Home to the Riverview Inn

by Molly O'Keefe

  What should I say? he wondered, jamming his hands in his pockets. What am I supposed to do with my hands? Why doesn’t Jonah say something? Why doesn’t he take off those damn glasses?

  Jonah just stood there.

  “I’m glad you’re here,” Patrick said. It was a ridiculous understatement. A mere patch on what he truly felt, as if his life, missing something for so long, was finally going to come together. And this boy, his boy, this strong, handsome and angry man was the key to it all.

  But Jonah stared at him as though Patrick were speaking French and he didn’t understand the language.

  “Son—”

  “Where’s my mother?” Jonah asked, his voice flat.

  “She went back to her cabin to freshen up,” Patrick said, stammering slightly. He understood it wasn’t going to be roses with this boy. They had a lot of demons between them that needed to be put to rest. But he had hoped for a better start. Something closer to friendly than this frigid behavior. Iris had warned him that Jonah was not happy about this. That he was reluctant to come. But Patrick truly had not expected there to be no connection. They were flesh and blood after all and it wasn’t as though Patrick had known about him and rejected him. If he’d known Iris was pregnant when she left, he would have moved heaven and earth to get them back.

  “I’m sure she’ll be out here soon. My boys are coming, too. Gabe just had a baby and he’ll want to show her—”

  “Listen…Patrick,” Jonah said, his voice cutting him like a knife. “I’m not here for a family reunion. I’m here because my mother asked me to be here. And—” his voice grew slightly meaner, mocking “—you probably don’t remember this about my mom but she doesn’t ask for much. So, I’m here for her. I don’t care about your sons—”

  “They are your brothers,” Patrick insisted.

  “They are no one,” Jonah said. “You are all strangers and you’re going to stay that way.”

  Patrick watched this boy and tried to see into him, tried to find him amongst all that attitude. But couldn’t. And it broke his heart a little.

  “We’ll see about that,” Patrick said, not ready to give up the fight just yet.

  Jonah shook his head. “This isn’t a made-for-TV movie, Patrick. There is no happy ending for us. Mom had no business trying to get us all together.”

  “Don’t you want her to be happy?” Patrick asked.

  Jonah lifted his sunglasses before bracing himself against his Jeep. Patrick felt pinned by the hate in his son’s blue eyes. Eyes that were, as Iris had said, identical to his own.

  “You don’t know my mom,” Jonah said. “You don’t know what makes her happy. And you sure as hell don’t know me.”

  “I want to,” Patrick said, bracing himself against the Jeep, too. There was only so much of this man’s disdain and disrespect he could take. “You are my son and I want to be a part of your life.”

  “Well.” Jonah laughed and the sound made Patrick wince. “You should have thought of that thirty years ago when you told your wife you wanted nothing to do with her. Twice.” Jonah put his glasses back on and checked his watch, dismissing Patrick like a waiter at a restaurant. “Tell my mom I’ll pick her up for lunch—”

  “Tell her yourself.” Iris appeared on the walkway leading from the cabin she’d been staying in. She wore red—a scarf in her hair and a banner of crimson across her lips. Happiness, a certain motherly excitement radiated from her like raw electricity. It was as if the woman Patrick had gotten to reknow in the past five months was plugged in suddenly, amped up.

  She looked like the woman he’d married. The woman he fell in love with so long ago. And seeing that woman again knocked all the wind right out of him.

  He barely stopped himself from sagging to the ground.

  “Hey, Mom!” Jonah said, his face changing, growing younger, lighter, happier. His body, so rigid, softened as he picked up the smiling Iris and wrapped her in a giant bear hug.

  “It’s been too long,” Jonah said.

  “Yes,” Iris agreed. She stroked her son’s hair away from his face and pulled off his sunglasses. “That’s better,” she said, smiling into his eyes.

  Patrick felt as if he’d been punched in the gut.

  They were a unit, these two. A family. Who was he, at this point in their lives, to insist on being involved?

  There was so little chance of this working, he realized. He understood Jonah’s anger and Iris’s reticence to get him and Jonah under the same roof.

