Moon-Mad

By Molly Schneider

Copyright 1999

An hour before opening he came downstairs to find his daughter already sitting at the bar with a glass in front of her. "Good evening, Janette," he said pleasantly.

"'Good evening,' he says," she remarked to the air. "'Good evening'--ha!" A decidedly French snort accompanied this.

He halted in midstride, raising an eyebrow at her. "Is there something amiss?"

"Will you stop it with the eyebrows already? I've had it with the eyebrows. Jack!" The bartender reluctantly returned from the far end of the bar and refilled her glass.

"I'm not in the mood for riddles, Janette. What is it *now*?"

She wished for just one second that she was mortal. A mortal woman who cooked. In movies and television shows such women demonstrated their displeasure by banging pots and dishes around. She had nothing to bang. Well! She rounded on him. "All you have to say to me lately is 'good evening,' or 'how was your night?' As if you were talking to the furniture!"

"I'm hardly in the habit of addressing the furniture, and you may want to consider that after nearly a millennium we should know each other well enough to be beyond constant blather."

"Oh! Oh, you--you--" she looked around for something to throw, reached for her shoe, then changed her mind. It had gone far beyond that. "You man!" she flung over her shoulder as she swept out of the room.

He cocked an eyebrow at Jack, who had the good sense not to mention his employer's habitual quirk, and enquired, "Do we know what that was about?"

"Er. No, sir."

Sighing, he left to track down his normally less-troublesome child. Tonight's monologue, he decided, would be on parenthood, and the advice he had for his listeners could be summed up in one word: Don't.

He found her in the cellars, taking inventory with a stubborn set to her face. Taking inventory rather roughly, he noted. He took a rare bottle out of her hand and set it carefully back in the rack. "For God's sake, don't break anything."

"That's all you care about." He detected a sniffle under the words. "Now, now. That's not true. What's this all about?"

She started to cry, just a little. "You don't like me anymore."

"That's not true either."

But he wouldn't ask her why she thought that, would he? Not him. "Go away," she said.

"No."

A moment of silence while she tapped her pen on her clipboard, then a sidelong glance. "You treat me like a Frenchman treats his wife."

He just managed to keep his eyebrows level. "Revered? Cherished?"

"Comfortable," she hissed. "Reliable. As though I have the sex appeal of--of a--of a *turnip*!"

Turnip? he thought, but only took her in his arms, murmuring, "Hush, now. There, there."

She drew back. "You *do* think I have the sex appeal of a turnip!"

"No, darling, not a turnip." He pursed his lips, and raised an eyebrow just for effect. "More like a... leek."

Her shriek echoed through the cellar, but he was gone before her shoe hit the wall.

FIN