Disconnected (Luke Hemmings AU)

Chapter 3

When I woke up the next morning in my father's Presidential Suite at the Beverly Hills Hotel, I had no idea where I was for about ten minutes. I was in a ridiculously enormous bed and the sun was streaming in through the window. When I pushed back the blankets and looked outside, I was gazing down upon an enormous crystalline swimming pool that was being cleaned by men in uniforms. Then I saw a woman who I recognized from the cover of People Magazine wearing a terry cloth cover-up sitting down on a deck chair and slathering sunscreen onto the shoulders of a little girl around the age of five. And then all of the events of the last three days came flooding back to me.

My father had been on the phone well into the night making arrangements. A wake for my mother was being held later that afternoon in Beverly Hills, and my father's extensive team of managers, lawyers and accountants had begun settling her estate. Before I had nodded off the night before I had come to understand vaguely that there wasn't much of my mother's life left to settle.

Our house on North Laurel was a rental. I don't know how I was so ignorant of this; I had always thought of it as our house. But my father had been playing rent on it since I was a baby. And Mrs. Earle was our landlord. How had I never known? Why hadn't she thrown out my mother for her rowdy partying? At any rate, my father had arranged for a locksmith to change all the locks on the house that morning and install an alarm system to keep it secure until the new tenants moved in.

My mother had no savings and no assets. She had a check that came once a month for the backup singing she had done on a Chevy commercial when I was in eighth grade. Every time the commercial aired anywhere in the world, she made a few pennies, but I would soon find out that her monthly liquor expenses were far more than that residual check. Part of what my father had been sending her in child support since I was a baby had been intended for a college savings account, and apparently no such account existed.

I certainly knew nothing about one.

My mother;s parents were on a flight from St. Paul. The concierge at the hotel was arranging for a black dress to be delivered to our suite for me to wear to the wake, as I didn't own anything formal (although simply black would not have been a problem as black turtlenecks and jeans were my personal uniform at school), Everything seemed to be moving so fast...and at some point I was going to have to make my way down to the pool to introduce myself for the first time to my father's wife and daughter,

There was a knock on the door to my room.

"Allison, are you awake in there?"

It was my dad. I opened the door and found him carrying a leather-bound menu with a little tassel on it.

"Did you sleep well?"

"Yes," I admitted.

"You should come downstairs and eat. We have to be at the funeral home at two and the stylist will be here with some dresses for you to try on in an hour," my dad said.

A shower and a fresh pair of jeans later, I made my way down to the pool, where my dad had joined Jill to order breakfast. Now it's probably important to point out that when my dad had married Jill, I read about it in Expose Magazine just like everyone else in America. Jill was a fashion stylist on a shoot he had done for Rolling Stone, and the had exchanged vows at the Fundu Lagoon resort in Zanzibar. My mother had noticed the cover of the magazine when we were standing in line at Target to buy toilet paper and ice cream. She had snorted with disgust and read the article aloud in a dramatic British accent for my amusement.

Two years later, when I had met my dad for burgers near the airport, he had told me that he had invited me, and that y mother told him it was hardly possible for me to just drop out of fifth grade classes and jet off to Africa. At the time I thought he was probably lying, but realistically my mother kind of had a point. Since then, I've seen my dad and Jill on Extra, attending the American Music Awards and the Grammys, I even got a complete tour of their mansion on the Jersey shore not far from where the Bon Jovis lived, courtesy of Cribs. But never once was I visited in person.