  “Well, well.” Gabe, his oldest boy, stepped up next to Patrick while Max, his middle son, flanked him. Patrick could not have been more relieved.

  This was his unit. His family.

  “I should have guessed that Jonah would use Mom’s maiden name, but I never put two and two together,” Gabe murmured quietly so Jonah and Iris didn’t hear. “The Dirty Developer is our missing brother.”

  Patrick’s jaw dropped. “No,” he breathed. “No way.” They’d talked about the news article this morning over coffee and he hadn’t put two and two together, either.

  But Jonah did bear a remarkable resemblance to the grainy picture of the man in the newspaper.

  My son? Patrick thought. Someone with my blood was capable of such things?

  It was obscene. Gross.

  “Jonah,” Iris said, keeping her arm around him but pointing him toward Patrick and the boys. “Meet your brothers.”

  Max stepped forward, all business, a policeman to the core. “Max,” he said, holding out his hand. “Good to meet you.”

  Jonah just stared at the hand and Patrick held his breath, waiting for Max’s short fuse to be lit by Jonah’s apparent ingrained disrespect. The last thing this situation needed was Max’s fighting instincts to be stirred.

  “Jonah,” Iris admonished the full grown man next to her as though he were a five-year-old. Jonah reached out to shake Max’s hand.

  “And I’m Gabe,” Gabe said, stepping up beside his brothers. With all of them standing together Patrick could see how similar they all were. Tall men, like him. Gabe had Patrick’s blond hair and olive skin. Max and Jonah had Iris’s dramatic coloring—dark hair and light skin—though Max’s eyes were dark. And Jonah’s eyes, like Gabe’s, were blue.

  Patrick glanced at Iris and caught the worry in her expression, her clenched hands and tight lips.

  The parking lot was filled with dangerous fumes, combustible tempers and incredibly hurt feelings. The wrong word uttered and Patrick knew the whole place would go up in smoke. But he didn’t know what to say. What to do. This whole situation was too big to be dealt with. How did one pull it apart and try to fix what was so terribly wrong?

  “Well, now,” Iris said, charging into the clutch of boys, wrapping her arm around Jonah’s waist and grabbing Max’s hand, giving them both a little jostle. She glanced around, her smile fierce, her eyes daring any one of them to say something wrong at this moment. “Isn’t this nice.”

  Patrick tipped his head back and laughed.

  That’s how, he thought, pride and respect for Iris washing over him. That’s how you do it.

  Iris could be a powerful riptide, dragging Jonah places he didn’t want to go. School. Church. Parties. Into the Riverview Inn for lunch.

  “Go,” he told her when she turned to wait for him. Patrick, Max and Gabe had already headed for the front doors. Max and Gabe had practically grabbed the laughing Patrick and ran away with him, as if rescuing him from Jonah. “I’ll be right in.”

  This was not my idea, Jonah wanted to yell. But he didn’t have enough air. He didn’t have enough air to walk to the lodge, much less give those men, his brothers, the fight everyone was itching to get to.

  My chest, he thought, a frenzied panic starting to claw up his back.

  “Mom,” he said when she continued to stare at him with her obsidian eyes, knowing him far too well to believe him. She thought he was going to turn and run.

  “I have to call Gary,” he lied. “A quick call and I�
�ll be right in.”

  She quirked an eyebrow and he smiled, dug into his pocket and chucked her his car keys, which she caught deftly in one hand the way she used to when he was a teenager.

  Go, he wanted to beg, please just go.

  “Happy?” he asked and immediately knew it was the wrong thing to say. Her eyes got wet and she bit her lower lip.

  “I am, Jonah,” she said, standing against the rustic and wooded background of the inn like a brave and noble pioneer woman. Which so suited how he always saw her. Strong and stalwart. Unflinching but also, most of the time, unsmiling.

  Life had been hard on Mom.

  “I am very happy right now,” she said and Jonah forced himself to smile so she would leave him for a few minutes.

  Just a few was all he needed. Or he’d pass out on the gravel.

