John Lescroart - Nothing But The Truth

‘And how long was that, that phase?’

‘Five years, maybe a little more.’

‘Did they ever know what she did?’

‘Oh no. She was a student, like me. But my dad, especially, saw through her, saw what she was. He tried to tell me, but I wasn’t ready to hear anything critical from my hopelessly unhip father. I mean, he sold insurance for a living. He was in the Rotary Club, the Holy Name Society. What in the world could he tell me?’

‘Only everything,’ Hardy said seriously.

The comment made a connection. ‘Exactly. But I was out on the sexual frontier and he didn’t have a clue. I even thought he was jealous of me.’ Again, that distinctive hollow laugh. ‘So of course I gave up on them, not her. And then Dad died. And then two years later, Mom.’ He looked down at his hands.

‘So you were married five years?’

‘Not yet. We were free. We didn’t need the piece of paper.’

‘So what did you do? Were you an actor, too?’

‘No.’ He thought for a moment. ‘I still don’t know why. Chicken, maybe. Screwing on film was too far for me to go. Like some part of me knew I’d outgrow all of that someday. I didn’t want any record of it.’

‘That wasn’t dumb.’

‘No. But it wasn’t something I planned either. I can’t take any credit for it, that I was this virtuous guy. It just happened.’

‘So what did you do?’

The question seemed to embarrass him. ‘Not much, to tell the truth. Dawn made sporadic but pretty decent money and I had majored in finance, so I managed it. We had enough to get by, and the main thing was we didn’t want to be tied down to jobs. We had to live.’

‘So what changed?’

‘I guess I did.’ Hardy didn’t want to admit it, but there was a charming, self-effacing quality to Ron Beaumont. As everyone else who knew him said, he seemed to be a great guy. ‘It wasn’t any increase in wisdom,’ he admitted candidly, ‘just age. Maybe my conventional background started to catch up with me, I don’t know, but I figured we’d done the bohemian thing, and it was time to move on. Frankly, the scene was getting old, not to mention us.

‘So she got pregnant. We got pregnant. Then she decided to have an abortion. We had a huge fight over it. She was going to do it anyway. And she did. And I moved out.’ He sighed. ‘Then I think for the first time she couldn’t handle… the emotions. She was thirty-one years old. The biological clock was ticking pretty good. The whole thing just tore her up. She was shocked that she couldn’t rationalize some way to handle it, but she couldn’t.’

‘And you got back together?’

He nodded. ‘We got married. I started working as a teller in a bank. We had Cassandra. A year later we had Max. She hated it.’

‘What?’

‘The whole thing. Babies. Crying, puking, diapers, no sleep. But mostly the boredom, being with them all day. She hated what I was doing, my job. She hated that we had no money. But you know the funny thing?’

‘What’s that?’

Hardy recognized serenity in the man’s face. ‘I loved it. I loved them. It was as though somebody just flicked a switch and suddenly I saw everything differently. It made sense. This was what we were here for. Certainly it was what I was here for.’

This was an incredibly difficult thing to hear. Ron was describing Hardy’s own feelings at the birth of his first son Michael, who had died in infancy. That tragedy had plunged Hardy into a cold and dark void from which he thought he’d never escape.

But nearly a decade later, the births of Rebecca and Vincent had rekindled a flame that had burned brightly for several years. More recently, though, it had dimmed to where it now mostly felt to Hardy as if there was no light or heat, only ash covered by other stuff that didn’t burn at all. He wondered if under it all, the last embers had truly died and if not, if there was a way to coax a new flame to life. When this was over, he promised himself, he was going to try.

‘So what happened next?’ Hardy asked.

‘About what you’d expect up to a point,’ Ron replied. ‘Fights, more fights, still more fights. She wanted to go back to work and we fought about that.’

‘Doing what she’d been doing?’

He shrugged. ‘She said it was all she knew. I told her to learn something else, she was a mother now, think of the kids. Did she want them growing up in that environment?’

‘And what did she say?’

‘She said there was nothing wrong with that environment. It paid well and provided a valuable social service.’ He rolled his eyes in frustration. ‘I was being inconsistent. I was becoming too conservative. I was a hypocrite. You name it, I was it.’

‘So she went back to it?’

‘Not right away. Not for a while.’

‘Why not?’

‘I’d like to believe that it was my strength of will.’ A dry chuckle. ‘I didn’t give in. But she really couldn’t stand being at home, and I wasn’t putting the kids in full-time daycare, so we switched. Big mistake on my part, as it turned out.’

‘Why was that?’

‘Because she was then the good working mother, and I was the nearly unemployable dad. The courts like mothers best anyway for custody, and when the dad doesn’t have a real career…’ He shrugged. ‘He’s dead meat.’

‘So she went to work?’ Hardy had to know what had happened.

Ron nodded. ‘Some office job, which of course was incredibly boring and didn’t pay anything like she was used to. She wanted out, but I kept wanting to make the family thing work.’ He sighed. ‘Anyway, we made it a couple more years with me not working – bad, bad mistake – but finally I had to get another job, too.’ Ron’s eyes grew hard. He was sitting on the front inch of the couch again, his hands clenched so hard the knuckles were white. ‘Which is when,’ he said, ‘she started selling the kids.’

Marie and the children finally arrived back at the duplex which, truth to tell, was a great relief to Hardy. Belief in Ron Beaumont and his idealistic, over-the-top, melodramatic, perhaps heroic story had grown in him over the past days. To have it revealed now as false just when he’d come to accept it as the truth would have seemed a joke almost too cruel to endure.

They spent a few moments explaining Hardy’s presence and involvement to a skeptical Marie. But Ron and the kids – Cassandra particularly – convinced her that Hardy was on their side. He could be trusted absolutely. He was Cassandra’s hero. Clearly, she was thrilled to see him again, and so glad it was she who’d finally convinced him to help them. He told her he’d made a lot of progress. He’d give her a final report tomorrow. She loved that.

Otherwise, they were the well-mannered children they’d been at the hotel, although Hardy was delighted when Ron had to tell them to stop bickering over whose turn it was to get to choose the video. They were regular kids, after all. Much like his own. It continued to be a relief.

Marie – a handsome, physically confident yet soft-spoken woman in her late twenties – put on a brave front, but Ron’s situation with the children here was precarious enough without the added bonus of a stranger. Even if that stranger was presented as their savior.

And, because life was never simple, Hardy got the strong impression, picking up on the household banter, that the near future of Ron and Marie as a couple was in doubt. If it turned out that Ron decided to relocate tomorrow with the children, it wasn’t at all clear to Hardy that Marie would be joining them. Or that she even knew this was a contingency plan.

But after the kids had retired to the television, the two of them unpacked the bags with the practiced efficiency of a long-term couple. When they’d finished, Marie broke out a beer for each of the men.