Trevor hesitated. “Could I speak with my daughter alone?”
Without hesitation, Douglas said simply, “No.”
It was said in his usual authoritative tone that brooked no argument. After uttering that one word, Douglas pressed his hand into Julia’s back, gently forcing her forward before she could see her father’s response and before her father could respond at all.
She preceded both men into the room, Douglas stopping considerately to allow Trevor to go in front of him and then turning to close the doors behind him.
Julia walked to the ceiling-high windows and surveyed the gardens. Although she knew in their full bloom they could be beautiful, now the formal and regimented beds had been put to sleep for the winter. They were nothing but borders and large circles of overturned dirt with enormous empty urns in the middle surrounded by still-green lawns. They were terraced with magnificent balustrades that led into a small, natural wooded area that gave way to graceful rolling fields where chocolate-faced, round, woolly sheep grazed. The sun was already beginning to set on this beautiful pastoral scene and the day, whose weather had veered from hazy to bright, was fading.
Julia saw none of that, her mind turning in circles and she had begun to shake.
She was shaking because her father was there, pretending to feel a grief there was no way on God’s green earth he could feel.
She was shaking because she knew Monique hated her enough to do this to her, on a special day, a holiday, for goodness sakes. It was never pleasant to acknowledge that someone hated you that much, especially someone with whom you were forced to live.
And she was shaking because even if Douglas was with her (and she was thankful that he was and she wasn’t going to try to process why, she just was), she still felt somehow alone. Thousands of miles away from her wise and dramatic mother who would know exactly what to say. And forever away from her beloved brother who would have known exactly what to do.
And she was just Julia, the weakest of the lot, and she wasn’t sure she had the strength to face this.
“Julia, you must know, regardless of our estrangement, it came as a great shock –” her father began but she turned and levelled her gaze at him, the look in her eye causing him to stop speaking.
He’d walked into the room and was standing not five feet from her, his face earnest, his eyes warm.
Her lip curled.
“Estrangement?” she broke in, her voice shaking. “What a convenient word. I thought it was called ‘abandonment’.”
Trevor’s head jerked in response as if she’d physically struck a blow.
“Of course,” Julia continued, ignoring her father, anger spurring her on. She turned her attention from her father to Douglas, who was standing with his shoulders against the doors and his arms crossed on his chest, regarding her with that bland expression on his face. “I may not have full command of the English language. I was born in a small town in Indiana to a mother whose parents were farmers, as were their parents before them. We’re just simple folk.” Her eyes swung back to her father. “I was not born to privilege. My mother was not heiress to a popcorn fortune who came complete with a trust fund, a five bedroom mansion and a fourth generation membership to the country club. My father was, of course, a well-known surgeon but I never saw him. He didn’t send me to private school and violin lessons and pay for college and graduate school. So perhaps I have it wrong. I suppose the genteel way is to refer to it as ‘estrangement’ but where I come from, we call ‘em as we see ‘em and we’d call it ‘abandonment’.” Her eyes swung back to Douglas. “What do you think, Douglas?”
“Julia, is this really necessary?” her father asked before Douglas could answer (not that he was going to answer). “I came to make amends, when things like this happen, you realise –”
It was then Julia completely lost control, her vision exploding into fireworks of fury. Her fists clenched and her body tensed from the top of her head to the tips of her toes.
She leaned forward stiffly from the waist and hissed, “Make amends? You can never make amends. Even if I was to spend the next fifteen years telling you, you will never know what a good man your son was. You will never have the chance to meet the glorious woman he chose for his bride. You will never have her joy and light shine down on you. You’re too late.”
“I know that, Julia,” Trevor replied, his voice conciliatory. He began to walk forward and she threw her arm up to fend him off. It registered somewhere in her brain that Douglas had pushed away from the doors when father started to approach daughter but Julia was too overcome to think about what that meant.
“So now, because I have a little bit of my brother in me, I’m going to let you have Thanksgiving dinner with your grandchildren. Not for your sake, but for theirs,” Julia went on. “Their parents just died and I don’t want anything disturbing what, up until now, was perhaps their first lovely day in months. And afterwards, you’re going to go back to your wife and family and never darken our door again.”
At the mention of his second family, his face grew pale and his carefully controlled expression faltered.
“Felicia’s left me, Julia.” His voice cracked on this admission and instead of Julia feeling an ounce of compassion, which she saw his eyes beseeching her for, it all became blazingly clear why he was there.
If his wife had left him then now he was alone, only now would he come back into her life. Not of his own accord, but because, perhaps, he had no one else.
She didn’t care. She could not believe his selfishness, it took her breath away. But he wasn’t finished.
“My children, they’re all…” He didn’t complete that thought and she didn’t wonder at it. None of her half sisters or brother had ever made any advances to her or Gavin either. “And then I heard about Gavin and I just had to –”
She advanced on him, taking two swift strides and barely registering his wince and recoil at her quick, furious charge. She realised then how old he looked, how faded and defeated, his handsomeness nothing but a memory.
Gavin would have never looked like that. Never.
She jolted to a halt.
“If you have problems, they’re your problems. We, Mom, Gavin and I, had problems too but we managed to sort through them without you! There was the time when Mom had nineteen cents in the bank and you hadn’t paid child support and we had no toilet paper, where were you when Gavin had to break open his piggy bank so we could go to the store? There was the time when Gavin won All-County in football and all the other boys stood on the stage with their fathers and Mom had to be at work and my brother had to stand there alone, where were you then?” She hurled every word at him like a spear. “So, now you can take my offer and then you can go away and I swear to all that is holy, if you ever approach my mother, I’ll hunt you down and –”