“I’m guessing that guy hasn’t been renting out property since.”
“He claimed that I’d offered my services in exchange for room and board, which Daddy might have believed, but Mom wouldn’t even consider the possibility. My father’s subsequent investigation turned up some questionable money practices, which led to some other things, and the guy is now doing twenty-to-life for selling drugs to a minor who subsequently died of an overdose.”
So her father had been instrumental in putting away two men with whom Morgan had associated.
“You were trading honest work for honest compensation, Morgan. There’s no way you’ll be found an incompetent parent over that.”
“I’ve trusted two men that ended up in prison. One of them fathered my son. The other I exposed to Sammie. And when I was serving breakfast, I left Sammie alone in the apartment.”
“For the few seconds it would take you to deliver food downstairs. He was asleep and you never left the building.”
“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.”
“Another man went to jail?” Cal asked, beginning to feel as though he’d stepped through Alice’s looking glass and wondering why he was still stepping. Were the prisons filled with men who’d known Morgan Lowen?
“No, Greg’s venture wasn’t illegal. It just wasn’t as altruistic as he’d made it sound. No one got hurt. Daddy made sure I knew what had happened. And Greg was history.”
No one got hurt? Looking at the clouds in Morgan’s eyes, Cal didn’t believe that
for a second.
And he saw how hard it had been for her, the young, beautiful, only daughter of one of Tyler’s richest men. Her mere existence made her prey to the scum of the world.
Her plight called out to him. He would be her friend. He would listen and offer support wherever he could. And when she came through this with the dignity and class she exuded everywhere she went, when she’d secured her son’s future, he would see her graduate and wish her well before they went their separate ways.
What he was not going to do was touch her again. Ever.
Not even to help her up from the couch.
As soon as Morgan left, Cal picked up the phone and dialed a number that a new professor in the art department had slipped to him during a faculty meeting at the beginning of the summer. Professor Kelsey Barber was a vivacious, cute, redheaded free spirit. Cal asked her if she liked Italian food, not that the type of food mattered, and then asked her to dinner. She accepted.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
MORGAN WAS LYING in bed, trying her damnedest to make herself sleep, when the phone rang. It was only ten o’clock. Sammie was already asleep. She could hear his breathing over the monitor she’d installed that evening despite her son’s vocalized displeasure.
Not wanting Sammie to waken, she grabbed the phone. There was no one she wanted to speak with. After her argument with Sammie, one in which she heard her father’s voice-over, repeating verbatim the words she used with his own negative connotation given for the benefit of the judge, she was in a pretty vile mood.
The LED screen showed a number she didn’t recognize.
“Hello?”
“Morgan?”
She recognized his voice immediately.
“Yeah?” She couldn’t get involved right now. Couldn’t trust herself, or her son, to any more upheaval.
But God, his voice sounded good.
“Were you asleep?”
“No.” She sat up in the dark, keeping her voice low for the sake of the sleeping boy across the hall. “I’m wide awake. What’s up?”
Did he have any idea how much she’d been thinking about him?
“I hope it’s not too late. I’m just getting in. But I wanted to know how your meeting went tonight with the counselor?”
“We didn’t go.”
“Why not?”
“We had a call from Sammie’s new court-appointed counselor. We have a meeting with her tomorrow and I didn’t think it was a good idea for him to have to counsel with more than one person at a time. I discussed my concerns with both women and they agreed with me.”
Why was she explaining herself to him? Like he was her father and she had to justify her actions.
Something she’d stopped doing with her father when she was about thirteen.
Cal’s opinion didn’t matter to her. It couldn’t. Not now. She couldn’t afford a single misstep. A single mistake.
“So you talked to this new counselor?”
“Yeah. Leslie Dinsmore. She’s a certified counselor and a caseworker, too, so she’s used to dealing with troubled kids. She seemed nice.” But then, she thought everyone seemed nice, didn’t she? According to her father, anyway.
She was not going to let him make her second-guess herself. Yes, she saw the best in people. She liked to help people, too. Both were positive characteristics.
“I also called an attorney. I’m going to meet with her tomorrow, too.”
“Good. Your father has a lot of money, Morgan, but you’re a good mother and you and Sammie have rights.”
“I know.” She also knew not to underestimate the power of money. She’d seen her father’s wealth in action all of her life.
“How was Sammie tonight?”
She didn’t want to tell him. Didn’t want anyone to judge her son. Sammie was just struggling with growing pains.
“He was angry with me for putting a monitor in his room.”
“A monitor?”
“Yeah.”
