Кэрол Дуглас - Cat In A White Tie And Tails

“You are the trip business.”

“How’s your mother?” Jon had turned businessman brusque.

“Well, but more than somewhat confused, as you can imagine.”

“Same with my brother.” The waiter came to take their orders and then they were left in blessed peace for a few moments. The level of attentive service at this restaurant assured a good many necessary “time-outs” in the conversation.

Temple suspected they all ordered just to get it over with. Salads were too messy for delicate, groundbreaking conversations, Temple knew from experience. Your mouth was always sprouting spinach leaves that wouldn’t chew, or your fork was pursuing vagrant bleu cheese crumbles just as words were most urgently called for. The guys ordered steak entrées and she wild salmon.

“You should know,” Jon told them while the tablecloth still hosted only drinks, the roll basket, and butter containers, “and this might be a bit shocking. I want to come out of the closet.”

That shut their mouths.

“In terms of our”—he gestured back and forth between himself and Matt—“relationship.”

Matt, shocked, opened his mouth to speak.

“You’re right, Matt. Secrets are corrosive. Besides.” Jon looked sheepish. “My brother knows something is wrong. I can’t keep him in the dark much longer.”

“I don’t even know your brother’s name,” Matt said. “Why should he be the deciding factor in anything that involves my mother, as well as you?”

“Because he loves Mira and wants to marry her.”

“If he does, he’ll let her come to terms with the problem on her own. She won’t even talk to me about it.”

“It’s not a problem.” Jon smiled the same heart-stopping way Matt did when he was pleased. “Knowing Philip, he’ll win her over. Consider me the advance guard for a better future trip to Chicago,” Jon told him. “You’re not exactly nobody. The extended family only knows you’re a ‘distant relative,’ but is wild to meet you,” he added as ruefully as Matt spoke of his birth father’s family. “Now that I’ve seen the lovely Miss Barr, that’ll go double.”

Matt just shook his head, trying to imagine—like Temple—who, when and where, would tell Mira the family that had banished mother and infant son thirty-five years ago was strong-arming their belated introduction into their bosom.

After a few sips all around, Jon broached what seemed an even more uneasy subject for him. “Since the … revelation, I’ve studied the family financial structure.”

“I’m financially fine,” Matt said. “I’d be financially fine if the best job I could find was at a fast-food place.”

“I understand that. I admire where you are. I admire your independence. I’m not thinking according to need. I’m thinking according to … justice. Moral responsibility. My parents’ family had an inflated notion of their position. They opposed my enlisting in the armed forces. They wiped my wishes and obligations and responsibilities away like bread crumbs off a table.”

He gestured at the recently brushed white linen cloth.

“They sinned against me, and your mother, and you. You of all people should understand those terms.”

“I do,” Matt said. “I just don’t want to apply them to anyone else.”

“‘Vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord,’” Temple put in helpfully.

Jon sat back and took a hit of scotch. “That’s what my family always feared.”

“Someone alien having a claim on their money, right?” Temple said. “Especially someone their heirs might have liked or loved. ‘Money is the root of all evil,’ et cetera. Oh, heck, Mr. Jon Winslow. I’ve always been a working girl. All I need is a decent place to live where there’s a really good selection of vintage and resale rags, an honest man to love and love me, and a job that challenges my brain. The rest is luck or compromise, and I don’t believe in either.”

Jon took a big belt of single malt, and closed his eyes momentarily. “Paying off your mother,” he told Matt, “paying for a two-flat for her and you and nothing more, was written off as a ‘bad investment.’ If you can turn the other cheek on that, I can’t. My parents were like a minor league version of the Kennedys under old Joe, the bootlegging womanizer. Men had to excel in power positions and the women didn’t count except as props.”

Matt sat silent. Temple saw the muscle flexing in his left jaw because she faced it and Jon didn’t.

“I’m not guilty,” Matt told his father, “of forgiveness and mercy toward your family any more than I’m guilty of rage and revenge. I’m just certain, lousy as my low-end so-called family situation was, I came out better than if I’d been condescended to and manipulated in the high-end success factory you were put through.”

Temple clapped softly.

“Yeah,” his father admitted, “I did it all by the family code after I got my ‘going rogue’ stage over. It’s golden and shiny on the outside, but hollow on the inside. I think I always missed the genuineness of my youthful patriotic instincts. My most treasured moments are the ones least plotted.”

“Not mine. What about your brother?” Matt asked. “Did he fit the family mold?”

“Just who is interviewing whom about who’s fit to marry into whose family?”

Matt shrugged, but smiled at that bit of humility. “I couldn’t defend my mother then. I can now. Or try at least.”

“I wish I could say that for my kids. They’ve all done ‘well,’ but … anyway, Philip and his wife weren’t able to have children. They put their spare time into charity work for kids. That seemed to bond them better than board dinners and corporate cocktail parties. It was an awful thing when Sarah died. Cancer. So … I’m shocked, but fine with what’s happened. The only mystery is why Mira is so freaked about it. That was thirty-five years ago.”

“Simple for guys,” Matt said. “You had an incandescent one-night stand to idealize.”

Jon’s inbred control shattered. “How did you know it was ‘incandescent’?”

“I’ll never tell,” Matt said, but Temple knew.

His mother had given him a new surname from a soaring Christmas carol, “O Holy Night,” also called in the lyrics, “O Night Divine.” She totally approved of Matt’s not getting his father’s ego or interest up by keeping this most personal of his mother’s secrets.

“The woman had to bear the consequences, as it’s so coyly put,” Matt went on, “and you can never imagine how hellish that was.” He took the gloves off. “You couldn’t have used a condom?”

His father’s ruddy middle-aged complexion reddened more. “Being prepared made the sin bigger.”

“I bet you got over that in the military.” It was Matt’s first slightly bitter remark.

Temple hadn’t thought of that, of Jonathan Winslow getting clued in to “protect himself” while Mira’s “lost” innocence was paid for again and again through the years.

“It was my first time too,” Jon muttered. “I was scared about what I’d done and where I was going … I had just turned eighteen and was trying to prove I wasn’t the kid my family thought I was, but I still was. As soon as I got back, I started looking for her.”

“She’d never be the same. She thought you were dead all those years. Then you were resurrected. She regrets every decision she made since that time. That’s why she refused to meet with you when I tried to arrange it. You were still dead to her. Now, if she marries your brother, there’ll be this bitter family secret with a walking, talking souvenir.

“Either of you told your brother?” Matt asked last.

“I don’t think so.”

“You don’t know so?” Matt sounded incredulous.