Bulls Island (12 page)

I tried to be friendly and nonchalant all the way home and I thought Mickey didn’t suspect anything. As the afternoon wore on, I struggled with my conscience. Should I tell Valerie? Hell no. What good would that do? Should I tell my father? Absolutely not. Had he not enjoyed enough skirts to fill a department store? Should I confront my mother? What possible good would that do? Zero.

It was six-thirty. Mother had not called. I wondered if she knew with certainty that I had seen her. Was she avoiding me? This was some bull. I mean, did she think that if she didn’t mention it, she could pretend it didn’t happen?

I was getting hungry. Where was Valerie anyway? I called her cell and got her voice mail. She would probably be home soon. I poured myself a bourbon. Rosie was in the kitchen, putting the final touches on supper.

“Looks good enough to eat,” I said to Rosie as I glanced at the platter of sliced cucumbers and tomatoes.

“Thanks,” she said, “and thanks for the fish.”

“Your boy liberated them from their watery world…”

The phone rang and I picked it up in the kitchen.

“Hello?”

“J.D.?”

“Yes?”

“This is Brant Hazelton.”

Well, I thought, I’ll be damned. The old codger is calling to defend—or at least attempt to whitewash—mother’s honor with some bit of hasty fabrication.

“Yes, sir. What can I do for you?”

“Well, son, I’m afraid it’s not good news. I’m with your father down in Hilton Head. He’s had a heart attack…”

My head started spinning. They were trying to stabilize him, he said. They thought he would be all right, but just the same, I had better come and bring Mother. I got the address, the senator’s cell-phone number, and I dialed Mother. The phone rang and rang.

“What is it?” Rosie said.

“Dad’s had a heart attack,” I said.

“Oh no! What can I do?”

“Nothing. Tell Valerie when she shows up to leave her cell on once in a while.” It wasn’t Valerie’s fault and I shouldn’t have said that. “I’m sorry. I’ll call as soon as I know anything. I’ve got to go see about him right now,” I said. “Why isn’t Mother answering the phone?”

I redialed. After five rings, Mother finally answered.

“Mother?” I tried to sound calm, but I was sure she heard the panic in my voice and took it to be the beginning of a lecture from me about her liaison.

“Now, see here, J.D.—”

“Mother? Brant Hazelton called.”

“What?”

“Daddy’s had a heart attack. I’m coming to pick you up. He’s in Hilton Head.”

I hung up and looked at Rosie, who was clearly upset.

“Please! J.D.? Give your daddy my love, won’t you? Tell him I’ll be praying for him with everything I’ve got?”

“Of course I will, Rosie. Thanks. I’ll call as soon as I know anything.”

In truth, I didn’t care what my mother did in her spare time. After all, my father had been doing the same thing for as long as I had been aware that people had sex. But I was furious anyway and I didn’t know why. Then I decided it was the lies that made me so angry. There were too many lies in our family. Most of the way to Hilton Head, Mother and I were silent, but as soon as we exited, I-95, we started to argue.

“You can judge me all you want, J.D. But just how do you think we got Bulls Island declassified?”

“I have no idea, Mother. Did the family’s generosity buy the senator a new Maserati?”

“Don’t be absurd. Besides, Brant could buy his own Maserati if he wanted one.”

“Oh, I’m sorry. Like Dad never passed an envelope of cash to a building inspector?”

“Look, J.D. You really want to know what’s going on here? I have enjoyed the friendship of Brant Hazelton for years and your daddy knows it. And guess what? He doesn’t care! Your daddy does as he pleases, too, which is the most likely reason he’s in the hospital right now. Brant’s wife knows, too. And guess what else?”

“She doesn’t care either. Whatever.”

“Don’t
whatever
me, young man. I am still your mother!”

“So fine, tell me how you managed to have Bulls Island declassified. I’m dying to hear.”

“Well! He’s ingenious, that’s all. Brant buries it in the budget in a
line item. You know, he says something like ‘all islands west of this latitude and south of that longitude shall be offered for sale for specific use of the public good’ or some such vague language. Who on earth is going to catch that in a big old boring budget document that’s thousands of pages long?”

“Not even Sherlock Holmes, Mother. That’s pretty clever. And you and Daddy snap it up before anyone else knows about the public offering, right?”

