Chanel Bonfire by Wendy Lawless

from room service.
    Pop took us to Cartier on the swanky rue de la Paix and bought both of us gold charm bracelets with little French flags on them. He also bought Mother a grape-size sapphire ring that was surrounded by diamonds.
    The next morning, we were eating croissants slathered in jam and trashy American cereal at the rolling table from room service when the door flew open and Mother entered dramatically. She was wearing a luxurious hotel terry-cloth robe, her makeup slightly smudged, her hair pillow-rumpled.
    “Girls?” She seemed to be in speech mode.
    We sipped our orange juice and waited for her to begin.
    “Are you happy to see Pop?”
    It was a silly question. Although he had been in our lives briefly, we loved Pop because he was the only stepfather we knew. He laughed at all our jokes and was fun to be around, and he bought us stuff. So we nodded and continued eating.
    “He still loves me and can’t live without me.” Mother paced and smiled, tugging at her cigarette. “So, we’re going to try to work it out.” She turned to us and opened her arms, looking wildly happy. On cue, my sister and I got up from the breakfast table and ran to her embrace. We were a little confused, but if she was happy, what the hell, we went with it.
    So after a five-year absence from our lives, Pop had rematerialized as our fairy ex-stepfather. Suddenly it became not unusual for us to come home from school to find Pop sitting in our living room in London, with a lit Gitanes and a Tanqueray martini nearby. After he’d left, Mother would say, “You know he loves you two so much.”
    “We know, Mother,” we dutifully replied. I was pretty sure that it wasn’t just Pop’s love for me and Robin that kept him hanging around. There had to be another reason he continued to pay for our private school and summer camp in Switzerland. Even if Mother was seeing several men simultaneously, and she always was, she managed to keep Pop on the back burner—just in case she needed him.
    It was quite a juggling act. They seemed to fight as much as they didn’t but always ended up in each other’sarms. It seemed they couldn’t be together and they couldn’t be apart. And so they entered a phase of being together some of the time, and then apart some of the time. Pop would go away—and then he would come back. The Atlantic Ocean seemed to make the relationship possible. Where others might see an unfathomable obstacle, they found convenience. I think she loved him for changing her life and showing her the world outside of her small town in the Midwest; but I couldn’t be sure. There was a strong connection between them that was beyond my girlish understanding. Maybe he was the only person who understood her. I would never know.
    “I think he loves you as if you were his own children,” she said to us one day after he’d left. As if to further this feeling, Mother sent a letter to our school and had our last names changed to his, Rea. She talked about his formally adopting us, which never happened, and I didn’t know if it was even true or something she’d made up. I strongly suspected this idea had a financial aspect: we would legally be tied to him, even though she no longer was. And as she was always in survival mode, that would be a boon to her.
    We didn’t have a father in our lives, so it was fun to have Pop, though he was more like a stand-in for the real thing. Like a jolly uncle or an old family friend, he was the guy who would show up to take you to the circus, or out to your favorite restaurant on your birthday. Our image of our own father was starting to fade away. We had no photos of him, and trying to conjure his face in our minds was becomingmore and more difficult. Pop seemed to enjoy his paternal role with us when he was around, and we had to take what we could get.

    Like all fairy tales in which Mother was a player, this latest with Pop would be brief and cautionary. At our next spring break, he appeared with