  His body awash in cold sweat, he waited until she worked her way down the path to the lodge before he opened his passenger car door and slumped into the seat. Gasping, he pawed open the glove compartment and grabbed his emergency inhaler.

  It had been weeks since he’d needed this. Weeks since the asthma had fought past his carefully acquired relaxation tools.

  He took a deep puff from the inhaler. Another. Waited, inhaler poised, until finally, he felt the steroids at work, opening his lungs. His throat.

  Air, like cold, clean water, filled his body, and his head stopped spinning.

  He stared at the brilliant blue sky, the muscular shoulders of the Catskill Mountains and waited for his body, his constant betrayer, to fall into line.

  “See you later, Tim!” The tall blonde, Daphne, shut the kitchen door behind her and stepped onto the gravel heading toward her white pickup truck with the Athens Organics logo in green on the side.

  But she stopped, like a deer sensing danger and glanced over at the Jeep, the open door and him slouching in his passenger seat.

  God, she was pretty.

  Her hair, so gold it seemed white, was lit like a halo around her head, as if further proof of the differences between them. He could practically feel the devil’s horns pushing out from his skull. Her green eyes raked him. Her lush mouth opened slightly in surprise and, he was sure, a mild disgust.

  Not wanting her to see him like this, he tossed the inhaler back in the glove box and sat up. Met her gaze as if he had nothing to hide.

  She lifted a hand—a farewell or a greeting he didn’t know—then walked to her truck, got in and drove away, right past him, without another glance.

  3

  Jonah had sat through more than his share of tough negotiations. He could sit unfazed through the heaviest, stoniest of silences, smiling slightly until the opposition cracked.

  It was a skill he’d picked up from the many hours Aunt Sheila spent with him playing Stare Down during that chicken pox incident.

  But even he had to admit that lunch was rough. Rough in the way the Nuremberg Trial was rough. Rough like the South surrendering to the North. Civilized on the surface but only one wrong word away from an all-out brawl.

  “That wasn’t so bad, was it?” Mom asked, resting her head against his shoulder, while linking her arm through his. He was walking her from the lodge to her cottage across the clearing that was filled with the electric-green of a new spring. He slid on his sunglasses against the blaze of the sun.

  He had to admit, much like the meal he hadn’t eaten and the room he didn’t eat it in, the place was nice.

  That was all he was going to admit.

  “It was pretty bad.” He laughed, putting his hand over hers and holding it tightly.

  “Well, you didn’t help,” she chastised him. “Sitting there like some kind of—”

  “What?”

  “I don’t know. Tough guy.”

  “I am a tough guy,” he protested.

  “Please,” she said. “You barely said two words.”

  “They talked plenty,” he reminded her. Had they ever. Alice and Delia, the redheaded Texan, could talk paint off a wall. They were like two birds—bright and pretty but chattering constantly. He’d tuned them out until one of them mentioned Daphne, then like some kind of radar, he tuned right in.

  Idiot, he thought.

  “Max and Gabe barely said two words,” she said, seeming preoccupied.

  “Gabe said enough,” he assured her. Gabe, when everyone was occupied with passing dishes and spooning out salad and cooing at the black-haired, squashed-face baby, had turned to him, eyebrow arched in a way Jonah completely understood and said, “Dirty Developer?”

  He’d pushed away from the table for one wild moment, ready to put his fist in Gabe’s smug face but Max put a hand between them and said, “It would break Iris’s and Dad’s hearts if you fought.”

  It had been the appropriate bucket of cold water. But still, Jonah felt that anger in his stomach. The anger remarkably similar to the one that had fueled him for years on the playground when kids called him shrimp or tiny tunes or baby.

  But he did hope that before he left he might get a chance to have a quick conversation with Gabe Mitchell. The kind of conversation that might end in a bloody nose.

  “So, are you satisfied?” he asked, glancing down at her. “Family reunited so we can all get on with our lives.”

