A Son's Tale

“I know. And I’m telling you the truth. But if I push my father on this, he’ll make it come out looking differently. He’ll use the truth as a basis for his claims, and then skew it enough to serve his argument.”

Cal knew only too well how that could happen. And hurt. Sometimes the truth didn’t set a person free.

“What else is there?”

“When I was in high school, this girl I knew came to me crying because her mother and her father refused to let her get married because she was only seventeen. She was also pregnant and I knew her boyfriend. They were responsible, good students who’d made a mistake and wanted to do what was right for their baby. They wanted me to go to my father and see if he’d help them. I emptied my savings account instead and the money helped her and her boyfriend run away to Las Vegas, get married and pay for prenatal care. I hear from them every Christmas, by the way. They’re still married, living in Vegas, and have three kids.”

“If the money was yours there was no crime in helping them.”

“I gave them ten thousand dollars. My father will use that to prove that I don’t understand the value of a dollar, which is what he told me at the time as justification for taking away my allowance. I can fight him on that one. I’ve got a ten-year history of making it on my own. But I can guarantee you he’ll find a way to use that incident against me. I admit, it was dumb. But to my way of thinking, the only thing that made being the rich kid palatable was to be able to use my father’s money to help people.”

What kind of parents gave a kid, any kid, access to ten thousand dollars? “How in the hell did you even have a chance to establish any sense of the value of a dollar with that kind of cash hanging around?”

“I don’t know. Maybe he’ll say I stole it out of his and my mother’s account. Which I didn’t.”

His fingers were growing numb. He let go of her hand.

And wished there was some reason for him not to have done so.

“When Sammie was a couple of years old, I met a young woman at the park.” Morgan sounded as though she was giving a recitation now. “She was pregnant and unmarried, and off work during the last month of her pregnancy. She wanted to leave her boyfriend, but didn’t have anywhere to go. Her father was dead and her mother had kicked her out when she’d refused to have an abortion.”

“How old was she?”

“Nineteen.”

“The same age you were when you were pregnant with Sammie.”

“Right.

“Anyway, I met the boyfriend and didn’t like him. He was lazy. And fat. He’d had three jobs that year and missed work if he didn’t feel like getting up. He wasn’t abusive or anything, but it was clear that her life with him would be a series of dead ends.”

Cal knew that this wasn’t going anyplace good.

“I was working at the day care by then and took Sammie to the park every day after work, which is how I met her. She and I talked every day that month, and I told her that after her baby was born she could move in with Sammie and me until she could find a job and get a place of her own. My mother warned me that it wasn’t a good idea, but they’re always so uppity, you know? They don’t know what it’s like to try as hard as you can and still have that not be enough.”

“So what happened?” The woman stole from her, was Cal’s guess.

“My lease disallowed me from taking in a roommate. It was just a one-bedroom place. I told Shelley to keep things low-key when the landlord was around and she seemed to be really careful. But it turns out that when I went to work, she cranked up the stereo, had people over and let her friends drink too much. A neighbor complained. I got evicted. Sammie and I ended up having to live in one of those rent-by-the-week motels until I could find another decent place I could afford on my day-care salary.”

“What happened to Shelley?”

“She took the baby over to her mother’s house. Her mother fell in love with her grandchild and Shelley moved back home. She talked to the landlord for me, tried really hard to smooth things over, but he wouldn’t reconsider.”

“And her mother didn’t have room to take you in, too? Just until you found a place?”

“They didn’t offer. And I didn’t ask.”

He wouldn’t have asked, either.

“I wasn’t the only single mother living in the motel. It was clean and safe. I don’t think for a second that I’d lose custody of my son for having lived there. It’s the spin my father is going to put on things that scares me.”

“What about dating?” He told himself he was asking because her answer was pertinent to her case. If there’d been other men, her father would certainly bring them into the picture.

Morgan was a beautiful woman. One who would be certain to attract her share of male attention. “Have there been other men in your and Sammie’s lives? Any that would feed your father’s cause?”

“I’ve only dated one man since my son was born. Sammie was three, was potty trained and old enough to talk, to tell me if something wasn’t right, and so I finally felt comfortable leaving him with a sitter. Greg worked for my father, which didn’t sit well with me, but I liked some of his ideas. He was a junior financial adviser, working on charities, and one night I ran into him at the grocery store. He told me that he was trying to get Daddy to get more involved in charitable work, showing my father how it would actually help his bottom line, and I liked his passion to do good. He’d been after me since before Sammie was born to go out with him. My father didn’t approve, which might have been why I finally agreed.

“Anyway, it wasn’t long before I figured out that he had no interest in Sammie at all. What I didn’t know was that he was using his relationship with me to put pressure on my father to invest in this charitable venture he’d found. My father agreed, but what Greg didn’t yet know was Daddy’s thoroughness in investigating any new financial expenditure even if it came from his own people. Turns out Greg’s venture was part of a tiered plan that benefited him more than the charities involved.”