“That’s right. We finalize the sale in the same moment the budget is signed.”

I saw then that my father and mother were no better than common criminals. Highfalutin, modern-day opportunistic, greedy bastards with no conscience. And there I was, aiding and abetting common criminals. Nice family.

“So now we own Bulls Island.”

“Yes, we do. We break ground in two weeks. ARC Partners is our partner. And I guess this is as good a time as any to tell you.”

“Tell me what?”

“That Betts McGee is in charge of the project.”

“That’s nice,” I said, but my heart started to pound.

If my father could indulge his weakness for strippers and my mother could have a semi-open affair with Brant Hazelton, could I have Betts? I struggled to focus on the fact that we were nearing the hospital where my father was possibly fighting for his life—fighting for his life with his strip-joint partner who was screwing my mother at his bedside. How many other secrets could my family possibly have?

Betts. Two weeks.

I
t was Friday and I was thinking about enjoying the weekend. Aunt Jennie was coming for dinner, so I ordered a special arrangement of flowers for my foyer and for the dining-room table. I had a date with Vinny Saturday night. I had not yet decided how to deal with this budding relationship because he scared me a little. For some reason, that scary aspect of his personality was appealing to me, which was also scary. I guess I liked edgy living. And as you know, he fascinated me.

I had to start planning Adrian’s move to his dorm and there was a long list of things he needed, linens and so forth, so we planned to melt the credit cards Saturday morning. But rattling around in the back of my mind was the fact that I had yet to give my father and sister fair warning that I was returning to Charleston. Deciding to face the worst music in the repertoire of my life, I took a deep breath and dialed Daddy’s number.

Then I hung up.

I repeated the dialing process somewhere in the neighborhood of twenty times and quickly hung up each time, right before I could hear Dad’s phone ring, behaving as though I were presenting some new variant of obsessive-compulsive disorder. I worried that perhaps the phone rang there before I could hear it ringing on my end or that my number appeared on their caller ID. Or, wait! Did they have caller ID? Were Joanie and Dad standing there watching the caller-ID screen and thinking I had truly lost my mind? Finally, I took a Lamaze-style breath, punched in the number one last time, and let it ring until, praise everything holy, I caught a karmic break and got voice mail. Joanie’s recorded message drenched me in a cold sweat of relief.

You’ve reached the McGees. Please leave a message. Thanks.

No one had ever accused Joanie of being overly engaging or seductively poetic. I left the following message:

“Hi, Joanie. Hi, Dad. It’s me, Betts. Just wanted to let you know that I’m going to be in Charleston for a couple of months on business and I hoped we might get together. Please call me. Thanks and I hope y’all are well. Love you both.”

Perfect. I had sounded chipper and at ease.

I left my number, which I was positive they had somewhere in their possession in case they had to notify me of a catastrophe, and hung up, wiping my sweaty hands on my skirt. How long would it take them to return my call? What if they didn’t call at all? I was determined to take the high road on this one. I had put them on notice that I was coming. If I didn’t hear from them before I set up camp in Charleston, I would call them when I arrived. I would do the right thing even if they didn’t. Sela was right. It was time for the nonsense to stop.

Most importantly, I wanted to see them in order to draw my own conclusions about Daddy’s condition. It wasn’t like Joanie held some medical degree or was an expert in geriatric care. But neither was I.
If he seemed off-kilter, I would somehow persuade him to get a thorough evaluation from the best doctors I could find. But I suspected that Daddy was just perhaps going through the normal stages of aging, and like Sela said, Joanie used him as a crutch to avoid having an authentic life of her own.

I had finally concluded that I wanted to repair our relationship as much as I could. They were my family, after all.

In preparation for dinner, I started flipping through the delivery menus I kept in a drawer in the kitchen. Even though I had spent a fortune designing a hyperorganized stainless-steel gourmet kitchen that looked like a spaceship, my kitchen had a junk drawer like everyone else’s. In it were an assortment of useless things I could never bear to discard in case of a terrorist attack or a blackout—candle stubs, matches, packets of soy sauce and saltine crackers, rubber bands from the mail, loose batteries that may or may not still work, coupons for free extra pizza toppings, long scraps of unwound ribbon, and enough scattered change to feed us for a month. And menus. One of these days, I told myself, I’m going to get this place organized.

