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“And who made the rule that only men can do that?”
The others were watching intently, except for Peter, who blew a pear-flecked spit bubble. Mortified by her outburst, she set down her fork and tried to regain her dignity. “I simply misinterpreted Shelby’s visit this afternoon. As a result, I became upset with Kenny, and now he’s upset with me.”
Everyone continued to regard her with interest except Kenny, whose brow had furrowed. “When she says she got upset, what she really means is that she slapped me.”
“Oh, my God!” Torie’s mouth dropped.
“You didn’t!” Shelby’s eyes widened.
Kenny glowered at Emma. “The slap wasn’t the important part, and you know it.”
“Tell us why you did it,” Torie said. “I’m sorry, Kenny, but I’ll bet she had a good reason.”
“Thanks a lot for the vote of confidence.” Kenny shot her a disgusted look.
“Well . . .” Emma’s inherent sense of breeding fought against her need to defend herself. Then she remembered that none of these people seemed to have any compunction about airing their dirty linen in front of her. When in America, do as the Americans. “What Shelby told me led me to believe that . . .” She could feel herself faltering, and she sat a bit straighter in her seat so she could deliver the truth bang-on. “I mistakenly assumed Peter was Kenny’s child and that Kenny had abandoned him.”
Torie’s wine glass stalled in midair. “Uh-oh.”
Shelby looked shocked, and even Warren seemed taken aback. “No man in the Traveler family would ever do anything like that, not even Kenny.”
It occurred to Emma that the Travelers had a peculiar moral code. Apparently it was acceptable for Kenny to pretend he was a gigolo, for Torie to go through two husbands and live off her father’s money, for Warren to get a woman thirty-one years his junior pregnant, but it wasn’t acceptable for her to experience a very natural misunderstanding.
“Shelby called Peter a forgotten child,” she pointed out with some asperity. “She told me Kenny had abandoned his responsibility to his own flesh and blood. And Peter looks like a miniature version of Kenny, doesn’t he? What else was I to think?”
Torie glanced over at Kenny and shrugged. “Put like that, I guess it’s a natural conclusion for somebody who doesn’t know you too well.”
Kenny would have none of it. “She knows me plenty well.”
“Actually, I don’t,” Emma pointed out. “We only met three days ago, and, technically, you’re my employee.”
That brought Warren’s eyebrows to the center of his forehead, but Kenny merely snorted.
Shelby had been silent, but suddenly it was as if someone had lit a fire under her. “Peter looks exactly like your baby pictures. You’re two peas in a pod, and that’s what makes this whole situation so ugly. You only have one brother on the face of this earth, Kenny Traveler, and you’ve turned your back on him.”
Kenny rescued a table knife from Peter’s reach. “I haven’t turned my back on him.”
But Shelby was off and running. “You’re lazy and irresponsible. You don’t go to church, you roam all over the country, you refuse to date any of the nice girls I’ve found for you, you hand your money over to drug runners, and you don’t show one single sign of settling down. If that isn’t turning your back on your responsibility to your baby brother, I don’t know what is.”
Emma wasn’t following this, but, as she tried to sort it out, Shelby’s voice grew choked. “Your father is fifty-eight years old! He doesn’t eat right. He doesn’t get enough exercise. He’s a heart attack waiting to happen, and he could die any minute! That leaves Peter and me. And if something should happen to me, my baby boy would be alone.” Her face crumpled. “I know all of you think I’m being silly about this, but that’s because none of you know what it’s like to be a mother.”
Torie shoved herself back from the table and headed for the bar.
Shelby went on. “I never knew I could love anybody like I love Peter, and I just can’t stand thinking about my baby all alone in the world.”
“He wouldn’t be alone,” Kenny said with such exaggerated patience that Emma suspected he’d been over this ground before. “In the first place, the chances that both of you will die before he’s grown are minuscule—”
“Don’t tell me that. It happens all the time!”
/> “—and I told you I’d be his guardian.”
“What kind of guardian would you be for a little boy? I can’t sleep at night worrying about it. You live all over the place, you currently have no job! You get into fights and mess around with bitchy women.” She shot Emma a quick, apologetic glance. “I didn’t mean you.”
“Thank you.” Emma realized no one had mentioned the possibility of Torie becoming Peter’s guardian. Why was that?
Shelby looked over at her husband. “You agree with me, don’t you, Warren?”
“I’m not ready to climb into the grave yet, but I have to say that it’s hard to see Kenny as anybody’s guardian.”
