“I do.” Mark nodded. “Take all the time you need, sir. I’ll be sure Eve doesn’t bother you.” He paused, and Bowen waited. Then he added, “And I’ll also make the rain hold off until you come back inside. No sense in you and Bugsy getting soaked out there.”
“Thank you, son. Thank you.” Bowen squeezed Mark’s shoulder. Then he shuffled out onto the wide porch that framed his house. Slowly, carefully, he hobbled down the front stairs, making a show of stopping when he reached the ground and leaning against the railing like he was having a hard time catching his breath. Finally, he shambled around the side of the house, heading in the direction of the garage.
Bugsy stayed close beside him, watching Bowen with wise, yellow eyes.
About halfway to the garage Bowen dropped his cane so that he had to stop and bend painfully to pick it up, and as he did he glanced up under his arm at the house.
Mark was standing on the porch watching him. Bowen straightened like he was the Tin Man needing oil and before he continued on his slow, doddering progress he gave Mark a thumbs-up. Mark waved and then disappeared inside the house. Bowen stood for another moment, pretending he needed to catch his breath. He saw no one watching. No one came out on the porch. No one was looking out any window.
He could hardly contain his excitement, but Bowen kept in character—actually, he was enjoying his frail old man act. When he reached the garage he leaned against it, coughing like his lungs had suddenly gone old and feeble, too. Then he shuffled around the side of the building where the door was located—and where the garage blocked the view of him and Bugsy from the house.
Bowen dropped the cane and then began to do several warm-up stretches as Bugsy started to wag and jump happily around him.
“That’s right, Bugsy old girl. Did I tell you about the time I scrimmaged against Notre Dame with a broken arm? Back before football was for pussies? And those dumbasses inside our house think knocking me around a little actually stopped me? Hell, I was offered scholarships in track and football by a Big Ten university. I still go to the gym five times a week, and every morning, rain, shine, or hurricane, you and I jog up and down this beach in the sand. Let’s show ’em how real athletes age!”
Then Linus Bowen, who was almost eighty years young, ran. Arms pumping, but upper body relaxed, he still had the form of the track star whose hundred-yard-dash record stood at his high school for almost forty years after he graduated. Beside him the huge wolfhound kept perfect pace.
In no time he’d made it to the sand dunes and the tall sea grass that he’d let grow wild on his property because the old biology teacher in him loved nothing more than providing a natural habitat for what he considered after all these years his seabirds and his coastal flora and fauna. There he had some cover, and was able to slow to a jog, weaving his way easily between mounds of sand and scraggly bushes.
“Steady old girl, steady,” he spoke to Bugsy between deep, even breaths as he stripped off his sweatshirt and tied it around his waist. “The Chevron station is two miles this way, on the other side of Cobb’s Cove. That’s where we’re headed. Then I’ll call real Texas law enforcement and they’ll be on those four like stink on shit.” Chuckling, Bowen jogged on, with the big dog at his side.
27
CHARLOTTE
Charlotte’s phone blared the melody of Ursula the sea witch’s “Poor Unfortunate Souls” from The Little Mermaid, forcing her awake. She picked up the phone, sighing at the time. Eight a.m. sharp. At least her mother was a creature of habit. Too bad she hadn’t remembered that the night before and silenced her phone.
But because she had forgotten, and she’d never been good at ignoring this particular person, Charlotte cleared her throat and answered with her perkiest voice. “Good morning, Mother!”
“Happy birthday, Charles.”
Charlotte’s eyes went heavenward. “Mother, we’ve talked about this. Please respect the fact that my name is Charlotte.”
Her mother’s voice was hard and cold, which was only intensified by her perfect Southern-belle accent. “It is the name your father and I gave you eighteen years ago, and that is the only name I will ever call you.”
“Then I don’t understand why you call at all. Mother, I’m an adult now. I am no longer your responsibility.”
“Thanks to that meddling old woman who calls herself my mother.”
“I’ve told you before, if you speak badly of Grandma Myrtie I will not talk to you,” Charlotte said.
One of her mother’s dramatic Southern sighs floated up from the phone, trying to smother Charlotte in a blanket of old guilt and wasted dreams. “You’ve always preferred her over me—your own mother!”
But Charlotte was done being bullied by her mother. “Because Grandma Myrtie has always accepted me and loved me for who I am.”
“Don’t you mean she indulged and spoiled you?”
“No. I said exactly what I meant. Mother, I’m going to go now. I don’t think this call was about wishing me happy birthday. Sadly, I think this call was about trying to make me feel guilty for being myself.”
“I cannot believe I gave birth to a child who would grow up to be so heartless to his mother.” Emotion intensified her accent so that Charlotte thought she sounded more like a caricature than a real person.
Not that that thought was a surprise. The truth was Charlotte often thought of her mother as a caricature of the perfect antebellum Southerner—stuck purposefully in a rose-colored-glasses version of an ignorant, racist, and homophobic past.
“I realize you’re incapable of understanding who I am. I stopped trying to get you to see my side of this years ago. I only wish you would learn to respect my decisions.”
“Why, when you clearly do not respect your father and me.”
“Mother, I respect you. That’s one reason I chose to leave North Carolina. I simply don’t agree with you. You can respect me, too, without agreeing with me.”
“That’s ridiculous. Why should I respect your homosexual desires? God doesn’t!”