  She stopped and stared at him, her dark eyes like spotlights on his grimy little soul. “I know this is hard for you, Jonah—”

  He laughed and tugged her into motion. “No, it’s not hard at all,” he clarified. “It’s not hard because I have no expectations, Mom.” He knew this was going to hurt, but she’d clearly gone slightly delusional since coming here over the winter. Maybe it was grief and stress over Aunt Sheila’s battles, but his mom wasn’t thinking clearly. “I have no attachment to these men.” When he saw her shaking her head, he spun her to face him. He took off his glasses so she could see how serious he was. “These men don’t mean anything to me. And they are never going to. I don’t want anything from them, or need anything from them.”

  She searched his eyes and he let her. This was his truth. “You are what matters to me,” he told her and she smiled. But it was one of her sad smiles.

  “Oh, honey.” She sighed, cupping his cheek. “You’re what matters to me, too. That’s why I want you here. Why I want you to stay.”

  “Mom—”

  “Look,” she interrupted. “Everyone in there was having a real hard time not asking you about that article in the Times last week.”

  “You saw it?”

  “Of course I did. It was the New York Times. Everyone saw it.”

  Of course. Everyone. Even out here. The lovely Daphne had already proven that. Thinking of her watching him through the windshield of his Jeep, her eyes so damning, made his skin tight.

  “Why don’t you just tell them,” Mom suggested. “Explain—”

  “There’s nothing to explain,” he said, walking again, trying to shake the remembered sensation of Daphne’s eyes judging him.

  “Jonah—”

  “There is nothing to explain,” he repeated, enunciating clearly so she’d get the idea that the conversation was over.

  “Well, if you won’t stay for me,” she said, “if you won’t stay in order to get to know your own father—”

  He rolled his eyes at her and she smacked his arm. “I am your mother, Jonah. You will not roll your eyes at me.”

  “Sorry, Mom,” he said, truly abashed.

  “Like I was saying, if you won’t stay for me, or to get to know these truly wonderful men—these kind and generous and complicated men who are your family—at least stay until that Dirty Developer thing blows over.”

  Ah, his mom. So smart.

  He sighed. “If you are asking me, I will stay.”

  “I know, but I get tired of asking.”

  “You never ask,” he cried, laughing. “I have more money than I know what to do with and you refuse a penny. I try to take you on trips. I tried to buy you that new car—”

  “My car is fine.”
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  “Your car is a mess!”

  “I don’t need your money, or your trips or cars.”

  “Clearly.”

  “I need you. Here. For two weeks.”

  He felt himself strain and push against that promise he’d made. He’d never guessed, being so young and so suddenly on top of the world, that his mother would ever ask for something he didn’t want to give. The one thing, actually, that he didn’t want to give her.

  “Were you unhappy?” he asked, blurting out the question that had been churning in his brain since he saw her smile at Max and Gabe. “All those years with me…did you wish we were with them?”

  Tears filled her eyes, turning them to black pools. He was sorry that he made her cry. He was always sorry for that. But it hurt to think that he was second best all these years.

  “I wanted to be with you,” she said fiercely. “Wherever you were that’s where I wanted to be.”

  He smiled at her. He knew a hedge when he heard one. A half-truth. She’d asked him once if he wanted to know his father and he’d said no. Absolutely no.

  At the time his six-year-old brain thought it might mean sharing his mother. And he hated that.

  His thirty-year-old brain wasn’t all that different. But he did recognize what he did to her when he’d told her no. The wall he’d built. He made it impossible to try to have both—her husband and sons all together.

  Of course those letters Patrick had written telling Iris he didn’t want her, those letters put up quite a wall, too. Jonah didn’t like the idea of her here chasing after the man who’d rejected her. Hurt her so much. There was far too much potential for more pain for his mother here.

  “Mom, why do you want this so bad?” he asked. “The guy told you no.”

  “And then he said yes.” Iris shrugged. “We both made mistakes.”

  It was a terrible answer, in Jonah’s book. Patrick changing his mind about having Iris come back didn’t erase the thirty years that his mom missed the man.

  She’d pretended she didn’t, but Jonah wasn’t blind.