looked momentarily puzzled then laughed and replied, “Well, I’m kind of new to this, I forgot how.”
“Hold them under your chin,” said Laura, positioning the opened passport and driver’s license in Amanda’s hands.
While Laura was focusing on Amanda’s face and the identifying documents below she noticed that Amanda’s last name was Sands.
“What a funny coincidence,” said Laura, “Amanda’s last name is Sands.”
“That is funny,” said Hugo. “Well? How’s that birth date?”
“Oh, she’s eighteen all right. Just,” Laura replied.
Just then the phone rang. Laura picked it up, spoke for a few moments then turned to Hugo. “It’s Margot. She’s at the station.”
“I thought you said Margot was sick?” Hugo said to Amanda.
“She must have felt better at the last minute and not realized they sent me,” Amanda replied calmly.
“Laura, would you run and pick her up? We’ll turn this into a double shoot.”
“That will work,” said Laura, leaving Hugo to stare at Amanda with a strange sensation.
“You’re not... related to me, are you?” he asked, feeling as he looked into her pale blue eyes that he was looking into a mirror.
“Yes, I am. Haven’t you figured it out yet?”
“I know I don’t have any more nieces. Are you perhaps a second cousin?”
“You wish. I’m your daughter.” A moment of silence passed as he stared at her intently, searching her face for a trick or a prank. It was impossible, unbelievable, for to his certain knowledge he had never impregnated any woman in the entire course of his life. And yet, she looked so much like him, it was almost impossible not to believe it at once. Even Laura had instantly noticed the resemblance.
“But...” Hugo hesitated as he groped for the right words, “...how is it I haven’t heard about you before? Who’s your mother?”
“Don’t you remember who you were making love to eighteen years ago?”
“Cassandra,” he replied at once, recalling his long lost love and a prophetic poem, which she had left behind, containing a cryptic, line about two becoming three. That line had haunted him since Laura had unearthed the scroll on the upper shelf of a closet in a room in his house occupied by Cassandra almost two decades before.
“Yes!”
For a moment they simply gazed at each other. Then he came out of his reverie, resisting the urge to embrace his newly sprung offspring as he remembered the event she had interrupted upon her arrival.
“Of all days you had to show up!” Hugo snapped, pacing with his hands in his pockets.
“Why? What’s the matter with today?” Amanda queried, observing that he seemed more peeved than upset.
“I was proposing marriage to Laura after six years of being crazy about her and she was thinking about saying yes. How unsexy is a suitor with a grown daughter!”
“I think you’re incredibly sexy,” said Amanda, unfazed.
Then Hugo began to process the scandalous realization that he’d just spanked his own daughter. “So, what was with the prank?” he demanded.
“The posing as a model? That was a sudden inspiration. I’ve always wondered what a spanking from my daddy would feel like!” said Amanda, spontaneously hugging Hugo. He hugged her back briefly then thrust her away, exclaiming, “This is absurd. It can’t be. It must be a practical joke. Why show up now? Why today? I’m confused. Let’s get coffee.”
They locked up the store and walked across the street to Marguerite Alexander’s bookshop, where Hope Spencer Lawrence was presiding over an empty coffee bar.
“Hi Hope,” said Hugo, leaving Amanda at one of the small tables by the hearth. “Bring us a couple of double caps, would you?”
“Who’s the babe?” asked the resident blonde beauty of Random Point in all innocence, used to Hugo stuffing his models with chocolate chip muffins during photo shoots. Hope Spencer Lawrence would have shot regularly for Hugo herself, had her husband not been an instructor at the local prep school attempting to maintain a low profile about his wife’s professional B&D past.
“My daughter, apparently,” Hugo confided, too struck by the uncanny resemblance between himself and the girl to attempt to deny it. Anyway, the word Cassandra had more or less explained it all. Anything was possible when that laser-focused female was involved.
“She’ll bring us coffee,” said Hugo, sitting opposite Amanda, who folded her French manicured hands calmly on the small, round wooden table between them but grinned back at him, mirthful at the trick she had pulled off.
“I just don’t understand your mother’s behavior,” Hugo said somewhat helplessly. “I was still completely enamored with her when she left me. She never said a word about a baby. Why? I would have married her.”
“Yes, we always felt you would have. But Mother knew you didn’t want children and didn’t feel it was fair to thrust me on you.”
“She might have let me know! Oh, am I going to thrash her for this!”
“She also said your aura was too powerful to expose an impressionable child to.”
Hugo groaned and exclaimed, “That’s the first thing you’ve said that doesn’t surprise me. No doubt she traced the moment of your conception to a period during which mercury was in retrograde, and it gave her a foreboding of evil.”
“She merely felt that a child should be reared by milder and less mercurial types than yourself.”
“Oh, is that so? And who’d she fix you up with instead?”
“A wise and industrious vegan who married Mother when I was three and has furnished me with gentle guidance ever since. He owns yoga studios and health food stores in San Francisco.”
“Well, what the hell did she think I would have done to you?” Hugo bristled.
“She just didn’t want me growing up to be a spoiled daddy’s girl.”
“So? How did you turn out?”
“I’m a daddy’s girl,” she grinned. “But not spoiled. I worked in the store and taught yoga classes all through high school.”
“So, when did you find out about me?” Hugo asked, thanking Hope for the large steaming cups of cappuccino she set down before them.
“Hello,” said Hope, smiling at Amanda.
“Hello,” Amanda replied.
“Later,” said Hugo, shooing Hope back to the coffee bar.
“Well, I was twelve going
