Last Chance Llama Ranch (3 page)

G
wendolyn Manning wants to Skype with you
,” Merry's tablet informed her.

Merry groaned. Her mother had spectacular timing, as usual.

She'd barely collected her pet turtle, Cleese, from Andy down the hall, and was still debating whether to chuck or wade through the stack of mail that had accumulated in the box the super kept downstairs for her when she was out of town. Judging by the machine-addressed see-through windows and the “Past Due!” notices printed in angry red ink on most of the envelopes, she wasn't going to like the contents of that correspondence. Then again, correspondence with the fam was likely to be equally unpleasant.

“
Do you wish to accept?
” asked her device.

No, I really, really don't.

It wouldn't just be Gwendolyn (never “Gwen”) either. Pierce would be beside her, stiff and uncomfortable in front of the webcam, doing his usual impression of Dignified Dad. Marcus, her evil, adorable older brother, would surely be there too, hovering over their shoulders with a glint in his eye that said he wasn't going to be any help at all. His Twitter feed—always a reliable means of keeping track of the twit—had announced “a visit to the ancestral pastures” a couple of days back.

The holy trinity of familial perfection.

And on the other side of the Skype session, Merry. The fallen one. The great disappointment. Merry—the girl whose sole saving grace had been her athletic ability. Without which…

Well. There wasn't much to say, was there?

Merry couldn't help remembering the morning of her first big competition. How her mother, swaddled in Arctic fox from neck to knee, had stood dwarfed by the unlikely daughter in team-sponsored spandex and space-age ski boots.

“I expect you'll win quite handily today, darling,” said Gwendolyn, turning her collar up against the wind at the summit of the Aspen ski area.

Merry felt herself flush with the unexpected praise…until her mother finished her sentence. “Of course, with your height and build, we must be grateful you inherited my family's athletic abilities.”

Merry had heard this refrain countless times since she'd started towering over her peers while still in grammar school. She clenched her fists around her ski poles, resisting the urge to flip down her visor and shut her mother out.

“Your uncle was quite the cricketer,”
Gwendolyn reminisced while Merry fidgeted,
eager to join her teammates,
“and your grandfather was captain of the royal dressage team for years before he got himself thrown by that blasted mare. I myself gave up a promising future as a figure skater to marry your father—but of course, all the men were after me in those days; I had my pick. It wasn't as though I
had
to excel at sports.”

Merry's eyes stung, but she told herself it was just the sharp wind whipping off the slopes.
Focus on the course
, she told herself.
Crush the competition
.
And get as far away from Mother as possible, as fast as these fucking fiberglass slats can take me.

“It's unfortunate you got more of the sportsman than the sophisticate from my side of the family, Meredith. But you've found your niche now, and I know you'll make us proud.” Gwendolyn removed a glove, one finger at a time, and reached up on tiptoe to fuss with Merry's wayward locks. Pursing her lips with motherly concern, she tucked hanks of hair under Merry's helmet—and then, as Merry flinched, wet her thumb with spit and ran it over her daughter's unsatisfactorily tamed brows. (Gwendolyn had a thing about unkempt “accessory hair,” as she so delicately dubbed it.) “We must always put our best face forward, darling,” she said. Unspoken was,
even if that face is homely, at best.
“One never knows who may be watching. And please, dear, dash on a little lipstick before the cameras catch you. Otherwise people might think you're one of
those
girls.”

A fate worse than death
, Merry thought now, tossing her mail on the bedside table and shaking her head to clear out the memory.

“
Do you wish to accept the call?
”
the tablet asked again—a little impatiently, Merry thought.

Do I
have
to?
she silently asked it.

But she knew the answer. She'd been ducking the Manning clan longer than was wise. Their emails, texts, and tweets (in Marcus's case) had been dogging her since well before she'd headed to Turkey. If she didn't talk to them now, they'd only become more insistent until she finally caved, and by then they wouldn't be best pleased.

Not that they were ever very pleased where Merry was concerned.

Flopping down on her bed with a sigh, she put Cleese on her tummy (he liked the warmth), gave him a bit of lettuce from the sandwich she'd grabbed at the corner deli, and settled the scratched and duct-taped tablet atop her bent knees. She tapped “Accept” and cringed.

“Happy birthday, darling!” trilled Gwendolyn, arriving on the screen poreless, lineless, and timelessly glamorous beside her equally attractive husband. A second later, up popped Marcus, thrusting his handsome face into frame and waving spastically.

“Hey, Sis, happy birthday!”

“It's not my birthday for another week,” Merry muttered, trying to minimize the part of the chat screen where she had to see her own face. Compared to their movie-star sheen, she was a walking war wound—with jet lag, no less. She resisted the urge to smooth her eyebrows.

“We know it's not really your birthday, sweetheart,” Pierce intoned. “We thought we'd try to catch up with you a bit early this year.”

Oh, joy.

“Yes, darling. We were rather hoping to schedule our annual family détente to coincide with your big day,” said Gwendolyn, pinching off the small smile that was all her Botox would permit.

Merry smothered a smile of her own, and across several time zones, she saw her brother do the same.
Détente
was more accurate than Gwendolyn, not known for her interest in wordplay, probably intended.

“Your father's just wrapped up that treaty in Ukraine,” she went on, “and I've got some time off from the foundation, so we thought now would be a good time…”

“I'm free too,” Marcus interjected. “I always make time for my little sis. Let the runways of Milan pine for my presence; I'm damn well going to give Sasquatch a squeeze for her big day!”

