Bermuda Heat (7 page)

Chris entered the kitchen and immediately headed for the coffee. He used some of Graham’s flavored cream and his usual half spoonful of sugar. He stood behind David, not bothering to sit.

Graham greeted him and after glancing at his watch, said,

“Well, I have to run. Enjoy your day.” He rinsed his coffee cup out and slipped out of the room. For David the temperature rose several degrees.

“What did he say to you?” Chris asked.

“Nothing. Why?”

“You’re upset.”

“No, I’m not… Okay, maybe I am a bit. This whole thing just pisses me off.”

Chris set his empty mug on the table, settled his hands on David’s shoulders and began massaging him. David could feel his tension slip away. Chris’s fingers dug into the tendons around his spine. He rolled his head back and sighed. “Oh yeah, that feels good…”

A sound broke them apart. David’s grandmother stood in the kitchen doorway, A look of disgust on her face. David stood up, brushing Chris’s hands off his shoulders.

BeRMudA heAt
47

“Looking for something, Nanna?”

Without a word she drew herself up to her full five-four height and crossed the room to the cupboard. She took two mugs and the carafe of coffee from the table, set them on a lacquered tray, and left the room. David stopped her.

“Before you get too busy, I’d like to see you and my mother this morning, if it’s not too much trouble.”

“Young man—”

“We can meet in here,” David said and turned his back on her. He met Chris’s alarmed looked. “You want to go antiquing later? Once my business here is…taken care of?”

“Ah, sure. That would be nice.” Chris bit his lip. “David—”

David reached up to clasp his hand. “It’ll be okay. Don’t worry about it.”

Chris’s grin was shaky. “I know it will be.”

David’s grandmother re-entered the kitchen moments later.

His mother had joined her and looked thunderous. She wasn’t used to being summoned by anyone in her own home. She threw a poisonous look at their entwined hands.

David ignored them while he turned to Chris. “Why don’t you go outside, hon. Take a walk down by the beach. There’s even a tree fort in the woods I built when I was a kid.”

“Your father built that,” his mother snapped.

David turned cold eyes on her. “Only he’s not my father, is he, Mother?”

Chris slipped out of the house and David watched him briefly while he made his way down toward the waterfront.

“We never hid the fact you were adopted by Graham. He loved you like a son.”

“And my real father? Oh that’s right, he died. Vietnam, wasn’t it? The great war hero. Gee, if he’d been younger he could have been a Gulf War veteran. I’m sure there’s a lot more cachet in that. Vietnam always left such a bad taste in everyone’s mouth.”

48 P.A. Brown

His mother’s face grew pale, but she didn’t back down.

“I’m not sure what you mean.”

“For God’s sake Mother, stop lying. My father hired a private investigator to find me. Of course this was only after he found out your stories about my death were convenient lies. He’s in Bermuda, but then you knew that, didn’t you? You must have been in a panic when I said we were booked to go there. You knew then, didn’t you?”

“Anything I did, I did for your own good. He was a horrible man.”

“A gold digger,” his grandmother added. “He tried to trap your mother into a marriage that would have ruined her. He was a hippy, a wastrel and a drug abuser. Is that what you want in a father? Graham was the kind of man who was there for you—”

“Even though I wasn’t his? How noble.”

“David Eric Laine. You know very well your father loves you.”

He ignored her protests. “Where did you meet this hippy, mother? Somehow I can’t imagine one of them would dare to show his face around here.” David studied his grandmother’s face. He narrowed his eyes and swung back to face his mother.

“It must have been one hell of a mistake.”

“What do you mean? You can’t possibly know anything—”

“I know you. You’re an uptight bitch who never gave in to a physical impulse in your life.”

“You can’t talk to me like that!”

His grandmother snipped, “Just because you rule your life with animal lust doesn’t mean civilized people do.”

“Well I’m not the product of Immaculate Conception, even you can’t claim that,” David said.

“Don’t blaspheme,” his mother said, but it sounded more like rote. She averted her eyes.

The awkward silence was broken by a chilly voice that David BeRMudA heAt
49

almost didn’t recognize. “Well, are you finally going to tell him, Barbara?”

