“If it happens in public, yes we do.” She didn’t tell him how everyone in the restaurant had laughed about Lewis Treeborne’s attack on his son. Everyone saw Carter as a pampered, spoiled wimp. “Too afraid of his old man to stand up to him” was the consensus.
Sophie thought that was probably true, but she knew a lot about being in situations where other people had control. She knew she shouldn’t get involved, since this young man was a Treeborne, but he was also a human being, and right now he looked so sad she couldn’t leave him alone.
“On I-40 there’s a tavern. It—”
“I know the place well,” he said. “Get in.”
That was the beginning. For the first time in his life, Carter had a friendship with a woman. Over the next few months he told her about his life, about his mother, and how she’d protected him from his father. And Sophie told how she had kept her stepfather away from her sister.
This mutual bond, this sense of sharing, led to friendship, which led to sex, and they led to love. That summer was the best of Carter’s life. His father was gone most of the time, there were competent people to run the company, so he spent a lot of time with Sophie.
Her refusal to take money from him was, at first, a problem. Lisa got a job at the local Dairy Queen so Sophie could cut down from three jobs to two, but that still took up too much of her time. Carter began devising ingenious ways to get money to Sophie. Tourists came through and left twenty-dollar tips. The feed store where she worked on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons did so much business her boss gave her a substantial raise.
By the end of the summer she was doing so well that she could afford to take whole days off to spend with Carter.
That they rarely left town, but never went anyplace where Carter might be known, didn’t bother Sophie. The two of them spent their hours together in a ramshackle summerhouse hidden on the Treeborne estate. They had a boat, a lake, and a forest to walk through. They spent lazy afternoons together reading, talking, or just being quiet. They made love often, but always quietly and tenderly.
For the first time since his mother died Carter felt that someone cared for him, not his money, but for him.
The only blemish in his life that summer was that he knew he was to marry someone else. In September, he tried to talk to his father about what he saw as a life sentence. But Lewis Treeborne wouldn’t listen. “You cannot marry a local girl!” he said in anger, then his face changed to one of concern and he calmed down. “You may think you’re in love with her but that’s only because you two hide out in the woods together and eat with your fingers. How would you feel if you showed up at the opera with her? Would she fall asleep? Or would she stomp and yell like she was at a figure eight race?”
Lewis put his hand on his son’s shoulder, a rare gesture. “I’ve seen this girl and she’s a knockout, I’ll give you that, but she’s a local and that’s all she’ll ever be. Believe me, if you married a girl like that, within six months you’d be ashamed to be seen with her. And think about her! All those fancy friends of yours would make fun of her until the girl would want to slit her wrists. Do you want to do something like that to her? Is that your idea of love?”
Lewis gave his son’s shoulder an affectionate squeeze and when he turned away he was smiling. Damn! but the boy was easy to manipulate. Palmer was holding out for his druggy daughter to marry “a good, clean young man,” and Carter was going to do it no matter what had to be done. If Lewis had to, he’d make the local girl disappear.
Still smiling, he left the room.
As he’d planned, Lewis’s words planted a seed in Carter’s head and he began to watch Sophie, put her under a magnifying glass. She knew she was being scrutinized and she asked him why. His reply was that he was about to make the biggest decision of his life. Sophie, correctly thinking he was contemplating marriage, looked down to cover her blushes. She had incorrectly begun to believe that she would be the bride.
In the end, Carter had gone with his father. To stand against the man took more courage than Carter had. One night he met with Traci at a formal dinner party put on by her father. He sat across from her and couldn’t help noticing that she used a fish knife correctly. And she wore a gown that cost a normal person’s yearly wage, and diamonds sparkled on her ears and her wrists. He had a vision of Sophie and him sitting on the summerhouse floor eating barbecued spareribs, sauce all over their faces. How would Sophie do at a dinner like this one? he wondered. Would all the cutlery and glassware confuse her?
After that night he began to pull back from Sophie, but he worked to not let her see it or feel it. By the time what he knew was their last night together came, he had convinced himself that his father was right. But some part of him felt bad enough that he showed her the Treeborne cookbook. Maybe she would tell her grandchildren that she’d seen it. Maybe . . .
What Carter hadn’t foreseen after the breakup was how miserable he’d be without Sophie. After he’d spent some time alone with the woman he was to marry, all he did was compare her to Sophie.
It took only days to realize he’d made a big, big mistake. He went to Sophie’s house and was told by her stepfather that she’d left town. “Took the car and went away,” Arnie yelled. “Now how the hell am I supposed to pay for this place?”
If Carter hadn’t been in the same situation he would have told the man to get a job.
Now, after Halloween, Carter was to the point where he hated his life so much that he didn’t want to leave his bedroom. The last time he’d seen Traci she’d offered him what she called a “particularly fine line” of cocaine.
When his phone buzzed he almost didn’t answer it. But then he thought maybe it could be Sophie.
It was his father calling to tell him to get twenty-five grand out of the office safe and give it to a man who’d be there in thirty minutes. “Can you get off your rear long enough to do this?” Lewis sneered into the phone. He was disgusted with his son’s depression, something Lewis had never come close to feeling.
Carter clicked off the phone, tiredly got up, and went to his father’s office. The last time he’d been in the safe was with Sophie when he’d shown her the old cookbook. Tears blurred his vision as he spun the dial with the combination.
He counted out the money, put it in an envelope, and sealed it. It was when he looked back at the safe that he realized the yellow envelope wasn’t there.
He tossed the cash his father kept in the safe onto the desk, then all the papers. The envelope, the family cookbook, was not there.
With his fingertips on his temples, Carter tried to think of when and where. Maybe his father had taken it. Maybe—
Carter knew that only one person would have removed the cookbook from the safe where it had been for decades. That day, that very last day, he and Sophie had made love on the floor of his father’s office. Such a violation of Lewis Treeborne’s private space had driven Carter to new heights of pleasure. It was as though he was at last defying the man.
Afterward, Carter had carried Sophie to his bedroom and . . .
He put his hands over his face. He’d carried Sophie out and left the safe standing open. She must have returned to the house after he’d shoved her out the front door. He hadn’t meant to be so rough, but he was afraid his father would return and see her. He didn’t want her on the receiving end of the man’s temper.