Merry winced. He'd probably still be calling her Sasquatch when he was a white-haired, white-toothed model for Cialis, and she was a tooth
less
, towering old crone. She grabbed her cell phone and, holding it out of sight of the webcam, quickly thumbed a text message.
Sasquatch, eh? Thought we'd decided to give that one a rest.

Her phone, which she had on mute, buzzed almost immediately.

Seriously, Sis, have you looked at your hair today?

Merry typed a tongue-stickie-outtie emoji, and on Skype, Marcus responded by giving her a real, if silent, raspberry from over their parents' heads.

“Yes, darling boy, we know how much you adore your sister,” Gwendolyn said, oblivious to her children's covert bickering. As if it could not help itself, one birdlike hand rose to smooth the cowlick that ruffled the otherwise perfect coif of her son's silky locks. “We're all eager to find out how you've been getting on, Meredith.”

Marcus shrugged away from her fussing, and Merry saw him thumbing the screen of his phone.
By which she means, “What shameful circumstances you've gotten yourself into,”
Marcus texted, as effortless with his smartphone as he was strutting his stuff down the catwalk during fashion week.
*Meredith.*

Gwendolyn always called her Meredith. Never mind that it
wasn't her name
. Merry's mother refused to acknowledge her mistake in allowing the then-eight-year-old Marcus to name their infant daughter after his favorite fictional character—Tolkien's Meriadoc Brandybuck. “We were in a phase, darling,” Gwendolyn had said once Merry was old enough to ask why she'd been burdened with such an unusual appellation. “And I was never one for fiction—I assumed if our Marcus chose it, it must be a respectable name. Anyway, all the parenting books were saying it was a great way to help siblings bond.”

Perhaps it was true. Despite her near-constant aggravation with her brother, Merry loved Marcus fiercely. He was a scamp, a scoundrel, and a scalawag, but he was loyal to a fault—and smart too, though he did a pretty good impression of a dumbass when he wanted to. And after all, he was the only other person who knew what it was like to grow up with Pierce and Gwendolyn Manning for parents.

“I'm sure Merry is getting on just fine,” Pierce said, patting his wife on one slender shoulder before peering into the camera to wink at his daughter. “Working hard at the new job, eh? Making us proud, I'm sure.” His expression said he
wasn't
so sure, but at least he was sticking up for her, Merry thought. Her stomach suddenly felt heavier than the lunch-plate-sized turtle on it could account for. Because it was clear her mother wasn't on the same page with Pierce.

Gwendolyn faced her husband, turning her cameo-perfect profile to the camera. “Is that so?” Her voice, though still measured, could have etched glass. “Then why was she cavorting naked in Turkey only yesterday? And drunk in Denmark the week before that?” She faced the webcam again, glaring just left of dead-on into Merry's flinching eyes.
Now we get to the real reason Mother called
, Merry thought, letting her weight sink deeper into her nest of pillows.
Let the guilt trip commence
in five…four…three…

“You might have taken that job with ESPN, Meredith,” said Gwendolyn. “They would have been happy to have you. There's no shame in being a sports commentator. Many athletes join the networks after they retire…”

I didn't retire. I did a Wile E. Coyote into a conifer
, Merry thought.

“Of all the opportunities afforded to you, Meredith, I'll never understand why you chose to sign up with that website. If not the networks, you should have taken up your rightful place at the foundation as your grandmother wished,” she continued. “Instead, you spend your days capering around like a monkey. It's undignified, and unbefitting an athlete of your stature. After all the years we worked to craft your image…” She stopped, pursing her lips with displeasure.

“I needed a change, Mother,” Merry said wearily. There wasn't much point going over this ground again. How could she explain to Gwendolyn how exquisitely painful it would have been to spend her life attending sporting events, watching former colleagues doing what she herself could no longer do? Fawning over them in interviews, watching them beat her best times…Gwendolyn could never understand.
She
had
chosen
to give up figure skating (and an Austrian grand duke) to marry Merry's father. Merry, on the other hand, had gone down in flames. To see that knowledge reflected in the eyes of her peers as she gushed over their accomplishments for the cameras?
It would have killed me.
Never mind how welcome those TV bucks would have been—the cost to her pride was just too high.

And the cost if I slink back into the family fold and take my place at Mother's foundation, spending my days sponsoring society luncheons and arranging benefit balls?
Merry shuddered.
Forget my pride…my very
soul
is at stake.

Though her better judgment was jumping up and down, making “shut up and tell her what she wants to hear!” gestures, Merry couldn't help herself. “And the thing in Denmark wasn't some drunken debauch, Mother. It was an artisanal beer tasting that got a little out of hand. My readers thought it was funny—”

“Well,
we
did not, Meredith. People are talking.”

“That's the
idea
,” Merry said. “Creating buzz is what the magazine pays me for.”

“
Buzz
,” scoffed Gwendolyn. “This can't be what you want for yourself, Meredith.” She shook her head, dripping disappointment. “To be some stand-up comedian on a…what do you call it? Blarg?”

“Blog,” Marcus put in, helpful as always. “It's called a
blog
, Mother.”

“Yes. That
blah
of yours. You were a
world-class competitor
, Meredith,” she said. “And now you spend your time writing fluff that will be forgotten the next time some teenaged pop singer decides to tweak—”

“Twerk,” Marcus interjected.

“—all over the Internet. You're undoing all our hard work, Meredith, making yourself a laughingstock instead of the legend you were meant to be. And for what? A travelogue on some garish little website no one's ever heard of?”

That “garish little website” gets millions of hits every month
, Merry thought, stung.
Besides, it's not a blog, it's a magazine column. Totally more dignified
. Merry opened her mouth—to scream with frustration, to defend herself, or apologize—she wasn't quite sure. “Mother…” she began.