone who wasn’t there. “Tom?”

“Yeah, yeah, I’ll consider it but only if you don’t bring it up anymore,” came her father’s voice from nowhere.

Helena craned her neck looking for him, but he was still out of sight in the depths of the office building. The two men at the door exchanged looks while Genevive gave them the same bitter smile she gave Helena and waved goodbye with a flap of her fingers into her palm.

“What is this?” one of them asked. “Is he blowing us off?”

“He said he’ll consider it. Don’t push your luck.”

Reluctantly opening the door, the two men left. Helena felt the one’s eyes roll up her legs again. This time she wished her father had been in the room to see it. From the time she turned fifteen, her father’s business partners had let their eyes linger considerably longer than they should. Some of them had taken a sharp knock on the side of the face if they were way too obvious about it. Like most things in her life, Helena was not sure if she loved this dynamic because she was supposed to or because it made her feel genuinely loved in a way that little else did.

“Genevive , are they gone?”

“They’re gone, boss.”

Helena’s father barreled out of his office and into the waiting room. There were certainly men physically bigger than him; men with deeper voices and more cro magnon brows. What Tom had was presence, and he swelled the air just by crossing a threshold. Helena secretly hoped that she had inherited his intangible yet undeniable ability to command attention rather than her mother’s slick-moving, demurely smirking energy. People never knew what to make of Helena’s mother, convinced she was making fun of them in sharp tongued flirtation. Considering she was married to Tom, and he wasn’t a man many wanted to cross, her behavior held everyone in prickly suspense.

“What’re you doing here?” Tom jabbed a finger in Helena’s direction. “I thought I was meeting you in the city.”

“I got up too late today to get anything done in the city,” she replied with a rapid batting of her eyelashes.

Tom exhaled, speaking in annoyance from the depths of his throat. “I doubt you had anything important to do anyway.”

Despite being used to him talking like that, the remark stung a bit. The problem was she couldn’t deny he was right about it. Her plans had consisted of returning a makeup palette she suddenly decided she didn’t like, and maybe doing some light shopping. Shoes mostly. It was springtime, and she was still clomping around in her sleek winter boots. Not that the Bay Area had much in the way of winter, but there was always rain to contend with and city street puddles that swelled alongside the sidewalk filling with the directionless fish of empty candy bar wrappers.

“You two have a reservation at The French Laundry,” Genevive said as she came around the desk and slipped a folded piece of paper into the pocket on Tom’s shirt, “at Helena’s request.”

“Is that one of those frou-frou places that I always leave hungry?” Tom asked, his attention shifting to his daughter who didn’t seem to be paying much attention back at him.

“It’s very fancy, daddy,” she told him as she checked her phone. “Very expensive, too.”

That was the magic word. Tom, a man of means and stature, loved spending money performatively. If there could be a crowd of people around him every time he picked up a check, he’d be the happiest person on the face of the earth.

“It better be,” he warned, ushering her out the door. He didn’t bother to rattle off a list to Genevive of what had to be done before the next morning; she would already know everything he had to say. Instead, he said she was the best and wished her good night.

Helena had long since concluded that her father and Genevive were fucking each other but she had never been able to prove it. When Helena’s mother was still alive, they appeared to be more discreet about it, but in the past few years it looked to her like they didn’t care who knew. The one time she brought it up, Tom told her she was a filthy pervert who needed to mind her own business.

“First of all, it’s got nothing to do with you, what me and Genevive are doing,” he reprimanded her in the last moments of their shared life when he effectively could. “Second of all, it’s way easier to find someone to fuck than it is to find an assistant or whatever that’s worth a damn.”

“That wasn’t quite the clarifying answer I was hoping for,” Helena sighed.

“Yeah? Then how about this: I’d rather pay for it than screw up a good working relationship. Does that make it all crystal clear for you?”

Helena had nodded, but she didn’t believe him. She figured if they weren’t actively sleeping with each other then they certainly had in the past. Or at the very least both thought about it. She swore she saw more emotion in her father’s eyes when he looked at Genevive to confirm a meeting than at any point with Helena’s mother.

On the ride into San Francisco, Tom had little to say. Helena was contented with the silence at first – it was warm enough to put the top down on the zippy little convertible Tom had been driving since his wife’s death, and the rushing water sound of traffic and wind was all that they needed – but she got antsy as they crossed the bridge, sailing like a sunspot across the horizon that burned later and later with each passing day.

“Is there a reason we’re doing this whole city trip or are you just trying to be father of the year?” Helena asked. Tom had slowed as they approached the toll booth, and her voice sliced the ambient noise they had both gotten used to. “You just made it sound like you had something to tell me.”

“I do but it can wait ’til dinner.”

Tom nodded at the lone toll worker, and the wooden arm lifted without any money changing hands. Most of the tolls were automated with electronic eyes scanning cars for their pass, but one still kept a living, breathing human for the people who refused to give into the static-crackling conveniences of the modern world. Somewhere in the middle between the automated and the luddites was Tom, a man who simply believed he didn’t have to pay.

“Just tell me now,” Helena said, trying to keep her voice from slipping into a whine. “Is it good news or bad news?”

“Helena, if it was bad news, I would have told you already.”

“Is it about you and Genevive ?”

“Christ on a crutch, kid. You still think something’s happening there?”

Helena shrugged as they moved in jerky waves of traffic through stop lights and bus lanes. The city was more congested every time they came in. Helena liked it that way; she liked the way it seemed like there was never enough room for everyone to be there yet San Franciscans acted as if everyone could fit in. It had yet to occur to her that they meant the term differently than she did.

The two of them got to the restaurant fifteen minutes before their reservation. For a man who didn’t want people to be comfortable, Tom didn’t enjoy making others wait. He thought it rude, unprofessional. The concept of him having a firm moral compass tickled Helena in a way she couldn’t explain. Mainly because she knew full well that her father was not the most law-abiding man in the world.

A valet took the keys and sank into the bucket seat behind the wheel of the convertible. He winked at Helena as he accelerated forward and disappeared over the other side of a hill before she even took stock of what had happened.