Tierney laid his fingers on the stem of his goblet. “No, thank you. If you’ll remember, I just spent two weeks in rehab learning how to deal with myself sober, and it’s kind of soon for me to start drinking again.” He bared his teeth at her.
She smiled back at him and reached over to pat his hand. “Of course, I keep forgetting.”
Un. Believable.
But she had more to say on the subject. “I don’t quite understand this part about you not drinking. You didn’t go there for alcohol treatment, dear.”
“Mother,” he began, but he had to interrupt himself, trying to rein in some of his exasperation. “Before I left, I’d been drinking a lot, and I was doing it to avoid dealing with—” he circled his hand in the air “—some things in my life. The point of me going there was to start learning a healthier approach to managing my issues.” Good lord, he sounded like a self-help text for children. “Dealing with problems by drinking isn’t okay.” Judging by her furrowed brow, she was at least trying to understand.
It wasn’t that his mother was stupid, after all, but she really loved her wine.
“You mean the problem about your being . . .” She leaned forward and whispered, “Homosexual?”
He leaned toward her and whispered back, “Yes.” He had to nearly bite his tongue off to not add, “Shhh, don’t tell Father,” but then he’d laugh hysterically, probably until he fell off his chair and rolled on the floor, and they’d send him right back to Dunthorpe.
Now that the subject of the past month had been broached, his father pursued it. “Tell us how it went, son.” He pointed a fork at Tierney, then speared a piece of meat with the tines, waving it at him when Tierney didn’t respond soon enough. “You have yet to say if your trip was successful.”
And there went his acid reflux. He busied himself with wiping his hands. “How would you define ‘successful’?”
The long pause was answer enough, but Father cleared his throat and asked anyway, “Are you still attracted to men?”
He ignored the little run of nerves that raced up his spine. “Very.”
Father paused in the middle of cutting another bite of roast. “I suppose that’s the next step to getting your life back on track: figuring out how to rid you of this predilection.”
Tierney’s backbone straightened. “I think I’d like to keep this predilection.”
Father’s fork stabbed into the plate. Clink! “What? But why would you do that? I’ve been looking into it in case this happened—”
“Arthur, you never told me that. I thought we ag—”
“Hyacinth, I felt it necessary.”
Mother subsided, nodding. God forbid the woman expressed her own opinions to his father. Not that she had any problems telling Tierney about them.
“Son.” Father placed his fork down carefully, resting it mostly on his plate, just the last inch or so cantilevering over the side, as etiquette required. “I’ve discovered there are some excellent therapies for helping one become, as they say, ‘straight’ again. I’ve identified the ones with the higher success rates and—”
“I’m not.” More nerves made themselves felt, muscles in his legs beginning to get antsy. Might need to finish that sentence. “I’m not going to be undergoing any of those therapies. I won’t. You can’t make me.” He straightened his shoulders the instant he caught himself trying to hunch them.
Elbows on the table, Father gave Tierney “the look.” It didn’t seem to have the same effect on him that it used to. Father’s hadn’t ever been as powerful as Grandfather’s stern face anyway. Instead of opening his mouth and babbling out whatever he thought the dude wanted to hear, Tierney gazed back at him.
“Have you thought about this carefully?” Father eventually asked.
Tierney leaned toward the head of the table, harnessing some of his nervous energy and using it to power his voice. “I’ve spent years thinking about nothing else.”
Father’s Adam’s apple bobbed. “Have you given any thought to how this will affect the rest of the family? Or the company?”
Tierney’s adrenaline really started to flow, making him feel like a live wire. “Of course I have. What do you think shut me up all those years? Grandfather’s harping on behaving like a Terrebonne. But here’s the thing no one seems to get: this is my life. I spent years living it the way you expected me to and—”
“Darling, we never told you not to be gay.” Mother’s hand flew to her sternum in affront.
It was grit his teeth or laugh in her face. “You didn’t get the memo I sent out at the wake? Grandfather did tell me that. And right now?” He shoved a finger in his father’s direction. “He’s trying to tell me the same thing. Either way, it’s. My. Life.” He pushed back from the table, standing up. “I don’t know a whole lot about anything right now, but I know one thing. If I’m desperate enough and stupid enough to announce my sexual orientation to a crowd, then I’m going to stand by what I said, what I am. I’m thirty-four, so it’s about damn time I did.” His parents sat frozen, wide-eyed and fixated on him. He could hear his own breath echoing off the walls, so he forced himself to sit back down, trying to slow his heart by will alone.
Father unfroze, looking at Mother, then toward Tierney again. “As vice president of PR and government affairs, will you be able to adequately represent the company as a gay man?”
That did it—Tierney laughed. He killed it quickly, but he lost it for a brief second there. “I knew it!” He pointed at Father again. “I knew it. This is why I never wanted to be out in the first place. You’d actually do it, wouldn’t you?” This time when he stood up, his chair nearly went over. “You’d force me to leave the company because I like to—”
“Tierney!” Father stood up also. “That’s not what I meant.” They stared at each other a second, while a small but compelling thought tickled Tierney’s mind. Let’s listen to him.
He sat back down once more and arranged his face into exaggerated interest.
Father took a deep breath, dropped into his chair, and took a fortifying sip of wine. “I do understand that my father could be very . . . rigid. It’s possible we relied too much on his guidance, but I do feel it necessary to say that, no matter how much things have changed, people see homosexual men differently. Next time you go to Washington for the company—”