Cathryn Parry - The Good Mum

Brandon’s needs had won. Brandon’s needs would always win. As they must.

* * *

AIDAN ATE HIS meal silently, alone. His grandmother had been on her telephone for the past half hour.

First her stockbroker, then her lawyer. Then the general manager of her professional baseball team, the New England Captains. If he was lucky, Aidan thought with amusement, maybe he’d get the trifecta plus one, a ringside seat to her conversation with the head of the board at Wellness Hospital.

Finally, she hung up.

“Eighty-five years old,” he said to the legendary Vivian Sharpe. “Don’t you think you should relax and enjoy yourself for once?”

She gave him a dark look. “You know better than to say that to me.”

He set down his fork on his luncheon plate. They were at a fancy seafood restaurant that just felt odd to him, after nearly a year out of the country and living in the situation he’d been in.

He sighed. Might as well come out and say what he’d been thinking. Delicacy had never been a part of his and Gram’s relationship. “Dad mentioned in his last email that he and Mom were worried about you. He asked me to talk to you and give my opinion about the state of your, ah, mental faculties.”

And then Aidan softened the blow with the wry, comical smile that he and Gram alone liked to share. She snorted at him. He knew it was good-natured on her part, though the message surely had to sting.

She waved her hand. “I’m restructuring my estate, and William and Jane haven’t been happy about that fact. Pay no attention to their insinuations. I don’t.”

Aidan nodded. William, Aidan’s dad, was a world-renowned heart surgeon. He and Jane—Aidan’s mother, also a cardiologist—had enough money that they didn’t ever need to worry about finances again. Even so, finances were the types of conversation they loved to concern themselves with.

Heart surgeons with no hearts, Aidan thought, and not for the first time. He laughed out loud. It was darkly comical, and since he knew there was nothing he could change about it, dark humor with Gram was a fine way to cope.

“You laugh now,” Gram said, a spark in her eyes, “but William spoke to me about you, as well.”

“He isn’t worried about my finances, is he?”

“No.” She waved her hand again. But this time she met his gaze seriously. “I’m worried about you, too, Aidan, but I’m worried about your well-being.” She leaned forward and peered more closely at him. “You’ve been through a terrible situation. I wish you had come home last October when it happened. I don’t know why you stayed.”

No more humor, he thought sadly.

“How are you, Aidan? Honestly?”

“I’m fine, Gram,” he insisted.

She shook her head. “I may have been on my phone just now, but I noticed you’ve been ignoring your text messages. That isn’t fine.”

His grandmother didn’t miss a trick. Surely she’d also caught a glimpse of who the text messages were from—Fleur’s parents. Right now, he just wasn’t in a good place to speak with them. Eventually he would be. But not yet.

He gazed out the window at the view overlooking the blue Atlantic. Sailboats bobbed in the bay. In the distance was a faint smudge of land—one of the islands in the outer harbor.

“Aidan?”

He glanced at the water glass he’d been idly rubbing his finger around. “Yes, Gram?”

“It is nice to have you back. And to see you looking civilized again, even if your hair isn’t quite short enough yet.” She reached out and touched his hair.

He smiled faintly at her. “You asked them to do that for me. It wasn’t my idea.”

“Yes, I did ask them. Discreetly of course. And now you look much better. You look cared for.”

Ashley had washed it for him. “Cleaned it up,” she’d said. He could turn ninety, and he would never forget the feel of her fingers brushing his scalp. It had been one of the most sensual experiences of his life, and yet they’d both been fully clothed. Her breast near his face. The rustle of her skirt as she’d turned. The soft knock of her heels on the wooden floor. The pads of her fingers as she’d brushed a soap bubble from his brow.

“Aidan?”

Again he snapped to. Hadn’t realized he’d been daydreaming. “It’s strange to be in Boston,” he admitted.

“Home,” Gram amended.

Was it? Outside the windows near the street, Boston whizzed by. The buildings were familiar; the shops and restaurants in the same places with some facades and names changed. Always, though, the throngs of students—college kids—at the crosswalks.

“How do you feel?” she asked again.

He closed his eyes, ran his palms over his newly smooth hair.

“Honestly, it doesn’t feel like home anymore.” He’d spent his childhood here, had gone to college and done his residency here. Now he’d been gone for a year, and it felt like a foreign country.

Gram rummaged inside her tote and pulled out a stack of mail secured with a rubber band. “Your mail. I suppose now that you’re back, I’ll no longer need to handle it for you.”

She’d done the job well for him. Periodically, he’d received an email from her assistant, detailing bills paid on his behalf, invitations answered and declined. “Thank you,” he said.

She waved her hand. “You may stay at my townhouse tonight, if you’d like. I had the guest suite made up for you.”

“I still have my condo.” The words came out gruffly.

There was a pause. She was being circumspect, his formidable grandmother, who had a big heart and who loved him with all of it. “Yes,” she said softly. “Yes, you do, Aidan.”

His condo was filled with Fleur’s presence, of course. With her things and her memories. He’d toyed with the idea of turning his back on it, selling it as is. Hiring someone to empty it and never going inside again.

“You’re welcome to stay with me tonight,” Gram said again. “In the morning I’m stopping by St. Bartholomew’s School for a meeting of the board. It would be nice if you came along.”

He looked at her sharply. Of course, he’d suspected back at the hair salon that there might be some angle with St. Bartholomew’s somewhere. With his grandmother, nothing was coincidental.

“Why did you really bring me to that hair salon today?” he asked. “Tell me the truth, Gram.”

She smiled at him. “To bring you back into civilization with me. Even if she didn’t cut it, Ashley did a nice job.”

Gram was lying. Feeling sad, he took his napkin off his lap and placed it on the table. “How do you know Ashley? Be honest.”

“I’ve spoken to her only once before.”

“In what capacity?”

Gram folded her hands over her purse and looked him squarely in the eye. “Her son, Brandon, is the best fundraiser for the Sunshine Club we’ve ever had.”

Aidan swallowed his shock. The answer was cold and businesslike, even for her.

Yet the Sunshine Club was his grandmother’s pet project—her fundraising arm for children’s cancer research. The Sunshine Club was Gram’s baby. She’d started it decades ago after her youngest child—an uncle Aidan had never known—had died of childhood leukemia. Gram often said that if Luke had been born today, with all the advances in medicine, then he would have lived.

Few people outside the family even knew of Luke, or of Gram’s continuing grief. She kept it that way on purpose. Gram had a soft heart, though she preferred to show the world the sharp, hardened exterior she’d developed through her business and charitable pursuits.

“Did you meet Brandon through the Sunshine Club, as well?” he asked. “I understand he’s also a leukemia survivor.”

“Initially, yes.” Gram paused. “My staff supervises him and handles all communication between his mother and the organization. Prior to Brandon, we’d used baseball stars—from the Captains—as our television fundraisers. But quite by accident, Brandon stepped in. And he proved to be much more effective than any of them were.”