I pulled out the menu from Fascino, which was the hot new Italian eatery owned by the De Persio family from Nutley, New Jersey—hot because their two sons, Ryan the chef and Anthony the manager, looked like a couple of movie stars. And because Ryan could do such magnificent things with tomatoes and macaroni that any one of the city’s major food critics could be found there four nights a week, humming to him- or herself in satisfaction. Normally Fascino didn’t deliver, but they did for me because they catered every recent ARC management meeting and we had a hefty house account there. Aunt Jennie would be thrilled with their veal Parmesan (not on the menu) and I also ordered her some fried zucchini flowers stuffed with ricotta cheese and a side of spaghetti marinara, plus a cannoli, a baba rum, and pumpkin cheesecake for all of our desserts.

Then I called my favorite Japanese restaurant, Dai Kitchi, and ordered California rolls, spicy tuna rolls, edamame, and a double portion of nabayaki udon with tempura shrimp. That mountain of Nipponese delights would surely catapult Adrian straight to hog heaven. Speaking of hog, lastly I called Blue Smoke for a rare personal indulgence of baby-back ribs, a pound of pulled pork to stock the refrigerator’s snacking department, two orders of baked beans, coleslaw, corn pudding, and a dozen biscuits. I knew Adrian would eat all the leftovers, and with my crazy life, it was easier to over-order prepared food than go to the store, schlep it all home, and cook it. Besides, if you paid me a million in unmarked twenties, I couldn’t even make the broth for nabayaki udon much less the soba noodles that go in it.

Adrian came home around six, just as the deliveries began to arrive.

“Aunt Jennie’s going to be here any minute. Want to set the table?” I said. “I’ll get the door.” I took three five-dollar bills from my wallet for tips.

“Sure! Hey, I saw the new Harry Potter film this afternoon.”

“Thanks a lot,” I said to the deliveryman, and closed the door. “How was it?”

“Awesome,” he said.

“Of course it was awesome,” I said, giving him a baby punch in the arm. “Everything in your entire
world
is awesome.”

“Aw, come on, what did you say at my age? Groovy? Or ‘far out, man’?”

“You’ve been watching that Woodstock documentary again, haven’t you? FYI, we said ‘cool.’”

“You still say ‘cool.’”

“Because I
am
cool.”

“Maybe. I mean, all things considered…”

“Rotten kid,” I said. “How’d you get so tall?”

“All those asparagus you used to feed me.”

The doorman buzzed again and I picked up the phone. “Delivery,” he said. “Fascino’s and Blue Smoke.”

“Send them up,” I said.

I picked up the two fives and went toward the front door, passing Adrian as he set the dining-room table. He was moving around the table, placing flatware, and his back was to me. Something made me pause—the slope of his shoulders or maybe it was his posture. The sight of him gave me shivers because there he was—J. D. Langley in the flesh. Once again I was consumed with dark guilt over keeping his existence a secret from J.D. If I could have rebuilt the world from scratch, I would have populated it with only the three of us. It would have been paradise.

Adrian was already a young man and J.D. had missed his entire life. Adrian had never known a father. If they ever discovered the truth, J.D. and Adrian might kill me with their bare hands and no court of law in the land would convict them.

My doorbell rang and I snapped out of my gloom. J.D. and Adrian would never find out about each other because I would never tell.

It wasn’t long before we were settled at the table with Aunt Jennie and an international feast. I was taken aback by how frail and stooped she looked, but after all, I reminded myself, she was nearly eighty. On the other hand, her faculties were as sharp as a blade of marsh grass.

“My word, Adrian, I just cannot begin to tell you how tickled to pieces I am for you! Columbia! My goodness gracious sakes alive! To think I changed the diapers of such an important man!”

Her blue eyes twinkled with youthful mirth despite their red rims of age. Behind those eyes there still existed a vital young woman, probably reliving a moment of her own teenage years. She reached across the table and patted his hand in a gesture of affection.

“Ah, Aunt Jennie. Thanks,” Adrian said. “Edamame?”

“Who?” Aunt Jennie said. “You think I need a man at my age?”

Adrian and I had a fit of giggles, and Aunt Jennie smiled and said, “I guess my hearing isn’t what it was.”

