Maine - J. Courtney Sullivan [70]
It hadn’t helped that it happened only a couple of weeks after Fiona told them her news. Why did bad things always occur in multiples like that? The combination made Ann Marie question what she had always known about herself—that she was a good mother, that theirs was a traditional family.
Little Daniel had graduated top of his class from business school; he was terribly bright, and charming. But he’d had lousy luck when it came to work. His first boss, at a boutique investment firm, just plain had it out for the kid: he had dared to call Daniel arrogant, saying he wasn’t deferential enough, when the boss himself was Daniel’s exact age.
At the next place, a huge company in downtown Boston, they didn’t challenge him. They gave Daniel paper to push around, and—no wonder—he got bored. So he started taking long lunches (he said all the executives did the same). He came in late. At his one-year evaluation, they told him it wasn’t working out.
“What’s wrong with him?” Pat had said that time, too testily for Ann Marie’s liking.
“Nothing! He’s off the charts smart, Patrick, like you. He was too good for that job.”
Pat pulled some strings with Ronald Allan at the club and found their son a good, high-paying position at another big firm. It seemed like he was really working hard this time, but then, without warning, they laid him off and told him to be out in two weeks.
“This is outrageous!” Pat had fumed, uncharacteristically worked up. “I’m calling Ron and I’ll give him a piece of my mind. And possibly a lawsuit.”
He went into his home office and slammed the door. When he came out twenty minutes later, his face looked pale.
“Well?” Ann Marie said.
“Apparently they did him a favor, laying him off like that.”
“What do you mean?”
“There were complaints from some of the secretaries about certain behaviors.”
Ann Marie pictured a gaggle of lazy girls in tweed, refusing to fetch coffee or answer the telephone, citing women’s lib.
She didn’t ask her husband to elaborate, might have preferred it if he did not, but Pat went on, “They found some very disturbing pornography on his computer. Bondage stuff, I guess.”
Ann Marie was aghast. “These secretaries just claim he was the one who put it on the computer? It could have been anyone who did that.”
“They found out because they do his expenses.”
“And?”
“He charged it all to his corporate credit card. Two thousand dollars’ worth.”
“Oh my God.”
She wondered if this had happened in other offices. She thought of poor Regina, who was so proud of the diamond on her finger, and cringed at the thought of her son—that all-American boy!—asking to tie her to the bedpost. And she thought of Fiona, too, the two affronts wrapped around each other. Her son was a pervert and her daughter was a lesbian.
It’s no one’s fault. It was in vogue these days to say that whenever something terrible happened. But everything unpleasant was someone’s fault. What had she done to them?
“He’s made a goddamn fool out of me,” Pat said. “I’ll probably be the laughingstock of the club now.”
At that moment, a rush of estrogen, or maternal instinct, or who knew what, flooded her head and her heart, and all she wanted to do was protect that boy as best she could. Her only son.
“Oh, honestly, who cares,” she said. “Ron Allan has worse skeletons in his closet than some dirty movies.”
She called Little Daniel and told him to come over. He cried on the living room sofa and apologized for embarrassing them. He said he hadn’t realized that he’d used his corporate card until it was too late. (That made sense to her, though she had hoped he would deny the entire thing.) He went to sleep in his childhood bedroom, her strong, tall, handsome son, who everyone still called Little Daniel, though he had towered over Big Daniel by the end.
In bed that night, Ann Marie ran her fingers over the carved wood of the headboard they had found in a shop