My mouth wasn’t the only one that fell open. My mom’s, along with a few others, followed my lead, while Dad and Ford went with something more along the lines of curling their lips while reaching for their butter knifes. As Boone slid out my chair for me, I gave him a subtle nudge before sitting. One that suggested he shut the hell up unless he wanted me to stab him in the knee with my fork if he made any more comments of that nature.
Frieda raced back into the room and set up Boone’s place setting in less time than it took me to unfold my napkin and smooth it into my lap.
Breakfast was a formal affair at Abbott Manor, as most everything was. We ate our eggs with cloth napkins, drank our coffee from porcelain cups painted with gold leaf, and sipped our pressed-fresh-every-morning orange juice from imported Italian crystal. While the breakfast centerpieces were typically extravagant, from the three floral pieces lining the center of the table, I guessed my parents had had every floral shop from Charleston to Raleigh on round-the-clock mode.
“Estelle tells me you’re unemployed, Boone.” Now that we were seated, my dad sawed into his ham steak, though I couldn’t help feeling like it was Boone’s neck he was envisioning. He cut into it a bit more eagerly than breakfast ham warranted.
Boone took a sip of his orange juice, ignoring the heads turned his way. “Estelle speaks the truth.”
“Is this something new?” Dad asked, before lifting a piece of ham to his mouth.
I reached for my own glass of juice. Breakfast hadn’t even started, and I was already counting down the bites until it was over.
“My business just went under.” Boone took another drink, draining his glass. When he was done, he slammed his glass on the table like he was in some gunslinger bar and that was the way one asked for another drink. “So yeah, new within the past few weeks.”
My eyebrows came together as I processed what he’d just said. I hadn’t known anything about Boone owning his own business or what that business might have been. I hadn’t known that had been on his radar even. The fact that it had gone under so recently gave me fresh insight into why he’d so quickly taken the deal I offered him.
Desperation: what makes the world go round.
“What kind of business was that?” The forkful of ham stayed frozen in the air as my dad continued his interrogation.
When Frieda came up behind Boone after giving me a side of ham and poached eggs, she waited. Boone glanced back when he noticed her, his forehead lining.
“Your napkin, Cavanaugh,” Ford piped up. “It goes in your lap. It’s not used for wiping your ass like I know you were thinking.”
Beside him, Charlotte snickered, and across the table, Mr. McBride, who looked to have packed on fifty pounds in seven years and run his liver into the ground judging from the pale brown spots dotting his arms and face, popped off a single-noted laugh.
“Please, everyone. We’re at the breakfast table, and we’ve got a whole tableful of guests.” Mom patted the air with her hands, addressing the room like the debutante she’d been. “Now, Boone, you were telling us about the little business you started up . . .” Her hand flicked in his direction, giving him the floor.
I fought the urge to correct her for applying the word “little” to both Boone’s and my business ventures. In Freudian terms, that pretty much meant my mom thought we were a couple of fools to think we could or should think big enough to venture into the business world. She’d never understand, because to understand, a person needed to be wired with the understanding code.
She wasn’t.
Pinching his napkin, Boone simply moved it from his plate to the side of it. He didn’t put it in his lap, where it so-called belonged. In his own way, a way that wouldn’t earn him a reprimand from my mom, Boone was giving the finger to Ford. “I started a non-profit kids’ rec center.”
Guests in the process of eating their breakfasts stopped chewing. I’d been about to dive into my thick slice of buttered toast when I turned my attention elsewhere. A kids’ center? A non-profit? Come again?
“What’s that?” Dad pressed, his mustache curling higher from his half-smile. “Like a daycare?”
Again, Ford choked on a laugh, though this time he didn’t seem to care about trying to hide it.
Boone grabbed his fork and cut into one of his eggs. My dad wasn’t the only one venting his emotions on the breakfast food.
“No, kids could come and go as they wanted,” Boone explained around a mouthful of egg, “but it gave the growing number of kids in our community who are being raised in unstable-to-volatile homes a soft spot to land for a few hours. A place where they could just be kids and get warm meals.” He finished with a shrug and stuffed the other half of his egg into his mouth.