They all turned at Graham’s entrance. The easygoing man David had always known was gone.

David’s mother didn’t seem happy at the interruption. Her mouth thinned and she didn’t look at anyone in the room.

“Graham, I thought we’d agreed to let me talk to him.”

“Except you won’t, will you?” Graham’s eyes flicked over his mother-in-law. “If the both of you had been honest from the beginning, none of this would have happened.”

“We did it to protect—”

“Who, Barbara? The way I see it, the only one you protected was yourself, and your mother.”

“That’s hardly fair, Graham,” David’s grandmother said, drawing herself up in outrage.

“How about we stop talking like I’m not in the room.” David felt his blood pressure rise. He clamped his mouth shut to keep from saying the words he wanted to let loose.

Husband and wife stared at each other across the tiled floor.

Finally Barbara spoke to David, “If you must know, I made a mistake when I was young and foolish and…and impetuous. I let my head be turned by a charming, but empty, man.”

“Where’d you meet this ‘empty man’? At university? You’re a Willerton, of course you went. Some East Coast debutante college no less, I’m sure.” He glanced at his stepfather, then looked away. He didn’t want to see the distress in his eyes.

“No.” His mother took great pains not to look at anyone. “I didn’t meet him at Bryn Mawr.” Graham looked at his motherin-law. The look on both their faces said, “Don’t go there.” For the first time since he’d known her, David’s mother ignored her own mother.

“Woodstock,” she finally said.

David wasn’t sure he had heard her right. “Woodstock.
You
were at Woodstock?”

50 P.A. Brown

“She ran away from home,” his grandmother said icily. “In a moment of pique she nearly threw away a lifetime of promise.”

David swore under his breath. His stepfather sighed and sank into a chair at the kitchen table. He gestured for David to join him but David ignored the invitation.

“There’s no need for that kind of language,” his grandmother snapped. “Whatever you have become, you are still a Willerton.”

“Is that what you told my mother when she came back, knocked up? That she was still a Willerton?”

“Barbara knew her place.”

“I’m sure,” he said. “Under your thumb.” David turned his back on her and spoke to his mother. “You met this man, this Joel Cameron, at Woodstock. What was he doing there?”

“Joey, he called himself Joey. He was attending school.

Apparently it’s common for Bermudians to travel overseas to get an education. He took time off school to go to Woodstock. It was the biggest thing of the time.”

“So I’ve heard,” David said. Try as he might he could not see his mother as a flower child dancing through Max Yasgur’s muddy pasture, long hair full of flowers, barefoot and…sexually free? Doing it with total strangers. His mother?

“Sex, drugs and rock n’ roll,” he muttered. “What happened to him? Did he abandon you once he found out you had a little Joel Cameron in the oven?”

His mother winced at the crude words. “No,” she whispered.

“It wasn’t like that. We finally got out of the festival and I followed him…”

“Followed him where?” Although David already knew. His birth certificate said it all; the birth certificate that didn’t list a father’s name.

“Were you planning from the beginning to lie to us both? Is that why you wrote my father out of my existence before I was even born?”

“N-no.” For the first time in his life David saw his mother BeRMudA heAt
51

confused.

“Son,” Graham said. “Is this really necessary—”

“You tell me. You try finding out everything you believed in was a lie. So Mother.” He swung back to face her. “How did you manage to forget to include my father’s name on my birth certificate?”

“I can’t—”

“Tell him, Barbara,” Graham said. “I think the time for lies has past.”

“You weren’t born in a hospital. We had no money… a woman we met was a mid-wife, but it wasn’t legal to use them back then, so I said it was a premature home birth.” She ducked her head, a line of sweat on her upper lip. “Afterward, I never added your father’s name. It was an oversight—”

“Bullshit.”

“Don’t talk to her that way!” his grandmother snapped.

“Nanna, stay out of this,” Graham said. “Maybe if you had minded your own business back then, it wouldn’t have come to this.”

“He has no right to speak to his mother that way.”