“What?” I said, and we laughed again.

“Edamame is this soybean Japanese side dish that I could eat like a billion of,” Adrian said. “See?”

He demonstrated for Aunt Jennie by popping one in his mouth, sliding the beans from the pod with his teeth, picking off bits of coarse salt. Then he passed the dish to her.

“Not bad,” she said, after a tentative taste. “Kind of like boiled peanuts.”

“And just as fattening,” I said. “Everything good is bad for you, isn’t it? Hey! Did I tell y’all that I’m going to Charleston on assignment for a couple of months?” It was as good a time as any to break the news.

“Awesome! Can I come visit? I hear the beaches are really, really good.”

“We’ll see,” I said, fully aware that the only way Adrian was coming to Charleston would be to collect my dead body.

I could see the surprise register in Aunt Jennie’s eyes, but she handled it with her usual aplomb. “Oh? And what will you be doing there, Betts? Charleston’s such a pretty place.”

I would call her later to discuss the details and seek her sage advice. “Yes, it is. I’ll be building a very high-end gated community on Bulls Island.”

“What the heck do you know about construction, Mom? I mean that with all due respect.”

“No problem; but you’re right. I don’t know diddly-squat. I seem to have a long career of acquiring skills for the job as I
take on
the job. Crazy, right?”

“Not if you’re well compensated for all the trouble,” Aunt Jennie said, and smiled at me. I knew she wanted the details.

“My mom can do anything. Are you gonna eat that?”

“Here.” I passed him some ribs. “Thanks for the compliment, sweetheart.”

After Aunt Jennie got over her excitement about the news of my pilgrimage back to the land of my ancestors, the conversation limped along, but that limping wasn’t for our lack of interest in one another’s lives. It was that our worlds were so vastly different. Here was my Adrian, who lived in a high-tech sphere, fueled by the noise of pop culture, and who was on the verge of his college career. My world of calculations and risk was so fast-paced, diversified, and complicated that it was difficult to explain to an outsider what I did much less why I was so addicted to it. And Aunt Jennie lived quietly reading historical novels and biographies all winter and visiting gardens during the spring and summer. As much as we loved one another, coming together was a reminder that nothing lasted forever—Adrian’s youth, my role as the helicopter mother, and indeed Aunt Jennie’s days on earth were all running neck and neck to some kind of invisible finish line.

Before Aunt Jennie left, she reached for her purse and took out an envelope. It was a greeting card with a check for fifty dollars made out in Adrian’s name. For some inexplicable reason, I wanted to burst into tears and it was only much later that I realized that if my mother had lived, she would have been the one writing that check. Sharing that dinner. Hugging Adrian’s neck.

“Now, you be a good boy in college,” Aunt Jennie said when she was at the door. “Do us proud. And if you need a single solitary thing while your mother’s away, you know where to find me. And I have your cell-phone number, so I’ll be checking up on you!”

“Thanks, Aunt Jennie. Call me anytime and thanks for the gift.”

When we were alone we talked some more about me leaving for the Bulls Island project and Adrian was fine with it.

“Mom, don’t worry about me. I’m sure I’ll be studying all the time—you know, except for when I’m doing lines and getting drunk.”

“Adrian!”

He started laughing and of course I knew he was fooling with me, but the reality was, drugs and alcohol were as readily available for anyone with the means as a soft drink was from a vending machine.

Then my big lug of a man-child put his hands on my shoulders and looked me squarely in the face.

“Mom,” he said, “don’t worry so much. I’ve been getting ready for this moment since the sandbox. I’m not interested in all that stuff. If I want to be president of the United States someday, I can’t be doing drugs and raising hell.”

“Since when?”

“Since when can’t the president be a hell-raiser? You’re kidding, right? Don’t you know that Shrub—”

“No, no. Who cares about him? I mean, since when do you want to be president?”

“Well, I don’t. But I know enough to understand that every single stupid thing I do is gonna haunt me forever.”

I took a very deep gulp. My young Adrian had just dropped a truism of greater import than he could possibly have known.

“You are so right. You’re a good kid, Adrian. Wanna help me clean up?”

“Sure. Who’s gonna help you when I’m gone?”

“I don’t know, baby, but I know I’m surely going to miss my boy being here.”