Hidden Agendas

'Son? You okay?'

Tyrone looked at the doorway. His father stood there.

'Your mother is worried about you. Is there something going on we can help with?'

His knee-jerk response was to wave his father off. No, nothing, I'm fine, just tired, nopraw. But he was too sick at heart to even lie about it.

'Bella and I broke up,' he said.

His father came into the room. He leaned against the wall next to Tyrone's computer. 'Not your idea, I take it?'

'No. Not my idea.'

'You want to talk about it?'

'No. Not really.' But then, as they had with Bella, the words somehow just came tumbling out. He told his father all about it, about seeing her in the mall, about her kissing that jockjerk, about seeing her in the hall. It just flowed from him like some kind of sour, bitter fluid.

* * *

John Howard listened to his son, felt his anguish and pain, and ached for him. If he could stand between his child and the world and stop anything from ever hurting him, he would do it, but he knew it didn't work that way. Some lessons you had to learn on your own. Some pain had to be endured. If you were to be tempered so that your edge would stay sharp, you had to go through the fire, be annealed, quenched, and heated again. But it hurt to watch your child suffer. More than anything else he could imagine.

Finally, the boy ran down. His grief was intense, all-consuming, it filled his world. He couldn't see any way around it.

There was nothing Howard could say that was going to heal this wound. A broken heart accepted no medicine except time. That the first case of puppy love squashed would some day be nothing more than a small scar in the grand cosmic scheme of things was not what Tyrone wanted to hear. You will survive this and get over it was the truth, but it would not provide much comfort right at this moment. Still, it was all he had to offer.

Howard sighed. 'When I was sixteen, I was in love,' he said. 'A girl in my school, Lizbeth Toland, same class. We were tight, went everywhere together. I gave her my junior class ring. We called it ‘hangin' out' back then. We talked about going to college together, getting married, having children. It was pretty serious.'

Tyrone stared at him.

'It's kind of hard for you to imagine me with anybody except Mom, isn't it?'

Tyrone nodded. 'Yeah.' Then he must have realized that might not sound too good, because he said, 'Well, no, I mean, well, I–I never really thought about it.'

'That's okay. For the longest time, I believed my parents must have found me on a doorstep or under a cabbage leaf — the idea of them having sex together was beyond my comprehension.'

Tyrone shook his head, and Howard could almost read his thoughts: Gramma and Grampa? Having sex? There was a puker pix.

'Summer after my junior year, I went to ROTC camp. Lizbeth and I wrote each other every day — snailmail mostly. And we talked on the phone when I could get to one. She said she missed me, couldn't wait for me to get back, and I felt the same way.

'Then I got a call from my best friend. Rusty Stephens. He'd been at a bar one night sneaking in to drink beer with a couple of buddies. They'd seen Lizbeth there, with somebody he didn't know, partying pretty good.'

'That's terrible,' Tyrone said.

Howard nodded, knowing his son knew just how he had felt when he'd heard it.

'Yeah, I thought so. I called her, asked her about it. She had a perfectly reasonable explanation. She'd been in the bar, sure enough, but the guy she was with was her cousin, come to visit with his folks, and her mother had told her to take him out. So it was family, it didn't mean anything, they didn't do anything, it was her cousin.'

Howard shook his head. 'I believed her. How could I not? We loved each other, we trusted each other. And I wanted to hear there was a reason other than what I was most afraid of, so I was happy.'

'So what happened?'

'The summer went on. Rusty called again. He'd seen Lizbeth out again, dancing, drinking. Different guy, different place. He took it upon himself to follow them when they left. They drove up to Lover's Point, parked in the guy's car, fogged up the windows in the middle of July.'

'Oh, man,' Tyrone said.

'Right sentiment, but I used harsher language when I heard. I was pretty torn up about it. I called Lizbeth and asked her about it. She denied it. Said whoever told me they'd seen her was a liar.

'So here's the situation. Either my girl was stepping out on me, or my best friend was a liar.'

Tyrone shook his head. 'What did you do?'

'I checked it out. I called a couple of the guys Rusty said had seen Lizbeth. They confirmed his story, at least part of it.'

'That's terminal,' Tyrone said.

'Yeah. But it gets worse.'

His son raised his eyebrows in question. 'How could it get worse?'

'I called Rusty. Told him to go see Lizbeth and to get my ring back. If she was going to lie to me, we were through.'

'Did he do it?'

'In a manner of speaking. He went to see her, told her what I'd said. She refused to give him the ring, but they talked for a long time. She said some… unkind things about me.'

Tyrone blinked at him.

'Called me a ‘stupid shithead,' Rusty said.'

'Jesus.'

'So, I thanked Rusty for his efforts and said I'd take care of it. I bought a train ticket and waited for a long weekend in August when we didn't have much going on at camp. Went home. I got there on a Friday night late, caught a cab to Lizbeth's house. When I got there, I saw Rusty's beat-up old Chevrolet parked out front. He must have come by to try and talk to her again, I figured. Maybe even to get my ring back. Good old Rusty.

'I got out of the cab, walked over toward Lizbeth's front door, then I heard a noise coming from the Chevy — and I stopped and looked into the car. I saw Rusty and Lizbeth wrapped around each other in the front seat, both of them half undressed.'

'Fuck,' Tyrone said.

Howard considered saying something about his son's language, but this wasn't the time. In the grand cosmic scheme of things, a bad word didn't mean much. 'It didn't get that far,' Howard said. 'I thought I was going to die, right there, on the spot. I didn't know whether to pull good old Rusty out and beat the crap out of him, or to turn and take off before they noticed me.'

'What happened?'

'I stood there for what felt like a couple of million years, watching them kiss and fondle each other. It didn't seem real, like it was a bad dream. Then all of a sudden I got cold, really cold, as if I had turned to ice. August and it was probably still eighty-five degrees outside, hot, muggy, and I was cold. I reached out and tapped on the driver's-side window. They both jumped a couple of feet. When they turned and looked right at me, I smiled and waved good-bye. Then I left. The cab was gone, and I started to walk home.

'Rusty caught up with me a half a block or so away, on foot.

'He said, ‘John! I can explain!'

'And I looked at him and said, ‘No, you can't.' I was as cool as a barrel full of liquid oxygen. On the one hand, I wanted to smash his face in, but on the other, I was somehow… removed from it all. Like it was some kind of dream or vision, that I wasn't really even there. I said, ‘You aren't my friend anymore Rusty. I don't want to talk to you, ever again.' '

'Jesus, Dad.'

'Yep. Lost my girl and my best friend at the same time. I didn't know then this kind of thing happens all the time, so often it's a cliche, and I don't guess it would have mattered if I had known. They were both lying scum and