Family Dynamics (Pam of Babylon Book Five) (10 page)

“Thank you so much, Ashton. This means so much to me.” He smiled at her, happy that everything was going so well. By the time the Phillipses arrived, the five of them were laughing and relaxed. There was the usual chaos new people coming into a room bring, but soon they were all sitting around, drinking tea. A rare moment of calm gave John Phillips the chance to speak.

“OK, so let me get this straight. Natalie, you’re Deborah’s birth mother, correct?” He gave her a chance to reply.

“Yes, I am she!” She took a sip of tea, looking over her glass at John. Then he looked to Ted.

“And you’re Ted, right? You’re the father.”

Ted smiled and answered proudly. “That’s right, John,” he said.

“And you’re married, but not to Natalie.” He said it as a fact, not asking a question. Ted thought,
Oh, oh
. Ashton could feel the prickles on the back of his neck. He’d been standing quietly in the doorway that led back to the kitchen and was tempted to discretely take a step back and disappear down the hall, but he didn’t want to leave Ted alone.

“So where’s your wife?” John asked. He said it with an exaggerated movement of his shoulders, giving away that he knew who the “wife” was, but he was about to make a point.

“Ashton and I are married,” Ted said, standing up and reaching out to pull him into the room. “Almost a year ago!” The tension in the room was undeniable, but they were ready to let whatever was going to happen play out. Surely the guy wouldn’t make a scene while he was a guest in their house. John sat back and crossed his arms over his chest. He had a twist to his mouth that Ted didn’t miss.

“When Deborah invited us here to meet you, she said the birth mother was single and the father was married. I thought that meant a man and a woman. Not two men.” Beverly Phillips was pale, clearly embarrassed by her husband but not going to say a word in their defense.
How could she
? Ted thought. She felt like she needed to remain loyal to him, no matter how stupid he was acting. Deborah sat silent, her glass of tea halfway up to her mouth, while Zach twisted around in his chair, uncomfortable. Natalie was frozen in place, staring at John Phillips.

“Oh, God, yes, we are as gay as they come,” Ted trilled, animated. “I can see how you might be confused! But all is well. Are we about ready to eat, Ashton dear?” He turned his back to the crowd and rolled his eyeballs.

“Oh yes! Lunch is ready! Follow me, my wonderful friends. I have something special for you!” Ashton said, making huge sweeping motions with his hands, talking as loudly as he could without alarming the neighbors. He was sorry he hadn’t applied eyeliner, which he was known to wear on occasion. Deborah got ahead of her father and grabbed Ted and Ashton by the hands, pulling them into a hug. She whispered into their ears, “I’m sorry.” John Phillips would have minded an apology on his behalf.

Ashton and Ted kept up a running banter of questions during the meal, most of them directed at drawing Natalie and Beverly out. Surely, if there was going to be any heartache, it would belong to those two. Beverly had only praise for her daughter—her academic scholarship, the achievements she made in music, her athletic prowess. But John had to chime in with the trials of raising her, not noticing or seeming to care that Deborah was embarrassed by his disclosures.

“She hated to be touched, at least by me, didn’t you, Debbie? Tell the boys about your bedroom,” he requested, then directed his next sentence at Ted. “My own daughter installed a lock on the inside of her bedroom door, didn’t you honey?”

“I did it so you and Mom couldn’t barge in, Dad. You make it sound like there was something evil about it.”

Beverly spoke up. “Deborah was the neatest little girl! Her bed was always made, and she put her clothes away neatly as soon as she was able to dress herself,” she said. She sobbed an audible gulp and turned to Natalie. “When the lawyer called to tell us you had delivered, that there was a chance we would get Deborah, I nearly fainted. John was at work. I called his office, but he was already on his way to the hospital. He was so thrilled, he’d left without calling me the moment the lawyer phoned him! It was the happiest day of our lives.”

“You never told me that,” Deborah said, looking at John, eyebrows down and clearly annoyed. Ted thought,
What kind of family airs this crap in front of strangers?
Ashton was moved by it, however.

“I thought there was something wrong with her,” John stated. “She squirmed when we tried to pick her up and wouldn’t make eye contact. She could talk to strangers by the time she was one, but not to us.” Deborah was flushed, trying not to get defensive, but failing.

“I must have known I couldn’t belong to you,” she said. Looking over at Natalie’s wiry curls, she smiled. “Beverly, Mom here, had my hair straightened when I was six. Not that I don’t appreciate it now, Bev. It made elementary school much easier, not having a Brillo pad for a hairdo.”

Natalie started laughing. “You were lucky! My mother wouldn’t allow it. They were hippies back then, and you didn’t mess with Mother Nature. Besides, your hair didn’t suffer; it looks great now!” Everyone but John complimented Deborah for her wild, beautiful hair.

“Anyway, it looks like you might have benefited from my genes,” Ted added with a deadpan delivery. They looked at Ted’s receding hairline and thinning top. There was silence, and then laughter erupted.
Hopefully
, Ted thought,
John will shut his mouth
.
There goes the stereotype that people from Princeton are liberal intellectuals
.

“Zach, what do you think about all this?” Ashton asked. Zach shook his head back and forth.

“No way man, I’ve got no opinion about any of it,” he answered. They laughed, but Deborah looked at him, concerned. The last thing she needed was a reluctant boyfriend. Without him, she’d have to move back home for the summer.

The meal ended without any more commentary from John.

Ted wanted nothing but for them all to respect each other. He was still uncertain whether he needed a relationship with Deborah and Natalie, but it appeared that Ashton did. He was in the habit of speaking to Natalie on the phone at least three times a day.

“So, is this couch comfortable for sleeping?” Deborah asked Ashton.

