Sugar Daddy Read online

  Churchill’s first visit to Salon One happened around the time I started working there. One day the serenity of the salon was interrupted by a flurry of excitement, stylists murmuring, clients’ heads turning. I caught a glimpse of him—a thick ruff of steel-colored hair, dark gray suit—as he was guided to one of Zenko’s VIP rooms. He paused in the doorway, his gaze crossing the main room. His eyes were dark, the kind of brown that makes the irises nearly indistinguishable from the pupils. He was a good-looking old coot, but there was something off-beat about him, a hint of the eccentric.

  Our gazes caught. He went still, his eyes narrowing as he stared at me intently. And then I had the curious feeling, nearly impossible to describe…a sort of pleasant catch deep in my chest, in a place words couldn’t reach. I felt soothed and relaxed and expectant, I could actually feel the tiny muscles in my forehead and jaw softening. I wanted to smile at him but before I could he had gone into the room with Zenko.

  “Who was that?” I asked Angie, who was standing with me.

  “Advanced-level sugar daddy,” she replied in an awed tone. “Don’t tell me you’ve never heard of Churchill Travis.”

  “I’ve heard of the Travises,” I replied. “They’re like the Basses in Fort Worth, right? Money people?”

  “Honey, in the investment world Churchill Travis is Elvis. He’s on CNN all the time. He’s written books. He owns half of Houston, and he has yachts, jets, mansions…”

  Even knowing Angie’s tendency toward hyperbole, I was impressed.

  “…and the best part of all is, he’s a widower,” Angie finished. “His wife died not too long ago. Oh, I’m going to find a way to get in that room with him and Zenko. I’ve got to meet him! Did you see the way he just looked at me?”

  That provoked a self-conscious laugh. I’d thought he was looking at me, but it had been Angie, it must have been, because she was blond and sexy and men adored her.

  “Yes,” I said. “But would you really go after him? I thought you were happy with George.” George was Angie’s current sugar daddy, who had just given her a Cadillac Escalade. It was a loaner, but he’d said she could drive it as long as she wanted.

  “Liberty, a smart sugar baby never misses an opportunity to trade up.” Angie sped to the makeup station to reapply eyeliner and lipstick, freshening her face in preparation to meet Churchill Travis.

  I went to the cleaning closet and got out a broom to sweep up some hair clippings from the floor. Just as I got started, a stylist named Alan hurried over to me. He was trying to look calm, but his eyes were as big as silver dollars.

  “Liberty,” he said in an urgent undertone, “Zenko wants you to bring a glass of iced tea for Mr. Travis. Strong tea, lots of ice, no lemon, two packets of sweetener. The blue packets. Bring it on a tray. Don’t fuck it up, or Zenko will kill us all.”

  I was instantly alarmed. “Why me? Angie should bring it to him. He was looking at her. I’m sure she wants to do it. She—”

  “He asked for you. ‘The dark-haired little girl,’ he said. Hurry, Liberty. Blue packets, blue.”

  I went to prepare the tea as directed, stirring carefully to make certain every grain of sweetener was dissolved. I had filled the glass to the top with the most symmetrical ice cubes available. When I approached the VIP room, I had to balance the tray on one hand while I opened the door with the other. The ice jiggled dangerously in the glass. I wondered in desperation if a few drops had spilled.

  Assuming an implacable smile, I entered the VIP room. Mr. Travis was seated in the chair, facing a huge gold-framed mirror. Zenko was describing possible variations on Mr. Travis’s current hairstyle, which was the standard businessman’s cut. I gathered Zenko was gently hinting that Mr. Travis should try something a little different, maybe allow him to texture and gel it at the top to update his look to something edgier.

  I tried to deliver the tea as unobtrusively as possible, but those shrewd dark eyes locked onto me, and Travis turned in his chair to face me as he took the glass from the tray. “What’s your opinion?” he demanded. “Do you think I need updating?”

