Read Online Facets by Barbara Delinsky - Free Book Online

at his most rebellious, “what you are and what you’ve done don’t concern me anymore. Two more years and I’ll be eighteen. Then I won’t even have to come when you call.”
    But John had underestimated his father, who said in that same dangerously slow, tight-jawed way, “Don’t be so sure. I’m your future, John. St. George Mining is your future.”
    “Not if I don’t want. it.”
    “You will,” Eugene bellowed, “because the day you turn your back on it will be the day I write you off. That’ll be the end of the money, sonny. And don’t”—he raised a cautioning finger—“think you’ll be supported by the Wrights in the style you like, because there’s somethin’ you don’t know about people like that. You think they live high off the hog? Well, look close. The house on the Cape has been in the family for three generations and is shabby as hell. The membership in the country club was bought for perpetuity by the Wright who was a founding member. Do you see your aunt an’ uncle buying fancy clothes? Or flyin’ to New York for the weekend? Your cousins didn’t get new cars when they turned sixteen. The fact is, sonny, that people like that have the pedigree and the history and the money, but they don’t shell out. So if you think you’re gonna turn to them to support you while you piss away your time with your nose up in the air, you’re wrong.”
    Seeing that he’d regained the upper hand, he took a breath. “You need my money, John. Think about it, and you’ll know it’s true.”
    John wanted to argue, but his rebelliousness wouldn’t take him that far. He wasn’t sure if he believed that the Wright side of the family was a dry well, but he did know that there was money in St. George Mining. He liked nice things, and nice things cost money. Until he knew his options, he couldn’t risk disinheritance.
    So he met Patricia, and it took every bit of the social skill he’d developed in his sixteen years to be civil. The gossip hadn’t quite prepared him. Married, she was; the shining gold band on her finger confirmed that. Pregnant, she was; her protruding belly confirmed that. But John had imagined a husband stealer to be more sharp-edged. Patricia was pretty and soft, hatefully so.
    She was also very, very young. Gossip had hinted at that, but John wasn’t prepared for someone far closer to his own age than to Eugene’s. She was, it turned out, twenty, to Eugene’s forty-eight, which was the most bizarre, the most hateful turn of all.
    John couldn’t return to Boston fast enough, not so much to report on what he’d learned, since he was too disgusted to confess it, but because he needed to return to his own life and blot out his father and his father’s very young, very pregnant wife.
    He might have succeeded had Sybil not taken suddenly ill. The diagnosis was cancer. The prognosis was guarded. She had one operation, then another, and though the Wrights came often to visit, John was the one who stayed by her side. “You look so much like your father,” she would say with a smile in fuzzy moments, just before she drifted into a drugged sleep, and although he hated the comparison, he knew he would bear it if it brought her some comfort. Nothing else seemed to. The lethargy that had set in after Eugene’s marriage was magnified tenfold. The doctors told her to fight. The Wrights told her to fight. John told her to fight. But she wouldn’t.
    Seven months after the cancer was found, she died. John, at seventeen, was hit in the face with the facts of life and death. His grief was intense and complex. He felt fear, confusion, anger, and a pride that kept him from sharing his feelings with others lest they think him weak. So he guarded his emotions well, pressing them into a deep, dark portion of his mind, covering them over with the practical concerns relevant to survival. Because that was the name of the game. Not only was Sybil gone, but no invitation had come from the Wrights for