Veronica Sattler - Wild Honey

Only when she was seated and he saw her close up could Travis believe she would leave her fifties behind next May. The lines around her eyes, which had seemed faint in the dim light of the doorway, were more sharply etched than he remembered. The frown lines on her brow were new, too.

Well, five years was a long time. Damn the son of a bitch! Damn him to hell and then some!

“I suppose it was Reston who told you I was here?” he asked tightly.

Judith McLean nodded. “He…he said it was a gunshot wound! Oh, Travis, I—”

“It’s nothin’ serious, Mother.” How strange it felt to be addressing her like that. Mother. After all this time, like something alien on his tongue. “Just a simple flesh wound. I’ll be fine.”

She eyed the bandaged shoulder, the sling they’d used to immobilize his arm. “Are you certain? It looks as if it might be…You’re not in pain, Travis?”

“I said it’s not serious. Certainly nothin’ that’d require bravin’ the wrath of your husband by traipsin’ all the way up here to see the black sheep of the family!”

Her face went pale, and Travis felt instant remorse. Lord, he hadn’t meant to snap at her like that. He heaved a sigh. “I’m sorry, Mother. It’s just that…”

Travis ran his hand through his hair in frustration, then sighed again. “He doesn’t know you’re here, does he?”

Judith looked away and her reply was toneless. “No…no, he doesn’t.”

“So after five years of obeyin’ his dictates, of avoidin’ me, of not takin’ my phone calls or answerin’ my letters—five years, Mother!—a hospitalization has finally given you the courage to come see me. But only on the sly. What would it take, I wonder, to dredge up the courage to see me openly? My funeral?”

He saw her flinch, and remorse nagged at him again, but he shook it off. He was her son damn it! Her firstborn, on whom, along with his brother and sister, she’d lavished all the love and affection of a devoted mother. Yet she’d thrown him away—on the spiteful orders of a man she didn’t even love!

He still remembered the day she’d admitted that to him. The day he’d stumbled on her crying in the stables, where he later learned she often went when she was troubled. Wadded up on the hay-strewn floor was a lace-edged handkerchief. He’d retrieved it and begun to hand to her, thinking it was hers.

But it hadn’t been hers. Before she took it from him, he noticed the unfamiliar initials embroidered on one corner. And although he’d been only thirteen, he’d known. When he asked her, she’d told him that, yes, his father had a mistress.

“What’ll you do, Mother?” he’d asked next.

“Do, darlin’? Why, what can I do?”

“You can leave him! He can’t possibly love you if—”

“Love has nothin’ to do with it, Travis,” she’d interrupted.

“But he’s lied to you!” Travis had been outraged. “Lied to all of us! All those excuses ‘bout how he’s always tied up in surgery or goin’ off to lecture on—”

“Travis McLean, I’ll not have you speak of your father that way! Of course, he hasn’t lied to y’all. Your father does work long hours at the hospital, and his work most certainly takes him out of town to lecture sometimes. Your father is a world-famous heart surgeon!”

And then, with the uncanny perception of the young, he’d said, “That’s why you’re stayin’, isn’t it, Mother? It’s because of who he is, not because you love him. Isn’t that why you said love has nothin’ to do with it?”

Fresh tears welling in her eyes, his mother had nodded, then taken him in her arms. “But I was wrong to say it that way, son,” she’d murmured. “I may not love him, but I’d do anythin’ for you children. Love has everythin’ to do with that!”

Now, as he sat in this bland, sterile room, Travis wondered about that, too. Did she really love her children as she’d professed? Over the years he’d assumed they were the reason she stayed in a loveless marriage. But when the day had come when he’d dared his autocratic father’s wrath by choosing to follow his own path, she’d meekly aligned with her husband against him. Had let him cut Travis out of their lives.

As for their loveless marriage, Travis soon began to suspect it was nothing out of the ordinary. He’d spent a lot of time growing up amidst the privileged children of families where divorce was rampant; his prep school had been full of them. Soon he began to accept the fact that the love he thought was missing in his parents’ marriage simply didn’t exist.

Still, until five years ago, he’d believed in parental love. Now he wasn’t even sure about that.

With an irritated gesture, he steered the conversation to more certain ground. “Tell me about Sarah. Is she well? Happy?”

Obviously relieved by the shift in topic, his mother managed a smile and nodded. “She loves Georgetown. Doin’ splendidly there, too. Of course, we all know she would. Her adviser says she’s taken to pre-med like a duck to water.”

Unlike her long-lost brother. But Travis didn’t voice this. The bitterness was fading now. Maybe he’d exorcised it. “And Troy? He holdin’ up all right?”

His thirty-three-year-old brother had had to struggle for the grades that would get him into a decent med school. Or a career in medicine, period.

Troy had been the athlete in the family. A natural, who could have gone on to qualify for the Olympics in swimming, they’d been told. Or a career in tennis. He’d once beaten Bjorn Borg in a match at their club, and Borg had offered to sponsor him.

But that had been out of the question. In fact, Travis was the only one his brother had even told about it, and Troy’d insisted he keep it secret.

“Good Lord, Troy, why?” Travis had exclaimed. He could still recall his incredulousness at Troy’s request.

The brother he loved hadn’t been able to look him in the eye. “You know why,” he’d mumbled, staring at his Nikes as they sat on a bench in the club’s locker room.

And Travis had. Telling the family, or more specifically, their father, would only result in the same cold dismissal his swimming coach’s suggestion had brought the previous year: “You are a McLean, Troy. With a long and illustrious tradition of medicine to follow. Swimmin’ is a fine pastime, but it can’t be allowed to distract you from your career. From surgery as a profession. You’ll thank the coach and tell him no, of course.”

So Troy had acquiesced without a whimper, submitting to a regimen of tutors and summer schools to help him attain the grades necessary to enter medicine. And managing to graduate from a med school that, while not Harvard, was respectable enough for the father he tried so hard to please.

His mother’s sigh brought Travis back to the present. “Well, your brother does try hard, but sometimes I think he ought to have pursued another specialty. Your aunt Louise did suggest he join her at Stanford and go into research, you’ll recall. But as I told her, your father…”

And so it goes…

“Right.” Travis’s voice was tight with anger. “Nothin’ would do for his sons but to follow in his illustrious footsteps. No matter that the shape of those feet, as they tried to follow—tried so hard, Mother!—was so different. No matter that they longed to take another path.”

“Now, Travis, your father—”

“Is a cold, selfish bastard who never had time for any of us while we were growin’ up! And made it plain only one thing mattered to him—that we live our lives to please him. To be a self-perpetuatin’ testament to the great Dr. Trent McLean, heart surgeon nonpareil!”