  Considering my reply, I noticed that his teeth were slightly snaggled on the bottom row. As he smiled, it gave him the appearance of a fierce old lion inviting a cub to play. His eyes were warm in his craggy face, an umber glaze permanently seared into the top few layers of skin. Holding his gaze, I felt a small knot of delight form in my throat, and I swallowed it back.

  I told him the truth. I couldn’t help it. “I think you’re edgy enough as it is,” I said. “Any more and you’d scare people.”

  Zenko’s face went blank, and I was certain he was going to fire me on the spot.

  Travis’s laugh sounded like a bag of rocks being shaken. “I’ll go by this young lady’s opinion,” he told Zenko. “Just take a half-inch off the top and taper the back and sides.” He continued to look at me. “What’s your name?”

  “Liberty Jones.”

  “Where’d you get that name? What part of Texas are you from? You one of the shampoo girls?”

  I learned later that Churchill was in the habit of throwing questions out in twos and threes, and if you missed any of them, he repeated them.

  “I was born in Liberty County, lived in Houston for a while, then grew up in Welcome. I’m not allowed to do shampoos yet, I’ve just started here and I’m apprenticing.”

  “Not allowed to do shampoos,” Travis repeated, his heavy brows rising as if such a thing were absurd. “What in Sam Hill does an apprentice do?”

  “I bring people iced tea.” I gave him my prettiest smile and began to leave.

  “Stay right there,” came his command. “You can practice your shampooing on me.”

  Zenko broke in, his expression hypercalm. His accent was more pronounced than usual, as if he’d just done lunch with Camilla and Charles. “Mr. Travis, this girl hasn’t finished her training. She isn’t qualified to shampoo anyone. However, we have highly trained stylists who will be helping you today, and—”

  “How much training does it take to wash hair?” Travis asked incredulously. You could tell he wasn’t used to being denied anything, from anyone, for any reason. “You do your best, Miss Jones, and I won’t complain.”

  “Liberty,” I said, returning to him. “And I can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because if I do and you never come back to Salon One, everyone will assume I screwed up, and I don’t want that on my record.”

  Travis scowled. I should have had the sense to be afraid of him. But the air between us was alive with a sense of playfulness. And a smile kept bobbing to my lips no matter how hard I tried to push it back.

  “What else can you do besides bring tea?” Travis demanded.

  “I could give you a manicure.”

  He scoffed at the word. “Never had a manicure in my life. Why any man would need one I don’t know. Damn female thing to do.”

  “I manicure lots of men.” I began to reach for his hand and hesitated. In the next moment I found his hand resting on mine, his palm down, my palm up. It was a strong, broad hand, one you could easily imagine gripping a horse’s reins or a shovel handle. The nails were clipped almost to the quick, the skin of his fingers nicked and pale-rusted. One of his thumbnails was permanently ridged from some long-ago injury. Gently turning his hand over in mine, I saw his palm was webbed with so many lines, it would have made a fortune-teller stutter. “You could use some work, Mr. Travis. Especially on the cuticles.”

  “Call me Churchill.” He pronounced it without the i, so it sounded like “Church’ll.” “Go get your stuff.”

  Since keeping Churchill Travis happy had become the modus operandi of the day, I had to ask Angie to take over my duties, which included floor-sweeping and a ten-thirty pedicure.

  Angie would have liked to stab me with the nearest pair of scissors, but at the same time she couldn’t keep from offering advice as I stocked my manicure supplies. “Do not talk too much. In fact, say as little as possibl
e. Smile, but don’t do that big smile you do sometimes. Get him to talk about himself. Men love that. Try to get his business card. And no matter what, don’t mention your little sister. Men are turned off by women with responsibilities.”

  “Angie,” I muttered back, “I’m not looking for a sugar daddy. And even if I was, he’s too old.”

  Angie shook her head. “Honey, there’s no such thing as too old. I can tell just by looking, that man hasn’t lost his juice yet.”

  “I’m not interested in his juice,” I said. “Or his money.”

  After Churchill Travis’s hair was cut and styled, I met him in another private room. We sat facing each other across the manicure table in the white light of a large swing-arm lamp. “Your cut looks good,” I commented, taking one of his hands and placing it gently in a bowl of softening solution.

