Good Intentions Read Online Free PDF Page B

moment. But I’m not thirsty, thank you.”
    “You look really tired, Renée,” Debbie said sweetly. “Have you been feeling well?”
    “I’m feeling just fine, thank you. And the name is Renee, rhymes with beanie. Not Renée.”
    “I prefer Renée,” the girl said stubbornly. “Renee sounds like, I don’t know, the fat kid in grade school that nobody ever wanted to play with.”
    Debbie was gone before Renee had the chance to leap out of bed and hurl her from the bedroom window of the sixth-floor oceanfront condominium she had moved into when she married Philip. Not that the child would come to any serious harm, Renee thought, herhead falling back against her pillow. The girl was indestructible.
    From the kitchen, she heard the sounds of Philip’s soothing voice and Debbie’s innocent, girlish giggle. How, she wondered, was it possible for the girl to present two such different faces to the world? And how was it possible for a man of Philip’s sophistication and intelligence, not to mention his professional training, to be so blind when it came to dealing with his own daughter? How could he allow himself to be so manipulated?
    It happened every summer. Debbie would step off the Eastern Airlines flight from Boston and proceed to walk all over the stepmother who initially had been only too willing to be her friend. Renee laughed now when she thought of how eagerly she had awaited the arrival of her husband’s only child, how thrilled she had felt when she caught her initial glimpse of the girl who was only ten at the time of their first encounter. Though she was small for her age, Debbie had, even then, carried herself in the controlled manner of someone much older. She had long light-brown hair pulled back from her slim oval face into a high ponytail, and her legs were disproportionately long for her height, and very bony, which made her seem all the more fragile. Like a pretty pink flamingo, Renee had thought then. More like a vulture, she had learned, as the girl skillfully avoided her every overture while making it look as though it was always Renee who somehow came up short. “She doesn’t like me,” Renee had tearfully confided to Philip, who had assured her that the child was only shy, and the victim of conflicting loyalties. It was only natural for his daughter to resent someone else taking her mother’s place,especially since their divorce had been far from amicable, he told her, and she had bowed to his superior knowledge in such matters, although instinctively she had known he was wrong. “What can I do to make her love me?” she had asked, and he had told her to be herself. When that hadn’t worked—and it soon became obvious even to Philip that it wasn’t working—he told her to grin and bear it, that it was only for two months of the year, and surely she could indulge him that much. At first she thought she could. And yet the two months felt longer every year, as the child advanced past adolescence and the subtle maneuvers grew increasingly sophisticated, the barbs better aimed and more skillfully executed.
    Philip was no help at all. His guilt at having abandoned his only child to a woman he renounced as unstable made him the easy target of his daughter’s manipulations. If he saw through them, and Renee was sure that he did—Christ, even a total idiot could see through them—he was powerless to do anything but respond in the most obvious way. He gave in to all of Debbie’s outrageous demands on his time, his money, his psyche. He took her side in every dispute; he understood her position, her fears, her pain. Debbie was afraid of losing him, he told Renee, and didn’t seem to understand that she was afraid of exactly the same thing.
    “You were very rough on her,” he said when he came back into the room, the smell of hot chocolate on his breath. “She’s just a kid, you have to remember. She thinks you hate her.”
    “That’s ridiculous, Philip. You know I’ve tried