The Great Escape (Wynette, Texas #7)(64)

She learned he was chairman of the island’s biggest charity. Both admirable and good promotion for his business, since it kept his face plastered on all the fund-raising literature. He also sponsored Little League and soccer teams in every age group, ensuring that dozens of island kids were his walking advertisements.

“How about some lunch?” he asked Toby as they climbed back into his car. “The Island Inn or Rooster’s?”

“Can we go to the Dogs ’N’ Malts?” Toby asked.

Mike glanced at Bree, taking her in from head to toe. “Bree’s all dressed up. Let’s take her someplace nice.”

She didn’t want to be indebted to Mike for lunch or mountain bikes or notebook computers. She didn’t want to be indebted to him for anything. “Not today,” she said briskly as he turned the key in the ignition. “I need to start melting beeswax for candles.”

Toby predictably took issue. “That’s not fair. You spoil everything.”

“Now, boy, there’s no need to be disrespectful,” Mike replied.

“Please stop calling him boy,” she said tightly.

Mike glanced over at her.

Toby kicked the back of her seat. “I’m a kid. Mike’s my friend. He can call me whatever he wants.”

Toby was David’s son, and she wasn’t backing down on this one. “No, he can’t.” As she looked over her shoulder at him, she saw Star’s thickly lashed golden brown eyes staring back at her. “That word has a negative connotation—a bad association—in the African-American community.”

Mike flinched, finally catching on, but Toby grew more belligerent. “So what? I don’t live in the African-American community. I live on Charity Island.”

How had she, the whitest of white women, become responsible for instilling racial pride in David Wheeler’s son?

Mike, who’d started the whole thing, concentrated on pulling out of the parking lot. She plodded on. “White people used to call black men—even elderly men—‘boy.’ It was a way of making them feel inferior. It’s very insensitive.”

Toby thought about it for a moment and, no surprise, curled his lip at her. “Mike’s my friend. He didn’t mean to be insensitive. That’s just the way he is.”

Mike shook his head. “No, Bree’s right. I apologize, Toby. I keep forgetting.”

Forgetting to deal with his racism or forgetting Toby was half African-American?

“So what?” Toby muttered. “I’m white, too, and I don’t see what’s the big deal.”

“The big deal,” she said stubbornly, “is that your father was proud of his heritage, and I want you to feel the same way.”

“If he was so proud, why did he marry my mom?”

Because Star had always wanted whatever Bree had.

“Your dad was crazy about your mom,” Mike said. “And she was just as crazy about him, right up to the end. Your mom could make your dad laugh like nobody else, and he got her to read books she wouldn’t have picked up otherwise. I wish you could have seen the way they looked at each other. Like nobody else existed.”

He might as well have slapped her. And he wasn’t done. “It took them a while to realize how much they loved each other,” he said, an unfamiliar toughness clipping his words. “At first Bree was your dad’s girlfriend, but let me tell you, he never looked at her the way he looked at your mother.”

The real Mike Moody, with his calculated cruelty, had finally resurfaced. He kept his eyes on the road. “We’ll drop Bree off at the cottage so she can get her work done, and then I’ll take you to Dogs ’N’ Malts. That okay with you, Bree?”

All she could manage was the barest nod.

As soon as she was inside, she sagged down on the couch and stared blindly at the Siamese cats on the mantel. She’d spent more time lately thinking about her youthful love affair than the demise of her ten-year marriage. But her affair with David had such a clear beginning and end, while the course of her marriage had been so very murky.

She slipped her heels off. The sandals she wore every day had left tan marks on her bare feet. Not that she had much of a tan. This was as dark as she got, a touch of honey and a few more freckles, which made it even more ironic that she’d been charged with raising a young black male.

Despite what she’d told Mike and Toby, she wasn’t ready to tackle melting beeswax today, so after she’d changed clothes, she found paper and began sketching some ideas for handmade note cards. But her heart wasn’t in it, and she couldn’t come up with anything she liked. Eventually she heard Toby burst into the house and head for his room. She listened for the sound of the Cadillac pulling away from the cottage. It didn’t come.

“I know you’re mad at me, but what’s new, right?” Mike said from the doorway.

“I don’t want to talk about it.” She got up from the table.

In his businessman’s navy suit, he seemed bigger than ever, and despite her own height, she felt as if he were looming over her. “What I told Toby about David and Star was true.”

She began gathering up her drawing materials. “Only to you.”

He tugged absentmindedly on his necktie. “You want to believe you and David were Romeo and Juliet, but the truth is, you were a rich white girl from Grosse Pointe, and he was a black kid from Gary.” He shifted his car keys from one hand to the other. “David was fascinated by you, but he never loved you.”