Free Maggy's Child by Karen Robards

reproof at his son, who grinned back at him without repentance.
    “Actually, Adam’s getting a lot better,” Mary confided in a comfortable aside to Maggy. “Anyway, he enjoys playing, and that’s what’s important to John and me.”
    Maggy managed to murmur an appropriate reply while never taking her eyes from the game. It was Lyle’s turn. His ball was perhaps thirty feet from the hole, and his eyes gleamed with concentration as he plotted the route his putt would take.
    Ridiculous as it might be, Maggy couldn’t help herself. She focused on him, staring at him so hard that he should have felt her eyes drilling through him, willing him to miss, miss, miss.…
    Lyle positioned himself, swung—and the ball went cleanly into the hole. A cheer went up from the spectators. Maggy had to swallow a curse. She must have been the only one on the whole course who begrudged him his triumph as Lyle fished his ball out of the hole and held it high in the air, a wide grin splitting his face.
    David played next. His handsome young face was grim with determination as he positioned himself over the ball. As fervently as she had tried to derail Lyle, Maggy did her best to mentally aid David, willing his ball to go into the hole with all her might. Please, please, please …
    David swung, the ball rolled toward the hole—and at the last moment it did a neat little fishhook to the left as the putt missed by inches. A sympathetic groan arose from the gallery.
    So much for psychic power. Despite Tia Gloria’s fervent assurances to the contrary, Maggy clearly did not possess any. Maggy watched Lyle catch David’s gaze again and felt her fists clench.
    How could he be so cruel to the son he claimed to love?
    When the tournament was over, David and Lyle took seventh place. Lyle accepted the ribbon for participating,which was all they won, with a grin and an arm thrown around David’s shoulders. But Maggy knew, and knew David knew, that Lyle’s good humor was strictly for show. David looked miserable, and Maggy’s heart ached for him. She knew how hard David had tried, and how bad he felt about not having been as good as Lyle wanted him to be. She knew also about the coldness Lyle would display toward his son for weeks after this, about the endless hours of golf lessons David would have to endure, about the lectures.
    She had been there herself, in the early months of her marriage, when Lyle had been determined to mold her into the kind of wife he wanted and Maggy had done everything in her power to please him, to make her marriage work. Only then, as now, there was no pleasing Lyle. No one on earth was that perfect.
    An hour later the children were whooping and playing on the rolling grass in front of the golf course. The adults were sitting in cushioned wrought-iron chairs on the Club’s patio and milling around the bar inside, in the informal dining room. Most of them were starting on their third round of drinks.
    Maggy, who had stuck to iced tea as she always did, finally managed to excuse herself, ostensibly to visit the ladies’ room but really to find David. Lyle had joined him at the Club that morning for a practice round before the tournament, so she had never gotten the opportunity to say what she had wanted to say to him about winning and losing and how unimportant both were in the whole scheme of life. Now all she could offer her son was comfort, and perspective. Losing a golf tournament was not the end of the world.
    After a lengthy search, Maggy found him. David was alone, sitting disconsolately on the grass near the parking lot, his back up against the huge iron incinerator that held the Club’s trash, his arms wrapped around his drawn-up knees. The imposing facade of the enormous turn-of-the-centurybrick mansion that had been remodeled into the clubhouse forty years before made an incongruous background for the homely incinerator, which at the moment was belching smelly gray feathers of smoke.
    David looked so