  “It should, for what Zenko charges.” Travis stared dubiously at the array of tools and bottles of colored liquid on the manicure table. “You like working for him?”

  “Yes, sir, I do. I’m learning a lot from Zenko. I’m lucky to have this job.”

  We talked as I tended his hands, sloughing off dead skin, trimming and pushing back cuticles, filing and buffing his nails to a glassy sheen. Travis watched the procedure with great interest, having never submitted to such a thing in his life.

  “What made you decide to work in a beauty shop?” he asked.

  “When I was younger, I used to do my friends’ hair and makeup. I’ve always liked making people look good. And I like it that when I’m done, they feel better about themselves.” I uncapped a small bottle, and Travis regarded it with something close to alarm.

  “I don’t need that,” he said firmly. “You can do the other stuff, but I draw the line at polish.”

  “This isn’t polish, it’s cuticle oil. And you need plenty of it.” Ignoring his flinching, I used a tiny brush to apply the oil to his cuticles. “Funny,” I commented, “you don’t have a businessman’s hands. You must do something besides push paper across a desk.”

  He shrugged. “Some ranching work now and then. Lot of riding. And I work in the garden from time to time, although not as much as I did before my wife died. That woman had a passion for growing things.”

  I slicked some cream between my palms and began a hand and wrist massage. It was hard to get him to relax, his fingers unwilling to give up their knotty tension. “I heard she died pretty recently,” I said, glancing at his rough-cast face, where grief had left signs of obvious weathering. “I’m sorry.”

  Travis gave a slight nod. “Ava was a good woman,” he said gruffly. “The best woman I ever knew. She had breast cancer—we caught it too late.”

  In spite of Zenko’s adamance that employees refrain from discussing their personal lives, I was nearly overcome with the urge to tell Churchill that I, too, had lost someone dear to me. Instead I commented, “They say it’s easier when you’ve had time to prepare for someone’s death. But I don’t believe that.”

  “Neither do I.” Churchill’s hand tightened over mine so briefly that I barely had time to register its pressure. Startled, I looked up and saw the kindness and muted sadness in his face. Somehow I knew that no matter what I chose to tell or to keep secret, he would understand.

  As it turned out, my relationship with Churchill became something far more complex than a romantic one. It would have been more understandable and straightforward had it involved romance or sex, but Churchill was never interested in me that way. As an attractive and insanely wealthy widower just past sixty, he had his pick of women. I got into the habit of looking for mentions of him in newspapers and magazines. I was highly entertained by photos of him with glamorous society women and B-movie actresses, and even occasionally with foreign royalty. Churchill moved in fast circles.

  When he was too busy to come to Salon One for a haircut, he’d summon Zenko to his mansion. Sometimes he would drop by for a neck and eyebrow trim, or a manicure from me. Churchill was always a little sheepish about the manicures. But after the first time I filed, trimmed, scraped, and moisturized his hands, and buffed his nails to a subtle sheen, he liked the look and feel of them so much that he said he guessed he’d just added a new time-waster to his routine. And he admitted, after some goading from me, that his lady friends appreciated the results of his manicures too.

  Churchill’s friendship, the chats we had across the manicure table, made me the target of both envy and admiration at the salon. I understood the nature of the speculation about our friendship, the general consensus being that he certainly wasn’t seeking out my company to ask my opinions about the stock market. I think everyone assumed something had happened between us, or happened every so often, or was inevitably going to happen. Zenko certainly assumed so, and treated me with a courtesy he showed to no other employees of my level. I guess he figured even if I weren’t the exclusive reason Churchill came to Salon One, my presence certainly didn’t hurt.

  Finally one day I asked, “Are you planning to make a move on me sometime, Churchill?”

  He looked startled. “Hell, no. You’re too young for me. I like my women seasoned.” A pause, and then an almost comical expression of dismay. “You don’t want me to, do you?”

  “No.”

