Gerald's Game - Stephen King [55]
Tom Mahout vetoes the idea at first. He is a stock broker who divides his time between Portland and Boston, and for years he has told his family not to believe all that propaganda about how guys who go to work wearing ties and shirts with white collars spend their days goofing off — either hanging around the watercooler or dictating lunch invitations to pretty blondes from the steno pool. 'No hardscrabble spud-farmer in Aroostook County works any harder than I do,' he frequently tells them. 'Keeping up with the market isn't easy, and it isn't particularly glamorous, either, no matter what you may have heard to the contrary.' The truth is none of them have heard anything to the contrary, all of them (his wife included, most likely, although Sally would never say so) think his job sounds duller than donkeyshit, and only Maddy has the vaguest idea of what it is he does.
Tom insists that he needs that time on the lake to recover from the stresses of his job, and that his son will have plenty of birthdays with his friends later on. Will is turning nine, after all, not ninety. 'Plus,' Tom adds, 'birthday parties with your pals really aren't much fun until you're old enough to have a keg or two.'
So Will's request to have his birthday at the family's year-round home on the coast would probably have been denied if not for Jessie's sudden, surprising support of the plan (and to Will it's plenty surprising; Jessie is three years older and lots of times he's not sure she remembers she even has a brother). Following her initial soft-Voiced suggestion that maybe it would be fun to come home — just for two or three days, of course — and have a lawnparty, with croquet and badminton and a barbecue and Japanese lanterns that would come on at dusk, Tom begins to warm to the idea. He is the sort of man who thinks of himself as a 'strongwilled son of a bitch' and is often thought of as a 'stubborn old goat' by others; whichever way you saw it, he has always been a tough man to move once he has set his feet . . . and his jaw.
When it comes to moving him — to changing his mind — his younger daughter has more luck than the rest of them put together' Jessie often finds a way into her father's mind by way of some loop hole or secret passage denied to the rest of the family. Sally believes — with some justification — that their middle child has always been Tom's favorite and Tom has fooled himself into believing none of the others know. Maddy and Will see it in simpler terms. they believe that Jessie sucks up to their father and that he in turn spoils her rotten. 'If Daddy caught Jessie smoking,' Will told his older sister the year before, after Maddy had been grounded for that very offense, 'he'd probably buy her a lighter.' Maddy laughed, agreed, and hugged her brother. Neither they nor their mother has the slightest idea of the secret which lies between Tom Mahout and his younger daughter like a heap of rotting meat.
Jessie herself believes she is just going along with her baby brother's request — that she's sticking up for him. She has no idea, not on the surface of her mind, anyway, how much she has come to hate Sunset Trails and how eager she is to get away. She has also come to hate the lake she once passionately loved — especially its faint, flat mineral smell. By 1965 she can hardly bear to go swimming there, even on the hottest of days. She knows her mother thinks it's her shape — Jessie began to bud early, as Sally did herself, and at the age of twelve she has most of her woman's figure — but it's not her shape. She's gotten used to that, and knows that she's a long way from being a Playboy pin-up in either of her old, faded jantzen tank suits. No, it's not her breasts, not her hips, not her can. It's that smell.
Whatever reasons and motives may be swirling around beneath, Will Mahout's request is finally approved by the Mahout family's head honcho. They made the trip back to the coast yesterday, leaving early enough for Sally (eagerly assisted by