Free Blessing in Disguise by Eileen Goudge

Margaret, of all people!
    Cordelia forced herself to speak in the voice, soft-edged and honeyed, that she used to cloak her emotions whenever they threatened to run away with her. “I was just remembering that nasty union business some years back, all your people on strike, and the scabs you trucked in. One of them got killed, didn’t he? Shot right through the head, God rest his soul. I most particularly remember you calling Gene in a panic, saying that, if somebody didn’t bail you out real quick, you’d have a dozen killed and your precious mill going up in flames.”
    “Dellie, you don’t have to remind me,” Dan groaned. “I know there probably wouldn’t be a Killian Textiles today if Gene hadn’t gone out on a limb for me, if he hadn’t leaned on the union bosses, gotten them to sit down and hammer out something we could all live with. Hell, you think I’m not grateful! There’s not a thing I wouldn’t do for Gene if he were standing right here in front of me now asking me.”
    And because he’s not here to ask, you stick a knife in his back.
    A wave of regret swept over her—strangely, not for what Dan was robbing her of now, but for the youth they’d left behind, along with everything they’d once foolishly, blindly believed possible. ...
    “Well, Dan, I don’t honestly know what to say. I never in a million years would have believed that you would back out on your promise.” Cordelia adjusted her cream hat with its navy-on-white polka-dot ribbon, pulling its brim down in the hope of partially masking the scorched tightness of her face. “It grieves me, too, that people would be ready to tar and feather a man who is practically a saint to them, merely on account of some misinformed article about some silly book.”
    “Dellie, it’s your own daughter who’s writing it!”
    “Have you considered that she might be acting out of some childhood grudge against her father and me? You know children these days, a chip on their shoulder the size of the national debt. All those talk shows on TV, people going on about how their mothers were too strict or too bossy, and how their fathers were too wrapped up in their work to toss them a ball or play checkers with them. And those audiences just egging them on. I hate to say this, but Grace was always like that, making a mountain out of every molehill.”
    “You have a point there.” He sighed, replacing the trophy on its shelf. “Maybe that’s why I hate this job so much sometimes, because it reminds me of being a parent, of the decisions you have to make that always seem to end up hurting one child or another.” Dan walked over and stood looking mournfully down at Cordelia. He made her think of that toy her girls had played with when they were little, a set of plastic eyes and mouth that you stuck into a raw potato. In spite of herself, pity welled up in her. For, buried beneath the pouches of flesh, she had just then caught a glimpse, like the face of a drowned person floating just below the surface, of the sweetly rounded features of the boy she’d once loved.
    She pictured Gene then, not particularly handsome, but he had the kind of face—afire with the intelligence behind it—that you saw once and never forgot. Clever caricaturists could capture it in three or four swiftly sketched lines—the hawkish nose, the deepset eyes, the thatch of hair that didn’t quite hide the jagged scar over his brow.
    Oh, how she missed him still! She remembered as if it were yesterday that terrible night—young Tommy Pettit, one of Gene’s top aides, standing at her door, his eyes bloodshot, his doorknob of an Adam’s apple working as he told her of the helicopter crash half a world away. First had come the shock, but then how furious she’d been! At the self-serving Pentagon officials who’d allowed Gene to go off to that war zone and then had not protected him. And, yes, at Gene himself, who had placed himself in jeopardy over something as nebulous, as