Chapter 4 - The Anatomy of a Son's Betrayal
The midday sun beat down mercilessly upon the wooden deck, turning the salt spray in the air into a sticky, warm film. Robert sat hunched forward in the Adirondack chair, his elbows resting on his knees, staring down at his scuffed leather shoes.
"Tell me about Megan’s brother-in-law," I commanded, leaning against the porch railing, looking out over the beach where two gulls were fighting over a crab shell.
Robert wiped his nose with the back of his sleeve, sniffing heavily.
"Greg owns thirty percent of Coastal Crest," he muttered, the words dragging out of him like lead weights. "He approached me in September at his daughter’s birthday party. He said he had investors from New York who were assembling a package of oceanfront parcels between Henlopen and Rehoboth. He knew I was struggling with the logistics payroll."
"And what did he offer you?"
"He offered to clear my four-hundred-thousand-dollar business line at PNC Bank," Robert whispered. "And he promised me a ten-percent carried interest in the development project once the cottage was demolished. He said... he said the zoning board had already promised an expedited variance for multi-family units if we broke ground by next spring."
"Next spring," I echoed, turning my head to look at him with cold, clinical disgust. "Next spring, Robert? I am seventy years old. I take a brisk three-mile walk along the dune trail every morning. My doctor tells me my heart has twenty years of clean rhythm left. Were you planning to poison my tea, or were you planning to have Megan declare me mentally incompetent?"
Robert surged to his feet, his face flushing an angry, defensive crimson. "Stop it, Mom! You know me! I’m your son! I would never let anyone hurt you!"
"You already let them hurt me!" I yelled—a sudden, thunderous crack of raw, maternal fury that made the gulls on the beach take flight in a frantic flurry of white wings.
I took two massive strides toward him, my finger pointing directly at his chest.
"You brought twenty-one strangers into my house! You gave them Henry’s coffee mug! You covered his wedding portrait with a cheap plastic speaker! You let your wife’s family talk about tearing down the sunroom while I was standing outside the window listening to every word!"
Robert stepped backward until his spine struck the cedar shingles of the house.
"You heard that?" he gasped, his eyes widening in pure, unvarnished horror.
"I heard everything, Robert. I heard Megan say 'when it’s ours, that ugly little sunroom is the first thing to go.' And do you know what broke my heart the most?"
A tear finally broke over my lower lash, hot and bitter, tracking through the deep lines around my mouth.
"You didn't defend your father. You didn't tell her that your father built that room with his own two hands after his first heart attack so he could watch the tide come in when his legs stopped working. You just stood there in the kitchen and drank your beer."
Robert dropped his head, his chin sinking against his chest, silent tears dripping from his jaw onto the cedar deck.
"What do I do, Mom?" he whimpered, sounding exactly like the frightened seven-year-old boy who had broken my grandmother’s crystal vase in our first house. "The note matures on October twenty-ninth. If I don't produce clean title to the property... Coastal Crest will file an emergency foreclosure lien. They’ll take my house in Wilmington. They’ll take the business. We’ll be on the street."
I looked at my only child—the boy I had nursed through scarlet fever, the boy Henry had taught to steer a boat through the inlet, the boy who had sold his soul to real estate speculators because he lacked the courage to tell his wife they were living beyond their means.
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"You will do nothing, Robert," I said, my voice returning to that terrifying, glacial calm.
"You will drive back to Wilmington. You will tell Megan that she is not to set foot on this island again without a court order. And you will tell Greg that if he wants this dirt... he will have to pry it out of Arthur Sloan’s cold, dead hands."
