Free Maggy's Child by Karen Robards Page A

forlorn that he broke her heart.
    “Hi,” Maggy said, sitting down beside him without a second thought for the noxious odor or the grass stains that might soon adorn her cream silk shorts. Worn with a matching blazer and a white silk T-shirt, the outfit was as fragile as it was pretty. It was not made for sitting on the grass beside a stinking, smoking incinerator with one’s arms around one’s knees—but Maggy sat anyway, copying David’s posture with long-legged grace.
    David glanced sideways at her. There were faint telltale stains on his cheeks and a certain puffiness around his eyes that told her he had been crying. It was something he rarely did anymore—at eleven he considered himself too old for tears—and the evidence that he had succumbed to his emotions in a way he despised made her ache inside. She longed to put her arms around him—but hugged her knees and smiled at him instead.
    “What do you want?” David’s greeting was truculent.
    “To say ‘thank you’ for my birthday present. It’s wonderful, and I love it.”
    Another sidelong glance, less hostile this time. “Dad won’t like it. He says only sissies paint.”
    Maggy hesitated, though it was an effort to bite back the words that instinctively bubbled to her tongue. It was always hard to know where to draw the line at criticizing Lyle to David. If she went too far, David would respond by leaping to his father’s defense, yet she could not let Lyle’s views go completely unchallenged.
    At last she said in a mild tone, “Dad’s not always right about everything, you know, David.”
    The glance he cast her this time was fierce. “He’s right about that. I am a sissy! I can’t even play golf right!”
    So there they reached the heart of his current miserywithout any circuitous verbal steering on her part. Maggy abandoned the tactful opening she had planned, and groped for the words she needed.
    “You played very well. You and Dad came in seventh, after all, out of twenty. That’s pretty good.”
    “Pretty good’s not good enough! Dad said we would have won if I hadn’t screwed up!”
    It was all Maggy could do not to give vent to what she thought of Lyle for that, but she bit back the words. “You didn’t screw up, David. You missed a putt. It happens to golfers all the time, even the great ones. Believe me, your father has even missed putts. It’s part of the game.”
    “I let Dad down.” David spoke so quietly, in such a miserable tone, that Maggy’s heart constricted. She longed to wrap her arms around him, but once again she didn’t quite dare. Instead, she was quiet for a moment before she responded.
    “David, did you ever think that maybe Dad let you down? That maybe he should have been proud that you played well enough so that you two came in seventh, instead of being angry because you didn’t play quite well enough to come in first?”
    David glanced at her, arrested. For a moment, just a moment, Maggy thought she might have knocked the rosy glasses through which he had always viewed Lyle from his eyes. Then his face twisted into a terrible scowl, and he jumped to his feet.
    “What do you know about it anyway?” he shouted. “Dad says that with your background, we shouldn’t even expect you to understand about golf. He said you were the next thing to a hooker before he married you, and hookers don’t play golf.”
    “What?” Maggy was dumbfounded.
    David didn’t answer. He flushed, shot her an indecipherable look, and then without another word turned and ran. Within minutes he disappeared around the side of the clubhouse, headed toward where the other children,whose shouts and laughter echoed faintly beneath the grinding of the incinerator, could be seen tumbling all over a grassy knoll. Maggy was left sitting where she was, feeling as if she had taken a body blow. It was all she could do to breathe.
    How dare Lyle say such a thing to her son! Maggy felt a flash of white-hot fury that found vent in mentally