“It’s a chance to see a part of the country I haven’t seen before,” Ivy had said.
“If you want to see a part of the country you haven’t seen before, use your American Express.”
“It’s a chance to do something I haven’t done before, then.”
Her mother had put her coffee down on the kitchen table and sighed. “It’s a chance to get away from Dennis without having to hurt his feelings straight on, and you know it. I warned you it wasn’t going to work out when you started dating him. You’ve got more ambition than that.”
Ivy had wanted to point out that she wasn’t using any ambition she might have had, but she hadn’t. She got along with her mother. She got along with her father, too. It made her the odd man out at most of the places she liked to frequent.
“Tell me if the Wicked Witch of the West is advancing,” Grace said. “The last thing I need is another surprise.”
“She’s off at a table with Andra and that Chinese girl,” Janice said.
“You can’t call Alida Chinese,” Suzanne said. “She’ll bite your head off. I don’t think she’s a very nice person, do you? I mean, she’s terribly snobbish, and she’s—she just doesn’t like anybody. She doesn’t just relax and talk.”
“I wish you’d stop saying things like that,” Grace said. “You know they’re taping everything we say. And filming it. You’re going to get us stuck in some segment where we sound like first-class bitches, and I’m going to be there as much as you, even if I don’t go along with it. She’s probably just nervous. It’s probably her culture or something.”
“You know what I heard,” Janice said, leaning in a little. Ivy wondered if she imagined that this would mean that no microphone could pick up what she was about to say. “I heard that Sheila Dunham had a daughter, only now the daughter doesn’t talk to her anymore. She’s on drugs, or something. She ran away from home. I don’t remember.”
Ivy sat up a little straighter. That was odd, she thought. She’d heard that story, too. And there was something—
But Grace was going on. “That’s an old story,” she was saying. “It was all over the news at the time. The daughter had a drug problem, and she’d been picked up for shoplifting a couple of times and the next time it happened, she was going to go to jail, so Sheila had her put in one of those youth facility things, you know, the ones that are practically like jails.”
“A private jail?” Janice looked confused. “Is that legal?”
“It’s not in this country,” Grace said, “but they have them on islands in the Caribbean and things where it is. They take the kid’s passport when he shows up and then they make everybody get up at the same time and go to sleep at the same time and eat meals at the same time. And if you don’t behave they throw you in solitary. You can look it up on the Internet if you don’t believe me. A lot of really rich parents put their kids in places like that when they think the kids are out of control. So anyway, Sheila put her daughter in one of those, and the daughter managed to escape, somehow. Anyway, nobody has ever seen her since.”
“But I don’t understand,” Janice said. “Is it a jail? Or is it rehab? What?”
“It’s both those things.” Grace shrugged. “I barely talk to my father as it is, but if he’d ever done anything like that to me, I’d have found a lawyer and sued him over it. Although you can’t really do that, I think, when you’re a minor your parents can do pretty much anything they want to you until you’re eighteen.”
“No,” Janice said. “That’s not true. You can call the authorities and charge them with child abuse. I know that’s possible.”
“They aren’t going to charge someone like Sheila Dunham with child abuse,” Grace said. “And they’re not going to do it for sending her daughter off to some place that says it’s a psychiatric facility. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but they don’t take children away from rich people almost ever.”
“What about Britney Spears?” Janice asked.
“What about her?” Grace said. “They didn’t take the children away from her and put them in a foster home, did they? Their father sued for custody and he got it, but it isn’t the same thing. Anyway, Sheila’s daughter disappeared. Maybe she went to live with her father. I don’t know who that was. Nobody knows. Somebody Sheila was married to when she first started working, I think. Nobody ever talks about her. Which makes me think she really did disappear. It’s just the kind of thing the tabloids really like.”