Daniel Price - Slick

“She’s good,” I said with false frustration.

Madison tied her hair back. “I don’t know. She seems awfully perky for an alleged rape victim.”

“That’s the thing. She’s downplaying it beautifully. If she went on TV going ‘Woe is me, woe is me,’ there’d finally be some backlash against her. Everyone likes a victim, but nobody likes a whiner.”

“I didn’t know she had braces. I bet they’re fake.”

“Why would she wear fake braces?”

“So she doesn’t look too perfect.”

I tugged Madison’s ponytail. “Not everything is a calculated move.”

Jean continued her efforts to exist inoffensively. I smiled at her. “You must be bored out of your mind. I’m sorry.”

She gently waved a hand. I’m fine. I’m fine.

Madison signed to her, smirking. “Relax, Mom. You’re not embarrassing me.”

Jean quickly signed back. Madison laughed, then squeezed her mother’s arm.

“What did she say?” I asked.

“‘Give it time.’”

Jean kicked off her shoes and approached my wall unit. Within moments, she was thumbing through my old issues of Brandweek .

“See?” Madison said. “She just can’t sit still in front of the TV.”

“That’s amazing.”

“Yeah, but it’s made her all weird. I mean we barely have any culture in common. She doesn’t even know who Jerry Seinfeld is.”

Finding no interest in Brandweek , Jean kept browsing until she discovered my untitled copy of Godsend on top of the TV. She skimmed a few pages, then raised the stack in query.

Madison signed to her. “It’s just some novel his friend wrote.”

She tilted her head, mouthing her question at me. Ira?

“No,” I replied. “A different friend.”

Ironic that Alonso, the friend and author in question, just materialized behind her pelvis.

“Mom, move. We can’t see.”

Jean sat down with the manuscript. As the show continued, I found myself frequently checking in on her. She seemed at turns both enthralled and bewildered by Alonso’s prose. At one point she caught my glance and threw back a look that was way too complex to decipher. There was definitely some sadness there. I couldn’t tell what it was related to. Madison? Neil? Me? None of the above? I motioned for her handheld, fumbling with the stylus.

With an evocative pout, she wrote into the device.

Smiling, I scribbled back.

She studied me, deadpan, before passing her reply.

I bit my lip to keep from laughing, but it was a losing battle. Jean was a cruel woman, the kind who’d fart at a funeral just to watch the faces around her quiver and crack with painful suppression. But she fell into her own trap. She found my tortuous struggle so amusing that soon enough we were both red-faced and rumbling.

It was hopeless. Madison caught us.

“Scott, you’re supposed to be watching this!”

I let out a sobering cough. “It’s okay. I’m taping it.”

“Maybe I wanted to watch it with you! You ever think of that?”

“You will,” I promised. “Tomorrow, we’ll go through it piece by piece. I swear.”

Madison stood up, muted the TV, then aimed her hot glare at her mother: the human virus. Twelve minutes and already she’d contaminated the work effort, the apartment, me.

Jean grimaced, expecting the worst, but her daughter remained spitefully mature. With a stern glower, she addressed us in two different languages.

“Okay, fine. But instead of passing notes behind my back like third-graders, how about including me in the conversation?”

I shut off the handheld and tossed it back to Jean. “Sure. We’ll talk. You can translate. Just turn up the sound a little. I want to keep an ear open.”

Madison adjusted the volume, then faced us from the easy chair. “All right. Let’s talk.”

For a few awkward moments, none of us could come up with a topic. Then Jean pointed at the TV, signing.

“She wants to know what we’re watching and why. Can we tell her?”

“Of course. It’s hardly a secret.”

“This won’t be easy. Trust me.”

She wasn’t kidding. Jean was so far removed from the cultural spectrum, she didn’t even know what rap was. It took several minutes for us to explain the background, the main cast of characters, and our role in the drama. She wasn’t entirely pleased.

“It’s not so simple, Mom.”

“What did she say?”

“She said we’ve got it ass-backward. We’re saving the villain from the damsel in distress.”

I shook my head. “It’s a lie. He never even touched her.”

“‘How do you know?’”

Because it was my lie. “Because his wife knows him better than anyone. She has no illusions about him. And she believes he’s innocent with every fiber of her being.”

Madison translated my defense with gusto. Her mother backed down.

“’If you’re right,’” she offered, “’then this Harmony woman is either malicious or deranged.’”

I scoffed at Jean. “It’s not so simple, Mom .”

“Why do you say that?”

The question came from both of them. I leaned back and shrugged. “I just think people are complex. That’s all.”

Jean signed with sarcastic wonder. Madison giggled. “‘Ooh. You’re deep.’”

With a tight smirk, I flipped Jean the one piece of sign language I knew. She punched my arm, then gestured to Madison, who was still laughing.

“She wants to know what other crazy projects you’ve worked on.”

Delving into the crisis management archives, I told them about the time I fought to save a Stanford professor whose correct but unfortunate use of the word “niggardly” had raised quite the brouhaha. Ironically, it took four months and ten angry phone calls to get him to pay my invoice. I also shared the tale of my one political client: a California congressman whose sanity was called into question when he held a public moment of silence for Detective Bobby Simone (Jimmy Smits), who’d passed away the night before on a very special NYPD Blue . The congressman was simply injecting some droll levity into a long and dull assembly meeting, but newspapers all over the country painted him as a schizoid loon who couldn’t tell fiction from reality. With my help, he got better.

And, of course, I filled them in on the recent fun and games at Keoki Atoll. Madison was impressed with my ability to talk 128 respectable young women into stripping naked for me. Jean wasn’t, but she withheld her objections. Even when I told her about Deb Isham’s hateful reaction, she hid her thoughts behind a mask of lead. That frustrated me. I was challenging her, testing the walls of her moral outrage. At first I thought she wasn’t playing along, but as soon as Madison turned away, she threw me a quick, hardy squint. If you want to scare me, buddy, you’ll have to do better than that.

Through Madison, Jean segued to a crazy project from her own career. Three years ago, she was hired to come up with a nifty box design for Morning Faith, the world’s first and only Christian-themed breakfast cereal. Her client was an Israeli investor who thought he could make a quick buck in the States. After all, America had millions of Christians. It had millions of cereal eaters. There had to be some overlap.

There was, but not enough to pull the flock away from the graven images of Cap’n Crunch and Count Chocula. Jean blamed the product’s failure on her own generic “heaven sky” design. Madison and I faulted the lame title. We put on our thinking caps and came up with our own. Madison suggested “Angel Bran.” I liked “Genu-Flakes.” Jean took the prize with “Honey Frosted Monogamous Heter-O’s.” She also offered “Left Behind: The Cereal (Now with 25 % Less),” but that one left us scratching our heads. She rolled her eyes and told us to forget about it.