The Home for Wayward Supermodels Read Online Free PDF Page A

eye. “I didn’t see any reason you’d ever have to know.”
    “Know what, for land’s sake?”
    “I learned to speak French from your father, Amanda. Oh sure, I took it in high school, but I didn’t really get it until I met your father and we started speaking it together. I mean, that’s all we spoke for those three months….”
    I was even more stumped than I’d been before. My dad, Duke, was a lot like Tom: He didn’t do too much talking in any language. And I knew he’d never been much for school, preferring, as he put it, to “learn from the fish.”
    “ Dad speaks French?”
    It was Mom’s turn to look confused for a moment, and then she actually laughed. “Oh, not Duke. No no no no, not Duke. I mean your real father. Your biological father.”
    I stared at her. People had always said, from the time I was the littlest girl, how much I looked like my dad—like Duke. It was partly because Mom was so heavy and I was so skinny; no one in Eagle River could even imagine what she’d looked like when she was modeling, or see the resemblance between her and me. But I knew from looking at pictures of her when she was young and thin that I looked much more like her than like Dad, though it made him so happy when people said it.
    Now I felt like not only did I not know what Mom was talking about, I didn’t know Mom. And my dad wasn’t my dad. I felt like I was going to throw up all over the starched tablecloth.
    “Am I adopted?” I said, practically choking on the words. “Are you my real mother?”
    “Of course I’m your real mother,” she said, her voice rising to that hysterical pitch I knew from the day the pie shop was robbed, or when Grandma died. “When I saw you all done up for that shoot today, it took me back to my own modeling days. I felt like I was looking in the mirror. And meeting Alex, being in that studio, speaking French again—it just all came flooding back.”
    “ What came flooding back? You better tell me the truth now, Mom, and I mean the whole truth.”
    Here it is: She’d been to New York before. That’s why she started crying when we first saw the city. She’d come here when she was eighteen, my age, to model. Very quickly, she’d met a photographer, a Frenchman, and they’d fallen in love. Or at least she’d fallen in love. He went to France for a visit, and while he was gone she found out he was married. At about the same time she discovered she was pregnant. With me. She went back to Eagle River, where my father, I mean Duke, had been her high school boyfriend. She told him everything, and he wanted to marry her anyway. They agreed that he would claim me as his own. No one would ever have to know who my real father was.
    “So why are you telling me now?” I asked her. I was more furious than I’d ever been in my entire life, partly for her having lied to me for all these years, and partly for her now spilling the truth.
    “Seeing you there today at that shoot, so beautiful, such a natural, I thought: If you’re going to be in modeling, you’ve got to know the truth. You might meet your father, you might even work with him, and it’s wrong if you don’t know who he is. His name is Jean-Pierre Renaud; he’s quite well-known. I thought you’d stay in Eagle River your whole life….”
    “I just told you I am not going to be ‘in modeling,’” I said, slamming my hands down so hard on the table that the silverware and the crystal glasses leaped into the air, Mom’s wine toppling and draining like blood across the tablecloth.
    “I think that’s a mistake,” Mom said, fumbling to right her glass, her face so red it seemed like she was about to start sobbing—though at that moment I couldn’t have cared less. “Though I’d love it if you were with me in Eagle River….”
    “I don’t know what I’m going to do,” I said, staggering to my feet, jostling the table again so that the flames of the candles quaked in the reflection in the window. I