“I have someone I’d like you to meet,” I said. My mother had meandered close by, now leaning against the table my father worked from.
“You’ve finally rid yourself of the silliness?” she asked. Her words were sharp even if the delivery came with a smile.
“Margot,” my father scolded my mother, but added his own judgmental thoughts. “We never have to utter another word of that nonsense again. We’ll be able to spend more time with you.”
My stomach knotted, but I put it aside to dissect later. “Well, father, mother, I didn’t rid myself of anything.” I beamed happy, full of pride, my smile spreading wide. “My guy came back to me. Meet…” I turned, sweeping my arm out to…no one. I scanned the entire room. Beau wasn’t there.
Perhaps a sudden bout of anxiety got the best of him, and he’d hightailed it out of there. That worry had me retracing my steps in order to find him.
At the door of the den, I turned and bumped straight into Beau. “What’re you doing?” I whispered.
“Y’all were havin’ a moment. I gave you space,” Beau answered quietly.
“Come on.” I reached out a hand to hold Beau’s, guiding us back into the room. “This is Beau. He came back, just as I knew he would. Beau, this is my mom, Margot, and my father, Jack.”
I couldn’t have been more pleased. My family was complete. Beau rooted in his spot a step or two behind me. He didn’t budge when I tugged him forward, making me look back at him. I spotted the nervousness in his expression, but there was something more there as well.
I tilted back toward my mother and father, trying to see what he saw.
“Jack, you said you took care of this.” I couldn’t make sense of the words as my mother stared at Beau, reaching for the armrest of the closest chair to sit. My father looked business angry. The stern face he gave to his enemies.
“I believed I did.” His entire focus was also on Beau. “Boy, where’s your father?”
“His father died.” In that second, everything became clear. Time froze. The blood seeped from my face, my body tensed, and my thoughts turned harsh.
My mother lowered her head into her hand. My father’s mouth was moving while he reached for the landline telephone. While I couldn’t hear all of his angry outburst, I did catch phrases like “contracts in place”and“money transferred”and“that degenerate bastard.”As those watchwords filtered through my brain, my anger increased. Reality zipped back into place.
“Are you implying you’re responsible for keeping us apart?” The words were absurd, barely out of my mouth before I rejected them. These were my parents. They witnessed my pain firsthand. They’d promised to help me.
“Son, you can’t be serious,” my mother said, tossing out a careless hand as if I were being ridiculous. “You’ve always tested us at every turn.”
With my father still on the call, he pointed a finger at me. “We will not have our family name tainted with trash. It’s past time you grew up and stopped flaunting your irresponsibility and ludicrous world views in our faces.”
“What did you do?” I asked again, putting the rest of this bizarre discussion on hold. Beau was my only concern.
“Grow up, Dasham. Your father did what he had to do, and the boy’s father accepted. It was supposed to be over with.” My mother answered for my father as if she were saying the most reasonable things.
A glance at my father showed his cheeks red with anger. Then he slammed the phone down on the receiver.
“You listen to me closely, Dasham,” my father said harshly, his index finger pointing at me. “If this relationship continues, ours will not.” I took his words like the blow of an unexpected right hook. My entire body numbed. I was stunned.
“All this time, you were ultimately responsible for my unhappiness, not Beau’s father. Do you know what that man did to him?” Pain washed over me in waves.
“What I should have done to you, I’m certain,” my father replied flippantly.
“I always said you were too lenient with him,” my mother added, apparently seconding my father’s view of abuse as an entirely appropriate choice. “You were always pushing him to pursue his dreams.”
“He’s a homosexual, Margot. A liability. We can’t have him in the family business, no matter how smart he is,” my father explained, stating his reasoning even further. “He had to learn a trade.”
Again, I put a pin in his words, shoving them aside to deal with later. Beau. How did he fare through all the bombshell reveal? I glanced back, but he wasn’t there.Shit. Nothing mattered more than the apology I needed to give him, then begging him to stay with me.
Everything important inside me demanded I make this right. I couldn’t lose him now. I started out of the den. My father’s booming voice followed me. “You keep this up, and you’re no longer a part of this family. You’ll be cut off and removed from everything. We won’t tolerate you or your foolishness for another second.”
Once I didn’t see Beau anywhere, I began to jog through the foyer then the front doors. Beau wasn’t anywhere to be seen.
“Beau,” I called loudly, panic setting in.
A groundskeeper working on the flower beds pointed me in the direction of the long drive before my father came out of the house.
