Free The Quintessence of Quick (The Jack Mason Saga) by Stan Hayes Page A

turned to look at him. “Hey, there’s something I’ve been meaning to ask you. About Mose, and your mom.”
    Dialing up his inner caution a notch, Jack said, “What’s that?”
    “Was there ever any doubt in your mind that they were in love?”
    “No. It may not have been everyone’s notion of being in love, with her refusing to marry him or give up going back to New York, but they were definitely in love. I’m sure that they still are, in a manner of speaking. Why?”
    “I’ve just been wondering how you must’ve felt, seeing her grieving, believing that he was dead when you knew otherwise. Wasn’t that hard?”
    “Sure it was. It was damn hard.”
    “Weren’t you tempted to tell her?”
    “I wished I could tell her, every day, for a long time. But no, I wasn’t tempted to tell her.”
    “I can’t imagine that. It damn near killed my mom when he left, and she didn’t have to deal with his being dead.”
    Jack moved to freshen their drinks. “Not that you’ve told me all that much about your mother,” he said, splashing soda over the scotch, “But I’ve gotta believe that we’re talking about two very different people here. You and I, at least, had our moms around when we were growing up. Her mom died when she was fourteen, and left a tidy little scandal behind her for her children, the two younger ones at least, to deal with. Kids whispering ‘their maw got killed screwing their pappy’s partner’ behind their backs, and probably to their faces, day after day. I know that’s a big part of why my mom’s the way she is. She just lowered her head, got through high school as fast as she could, and went to college a long, long way from Bisque. After that, if she wanted something, nothing or nobody got in her way. She took me away from my dad when I was a little boy; it took me a long time to figure out why. What she told me was that Los Alamos was no place for a child to grow up, that it was hot, dusty, crowded and dangerous. Which of course it was. The real reason that she brought me back to Bisque, though, had nothing to do with that. What it boiled down to was that she was angry with him for agreeing to leave New York in the first place. She’d loved living there, and once we got to Los Alamos and she saw what the living conditions were like, she just wouldn’t put up with it. Next thing I knew, we were on a bus, bound for Bisque.”
    “Makes you wonder,” Linda mused, “why she didn’t just take you back to New York, if she loved it so much and had been given such a hard time here.”
    “We were in the middle of world War II, for one thing, and you didn’t just roll into New York and move into the kind of apartment that we’d left. Later, she told me that they wouldn’t have sent me to school in New York City for much longer anyway; we’dve had to move to Connecticut or Long Island, and the last thing she’d wanted to be was a suburban housewife. So she figured that the best- the easiest solution, for her- was for me to get through school in Bisque while she sharpened up her sculpture in her rooftop studio. Then, when I was off to college she’d be off, once again, to New York and life among les artistes.”
    “Sounds like she had it all figured out, except for one thing.”
    “What’s that?”
    “When was your dad going to get back into the picture?”
    “I think that was such a low priority on her list as to be damn near nonexistent. She was satisfied to be separated from him, as opposed to being divorced, and after the war I could visit him a couple of times a year- he was back at Columbia by then- and life could proceed with minimal disruption.”
    “For her,” Linda said.
    “And for him. My dad, you see, wasn’t about to set foot in Georgia, to visit me or for any other reason.”
    “What?”
    “He literally has a phobia about being in the South. Not sure how that came to be, but my money’s on a simple transfer of prejudice from one generation to another. His dad