Perfect Reader by Maggie Pouncey

and heir. She had it all.
    “Ms. Dempsey, are you still there?”
    She was, but she didn’t want to be. So she did something she hadn’t done since high school, in a fight with her boyfriend or her mother, the abruptness as satisfying as the sharp smash of a slammed door: She hung up.

    They were always in different rooms: Flora’s father reading the paper in his study, her mother reading Laura Ingalls Wilder to her downstairs in the library; him falling asleep in front of some game on the television in their bedroom, her smoking her Marlboro reds in front of a murder mystery on the other television on the third floor. The excesses of the President’s House welcomed such separations. Her parents were the sun and the moon, only rarely inhabiting the same sky, and when it happened, the feeling eclipse-like—exhilarating, and unnerving. But he could make her laugh the way no one else could, the way Flora never could. Flora’s grandmother had told her mother, “Marry the man who makes you laugh—they all make you cry,” and she had taken the advice literally.
    Her job now was to be the wife of the president of Darwin, and even Flora could see that she had decided not to do it well. She was certainly determined not to look the part. Her hair turned an alarming shade of purple overnight, and it was discovered she’d experimented with Manic Panic, a company whose target customer attended junior high school. She bought a pair of black combat boots and wore them around town unlaced. To complete the adolescent goth look, it could only be assumed, she, who never wore eye makeup, had her eyelashes dyed black. Her new eyes made her look depressed. And she left them every Tuesday night, Flora and her father, to return to the city and flee Darwin, back to her old life, the life she had never wanted to leave in the first place and still refused to give up, to see her friends and her analyst.
    “Doesn’t everyone’s mother have an analyst?” Flora asked Georgia.
    Georgia, who loved to be consulted on all matters of human behavior, paused to consider before answering. “Many do, but not all” was her assessment.
    Abandoned, Flora and her father developed a Tuesday-night routine of their own. Dinner at Ponzu, a Japanese restaurant on an ugly commercial strip just out of town, with huge grills on the tables where the chefs cooked in front of you and did tricks like flipping a shrimp in the air and catching it in their pockets. They were beloved guests because they came every week and because her father tipped exorbitantly. The hostess insisted on bringing them, on the house, a soda for Flora, and for her father, plum wine, which he found cloyingly sweet but drank out of politeness. He was a man who cleaned his plate, even if he didn’t like something, and this annoyed Flora’s mother, who felt his manners missed the point. “I’d rather have you leave some food and listen to me when I talk to you instead,” she’d say, as if one had a choice about that kind of thing.
    Sometimes Georgia came with them to dinner. Flora’s father called Georgia “the Wizard,” for Georgia’s love of science and magic, and because the tops of her ears came to the gentlest of points. “It’s the Wild Wizard!” he’d say to her in greeting, and they would both look delighted.
    “Like sisters,” the staff at Ponzu said.
    Over dinner, there were competitions. “Let the competitions commence” was her father’s rallying cry. “Who can make the best cow sound?” And the three of them mooed, one at a time, her father announcing, “I won that one,” and they would shriek with laughter at the corruption of the judging system. “I’m sorr-ry,” he’d say, exaggerating the word to show he wasn’t a bit sorry. “Even the Lithuanian judge gave mine a nine-point-eight. You two squeaked by with an eight-point-two.”
    Back at the house, her father made Flora sweet, milky tea, and then he would read to her, picking up wherever her mother