  Had he ever tried, I’m not sure what I would have done. I had no idea how to define my feelings toward Churchill—I hadn’t had enough relationships with men to put this one in context. “But I don’t understand why you’ve been paying attention to me,” I continued, “if you’re not planning to…you know.”

  “Someday I’ll let you know why,” he said. “But not now.”

  I admired Churchill more than anyone I had ever met. He wasn’t always easy to deal with, of course. His mood could turn ornery in a flash. He was not a restful man. I don’t think there were many moments in Churchill’s life when he was a hundred percent happy. A lot of that had to do with his having lost two wives, the first, Joanna, right after the birth of their son…and Ava, his wife of twenty-six years. Churchill was not one to accept the whims of fate passively, and the losses of people he loved had hit him hard. I understood about that.

  It was almost two years before I could bring myself to talk to Churchill about my mother, or anything but the barest facts about my past. Somehow Churchill had found out when my birthday was, and he had one of his secretaries call in the morning to tell me we were going out to lunch. I wore a neat black knee-length skirt and a white top, and my silver armadillo necklace. Churchill arrived at noon in an elegant British-made suit, looking like a prosperous old European hit man. He escorted me to a white Bentley waiting curbside, with a driver who opened the back door.

  We went to the fanciest restaurant I had ever seen, with French décor and white tablecloths and beautiful paintings on the walls. The menus were written in calligraphy on textured cream-colored paper, and the food was described in such intricate terms—roulades and rissoles and complex sauces—I had no idea what to order. The prices nearly gave me a heart attack. The cheapest item on the menu was a ten-dollar appetizer, and it consisted of a single shrimp prepared in ways I couldn’t begin to pronounce. Near the bottom of the menu I saw a description of a hamburger served with sweet potato fries, and nearly spewed a mouthful of diet Coke when I saw the price.

  “Churchill,” I said in disbelief, “there’s a hundred-dollar hamburger on the menu.”

  He frowned, not out of shared incredulity but because my menu had prices on it. One twitch of his finger summoned a waiter, who apologized profusely. The menu was whipped out of my hands and replaced by another, almost identical one, except this one had no dollar amounts.

  “Why shouldn’t mine have prices on it?” I asked.

  “Because you’re the woman,” Churchill said, still annoyed by the waiter’s mistake. “I’m taking you to lunch, and you’re not supposed to think about how much it costs.”

  “That hamburger was one hundred dollars.” I couldn’t stop obsessing over it. “What could they possibly d
o to that hamburger to make it worth a hundred dollars?”

  My expression seemed to amuse him. “Let’s ask.”

  A waiter was enlisted to answer questions about the menu. When asked how the hamburger was prepared and what made it so special, he explained the ingredients were all organic, including those in the homemade parmesan bun, and it contained smoked buffalo mozzarella, hydroponic butterhead lettuce, vine-ripened tomato, and chile compote layered atop a burger made of organic beef and ground emu.

  The word “emu” set me off.

  I felt a laugh break from my lips, and then another, and then there was no stopping the helpless giggles that made my eyes water and my shoulders tremble. I clamped a hand over my mouth to hold them back, but that only made it worse. I began to seriously worry if I could stop. I was making a spectacle of myself in the fanciest restaurant I’d ever been in.

  The waiter tactfully disappeared. I tried to gasp out an apology to Churchill, who watched me with concern and shook his head slightly, as if to say No, don’t apologize. He put his hand on my wrist in a reassuring grip. Somehow the pressure on my wrist quieted the wild laughter. I was able to take a long breath, and my chest relaxed.

  I told him about moving to the trailer in Welcome, and Mama’s boyfriend named Flip who had shot the emu. I couldn’t seem to talk fast enough, so many details tumbled out. Churchill caught every word, his eyes crinkling at the corners, and when I finally reached the part about giving the dead emu to the Cateses, he was chuckling.

  Although I hadn’t been aware of ordering wine, the waiter brought a bottle of pinot noir. The liquid glittered richly in tall-stemmed crystal glasses. “I shouldn’t,” I said. “I’m going back to work after lunch.”

  “You’re not going back to work.”