“Like those things people use to hear if their baby cries in the night?”
“Yeah.”
Dead air followed and when she felt uncomfortable after a few seconds she said, “I just wanted to be able to get some sleep. What if he sneaks out during the night? I’ll lose him for sure if he goes a second time. I can’t make him sleep with me, or camp out on his floor forever. What he did was wrong. A monitor in his room seemed like a punishment that fit the crime.”
“The crime?”
“He broke my trust in him.”
Another silence had her wishing she hadn’t spoken quite so freely. Cal Whittier made her feel as though she could tell him anything. She’d have to watch that.
“It’s not anything I would have come up with, but, you know, what you said has some merit.
“A more common punishment would be grounding, maybe,” he continued. “I’m not a parent, but I am an educator and I know that taking away something that the child values for a designated period of time is a widely accepted practice. But you’re right. He’s lost your trust. And that’s what you’re showing him.”
“Other than sports, Sammie values his computer. What good would taking away the computer do?” she said. “He uses it for legitimate things—schoolwork, and keeping up with his favorite teams and game scores. He’d be bored stiff without it. I heard in one of my classes once that the prisons are filled with smart people who were bored. It’s more of a challenge to be bad than to be good, and when you’re bored you look for a challenge. Besides, his computer use played no part in what happened on Friday. The other thing he values is his independence. That’s what I’m taking away. Only until I can trust him again. He has to know that breaking someone’s trust is critical.”
“You’re right.”
Why did his saying so matter so much?
“Well, thank you for calling,” she said abruptly. “I have to work early tomorrow. Covering for someone…” The words tumbled over one another as she hurried to extricate herself before she did something really stupid.
Like talking to the man half the night and getting herself in too deep. Her son’s life was at stake. Morgan was not going to mess this up.
* * *
SITTING AT THE COMPUTER in the small room that served as an office at home, Cal wrote long into the night on Monday—a collection of personal notes and memories that he was putting in chronological order. And he nursed a single glass of whiskey. He’d have had something to eat, too, but he’d eaten his fill during his dinner with Kelsey.
She’d seemed to enjoy herself. And he’d asked her out again for later in the week. She’d accepted.
On Tuesday, at ten o’clock, he dialed the phone again, exactly as he had the night before.
“How did your meeting with the lawyer go?” he asked as soon as Morgan picked up. He was in the office, wearing sweats and a T-shirt, ready to write, but had to do this first.
“Good. She says that while my father has a legal right to ask the courts to consider my ability to parent Sammie on my own, the courts will put the most weight in Sammie’s health and well-being. His having run away will work against us, but his good grades, good health and emotional stability will be in our favor. She thinks there’s a possibility that we might get joint custody, because of my father’s ability to provide for Sammie financially so much better than I can, but she doesn’t expect that to happen.
“And…she said that she thinks I should represent myself in court. She
said that court is all about strategy. About choosing the best strategy to win. And in this case, she recommends that I appear on my own behalf. Basically, my father is going to have me on trial. All an attorney would do for me is call me to the stand and ask me questions so that I can present my case. She said that I’m perfectly capable of giving the court the truth on my own and that I’ll appear more confident and capable if I do so. We aren’t going to try to fight my father, or drag him through the mud, which is what I’d need an attorney for. We aren’t going to challenge him, or put him on trial because then it appears like I’m fighting with my father, not standing up for my son. And…she said that she’ll continue to advise me as we go along, free of charge. She was really sweet, Cal. I liked her a lot.”
“She sounds wonderful. Where did you find her?”
“She’s a friend of Julie’s.”
“What she says makes sense. Do you think you can stand up to your father and his attorneys if you’re put on the stand?”
“In this case, yes. I know I’m a good parent. And, having grown up under my father’s thumb, I really believe that Sammie is better off with me.”
“For what it’s worth, I do, too,” he said, and then continued without giving her a chance to respond. “So how did the meeting with the counselor go?”
“I’m not sure.” She sounded tired.
“Was Sammie uncooperative?”
“I don’t think so. She talked to him alone. And when I asked him about their meeting he said it was fine.”
He wondered if she was in bed in the room he’d seen when he’d visited the restroom last Friday night. Or sitting alone on the couch he’d shared with her during that one very long night. “Boys aren’t big on details.”
“Or maybe she told him not to tell me.”
“Maybe.” He’d never dealt with child services. He and his father had always outrun them. “What did you think of her?”
“I liked her. She seemed to have Sammie’s best interests at heart.”
A Son's Tale Page 12