“Why? Only you can?” David studied his mother’s face, noting how pale it was. Any pity he might have felt was dispelled by the knowledge of how thoroughly she had messed with his life, as well as his real father’s. “So, you followed your new boy toy to San Francisco and dumped me in a pot pad like a litter of unwanted kittens. Don’t tell me, Haight-Ashbury, right?”

His mother darted a quick glance at his grandmother and raised her chin. “Yes, but you were never ‘dumped.’”

“Despite your lousy mothering skills, you’ve actually managed to impress me. You had the balls to leave this.” He pointedly looked around the modern and very expensive kitchen, then looked at his grandmother. “To leave her. Too bad you didn’t have the guts to stay away. Instead, you let her suck you back in.”

52 P.A. Brown

“I was there for her when your deadbeat father grew feathers and flew the coop.” His grandmother stiffened. “Would you rather have grown up on the filthy streets of that disgusting city?”

“A cage is always preferable to the streets. Isn’t that what being a Willerton is all about? A gilded cage?”

“You were never in a cage! You were protected and I might even say cosseted.”

He noticed she never used the word love. He suspected that word wasn’t part of her vocabulary. “I gave up trying to make you happy when I was ten,” he said. “It took me nearly another decade before I managed to escape with my balls intact.”

“Is that why you chose such a loathsome job? Associating with the lowest dregs of society, murderers and rapists?” Her gaze scanned his face, which he knew still bore the remnants of the bruises from his latest altercation. “It’s no wonder you became a degenerate, living with that androgynous faggot. You could have been a lawyer. You could have been anything!”

David had never felt more like hitting a woman in his life.

He clenched his hands into fists, digging his fingernails into his palms to drive the urge away. He could feel the blood pumping through his forehead. His jaws tightened. “I’m going to ignore that remark. But hear this, you will never mention Chris again, or I won’t be responsible for what I do.”

“You dare threaten me?” His grandmother roared. “You disgusting pervert—”

David turned away from her. Standing up, he stared through the screened-in porch’s windows toward the lake. He spotted Chris standing on the shore, tossing stones into the unruffled surface. Even from this distance his heart ached with love at the sight of Chris’s trim body. How dare this woman try to sully that.

“David, please,” his mother wheedled. God she never gave up.

He spun around and shouted, “I’m tired of your lies. You had the gall to tell my own father that I was dead! You told me he was dead. How dare you!”

BeRMudA heAt
53

“We dared because we cared. How can I make you understand that?”

“I’ve seen how much you cared. I disgust you, isn’t that what you’ve told me I don’t know how many times? Trust me, the feeling is mutual.”

“David!”

“Shut up!”

Both women recoiled. His grandmother put her hand on his mother’s arm. Graham stood up.

“I think you two should leave,” Graham said softly to the two women. “This has gone far enough.”

David could tell his grandmother wanted to argue, but his mother’s grip on her arm tightened. Finally they both turned away. “You’re right. This conservation is a waste of time. Leave him, if that’s what he wants.”

“Yes, Nanna,” his mother said meekly, once again giving up the argument without a whimper of protest. He wondered how long it had taken his grandmother to whip the fight out of her.

She never looked back as she followed her mother out of the kitchen. The room seemed larger without them.

Wearily David met Graham’s troubled gaze. Neither one of them spoke for nearly a minute. Then Graham sighed and massaged the back of his neck. “What will you do now?”

“Go to Bermuda. Meet my father. After that… I don’t know.”

“Maybe once your business is taken care of you could stop back here. I’ll talk to your mother. We can make this okay.”

“I don’t know, Dad.”

“We’re family, David. No matter how badly your mother’s behaved, she never meant to hurt you. That might be hard to believe right now, but it’s true.”

David knew his stepfather meant well, but it was all too much to swallow just now. Bitter bile filled the back of his throat.

“We’ll talk later, okay?”

54 P.A. Brown

He left, making his way out to the deck. He took a deep breath, filling his lungs with clean air and washing away the poisonous fatigue in his blood. Chris was still down by the waterfront.

David picked his way downhill and came up behind his husband.

He leaned over and planted his mouth on Chris’s neck, warm from the sun. He pressed his hips against his favorite playground.

Chris jumped. He spun around and grabbed David’s arms.