“Yes, but come with me. We have two bedrooms, my dear.” He took her by the hand to a light-filled space at the rear of the apartment. It contained a daybed and the bookshelves with the overflow books from the den. “You can stay in here when you visit. He imagined weekend sleepovers, holiday meals with his new stepdaughter, shopping trips for back-to-school clothes. Did college-aged students need that? He had a lot to learn. His reverie was disturbed when Ted came to get them; John and Beverly were leaving.

After the Phillipses left for New Jersey, the relief everyone felt was evident when they found a place to curl up alone. Natalie claimed one end of the couch in the den and immediately starting snoring. Zach, who acted like nothing bothered him, lay on the carpet and went right to sleep. Deborah found a leather-bound copy of
Rebecca
that had belonged to Ted’s grandmother in the spare bedroom and curled up on the other end of the couch to read in peace. Ted put the football game on in the living room. Only Ashton was still standing, puttering around his kitchen and refusing any help cleaning up. It was a comfortable, relaxing ending to a nerve-racking meal.

It wasn’t so nice for John and Beverly, though. When they got to their car, they found the rear passenger-side window of John’s Mercedes-Benz smashed and the radio and GPS gone.

“In broad daylight?” John asked, looking around. “What kind of brazen jackass breaks into a car in this neighborhood? It’s no better than Jersey City here.”

“Are you going to call the police?” Beverly asked.

“Why? What will they do about it? God damn it!” he yelled. “Don’t stand there gawking. Help me clean up this glass in front of the tires so we don’t get a flat,” he demanded. They spent the next five minutes trying to avoid getting cut while they swept the glass up with pieces of cardboard John got out of the trunk while passers-by looked on with apathy. “This is why we don’t live in the fucking city,” John said.

Beverly thought the reason was because he worked in Princeton, but she kept her mouth shut. When they created a path for the tires to drive through, they left for home. It was hot out, so the wind from the absent back window felt good. Beverly imagined that if she were alone, she’d stop somewhere to shop or go to a museum—anywhere but home. Or she’d get on Route 9 once they were back in New Jersey and head to the shore. Her sister had a great little beach house on the bayside in Ocean City. Beverly loved going there. When the kids were small, she went every weekend and when invited, stayed the night. John hated the Jersey shore, preferring to drive five hours south to Bethany Beach in Delaware. But Beverly didn’t like going there because it meant the protracted car ride with her husband, who acted like he hated her and days in a small condo facing other condos with no chance to lounge on the beach alone. Now that the kids were gone, she knew she had to
do something
. She couldn’t stay with John and feel like crap about herself.

She’d had an idea the year before, the year Greg started high school. He didn’t need her as much as before. The private high school he went to was practically in their backyard, so he didn’t even need her to drive him in the snowiest weather. Her mother left her a little cash, not a fortune, but enough to help out with college tuition for the children with something left over. She knew John expected her to fork all of it over to him to manage, but she was standing strong that it would not happen. It was money her mother had invested for Beverly instead of spending it on herself. Thinking about it made Beverly cry; her mother had been generous to a fault with her daughters, buying them gifts and helping them have a better, easier life then she did. No, John was not touching the money. Beverly wanted to start a business. She wasn’t sure yet what it would be. She thought of the things she loved and wondered how she might turn them into a profit making business. Beverly loved to bake and imagined a little bakery like the old-time bakeries that used to line the street in the Chambersburg neighborhood she grew up in near Trenton. She and her father would walk to their favorite place every summer morning and buy pastries and bread for the day. Her mother would scold them for the sweet stuff; it wasn’t healthy. But he bought it anyway. Although the rent in Princeton would be too high for her to have a business there, she thought about the old Italian neighborhood from her childhood. You couldn’t pick up a paper without reading how they were up and coming again, the classic old row houses available to young, savvy buyers for a song. She was going to look at the real-estate section of the paper when they got home and start investigating.

The horrendous traffic flowed out of the Jersey side of the Lincoln tunnel. Once they were on the turnpike, John could relax and start interrogating his wife.

“So did you know those two were homos?” he asked, looking over at her. She wanted to ignore him, to tell him he was an ignorant asshole,
how the hell would she know?
But she fought the urge, and although she felt like the air had been sucked out of the car, she smiled at him sweetly.

“No John, Deborah didn’t say anything to me about their sexual orientation. Young people take those things in stride now days.” The minute the words were out of her mouth, she regretted it.

“That’s a crock of shit,” he said, exploding. “We raised her in church. She knows it’s a sin not to be taken lightly. I should have insisted that she go to the church school and not that liberal Friend’s School piece of garbage. I blame you for that mistake. No wonder she’s accepted those reprobates and that frizzy-haired hippy as her parents.” Beverly looked over at her husband, not understanding how he could fail to see the hypocrisy in what he’d just said.

“What’s a crock of shit, John? That we raised her in the church? Or that she is a lovely young woman who doesn’t judge others because they don’t think exactly like she does?” Beverly didn’t like starting fights while John drove, but it was too late. Better to get the issues out in the open before they got home and exposed Greg to this squabble. They’d adopted Deborah doing the best they could for her, and now she was grown up and decent—maybe not exactly what John wanted by living in sin with Zach and not coming home for the summer. But she’d looked for her birth parents with Beverly and John’s blessing and wanted them all to meet. Whether that was Deborah’s idea or someone else’s was not important. What mattered was that she included them in her plans. But Beverly wasn’t going to bring it up with John. In his current mood, he’d fail to see the positive in anything their daughter did.

He didn’t answer her.

Beverly loved John, and if they’d lived in a vacuum all their lives, they’d been fine with nothing to fight about. She thought the way a couple dealt with stress defined what kind of relationship they had. She also felt like they were always headed for divorce court.

Chapter 14