“Okay. Whatever you want.” Bette shrugs.

“How about seeing if Katie could join us?”

“You want Kit to come to dinner with us?” Bette asked incredulous. Melvin had visited her in Los Angeles numerous times over the years, and even though Kit lived in the same city he treated her much the same way as he did Bette’s wife. It was as though Bette’s half-sister, his older daughter from a previous marriage didn’t exist. Never did he even ask how Kit was doing, much less want to see her, but unbeknownst to Bette her father and his estranged daughter had had a recent encounter.

***

It was nine months earlier when Melvin had visited Los Angeles. Tina was just two months pregnant with their first child and Bette was insistent on telling her father that he was going to be a grandfather. She thought he would have been thrilled, but instead he outright rejected the idea that he and the baby could be related if it wasn’t biologically Bette’s child. He’d upset Tina to the point of her feeling sick, and leaving the restaurant in the middle of dinner to go home. Bette offered to go with her, but Tina insisted she stay with her father. Bette was torn, but she was so adamant about convincing her father that this was her baby too that she’d stayed; allowing Tina to take a cab home alone. It was one of many regrets that Bette had of choosing her father over Tina or tolerating his behavior at the risk of hurting Tina’s feelings. Tina miscarried four weeks later and the guilt tore at her core.

Bette had told Kit how horribly their father had treated the couple’s news of starting a family but Kit didn’t have any sympathy for Bette’s plight. “Bette what did you expect? He is an old fashioned man. A bigot in his own right. Someone has to talk some sense into you about that man because he is not the saint you think he is. You are so brainwashed. What do you trade to feel his pride?”

Her older sister basically told Bette to grow up and to stop idolizing a man who harbored so much hatred in his heart. After Bette left her apartment, it took all the strength that she could muster to pay her father a visit that night at his hotel. This was the man that had thrown Kit out of his home, taken away her parental rights when she’d given birth to a son, and arranged a private adoption with strict instructions that that the boy whom they had named David Waters, have no communication with his birth mother.