Page 30 of Cursed

“Yeah,” Vince grunted. “That certainly runs in the family.”

“So anyway, you’ve got your free night pass all sewn up, my man,” Rob continued. “What you do with it is up to you. Cindy and I are tucking in for the night in the carriage house, to play it safe, and before you think of it later, I did scan the box that arrived today. Inside are documents, papers in folders. No bomb, no electronics of any kind.”

“Well, good,” Vince said, “and Rob . . . thanks.”

“What’re friends for?” Rob asked with a grin to his voice. “Just don’t do anything crazy. Last time I did, I ended up marrying the girl.”

Vince was still laughing when he hung up the phone, but the moment he slid it into his pocket, he froze. He could sense a presence behind him in the shadow of the magnolia trees. He was so busted.

“Hey, mom,” he said without turning around.

“Work!” his mother exploded, bustling around to face him properly. “Work. With you it is all about work. You have a beautiful woman on your arm, a countess even, and you sneak off like a thief in the night in order to take your telephone call. How do you know that she doesn’t need you? What happens if she is looking for you, searching and cannot find you?”

“Well, it’s not like she’s going to come to harm in the middle of three generations of Rallises.”

“That is not the point!” His mother threw up her hands and advanced on him, bullying him back through the magnolias and into their own back yard. The guitar music and laughter continued streaming out in the warm, humid air, and Vince scanned the space with an automatic efficiency, relaxing when he pinpointed Edeena.

“She doesn’t look like she’s searching for me,” he said dryly as Edeena twirled in some kind of complicated dance step to the delight of multiple women.

“But she could have been. And you would have been on the phone. Wasting a perfectly good summer evening with a perfectly beautiful young woman.” His mother eyed him darkly. “Work is not going to be a good partner to you when you are old, Vincent. I should think you would have learned that from your father.”

“Dad?” Truly startled by this, Vince glanced over to where his father sat with his cousins and a few best friends that had become permanent fixtures at their house since their wives had passed. “He isn’t still worried about work.”

“No. No he is not. But he is not because he decided not to be long ago, because I told him he had a choice, his work or me—his family. He could not be married to both, and I was not willing to accept half a man. I had to have all of him.”

Vince stared at his mother. “But he never quit his job, did he?” All his life Vince had thought of his father as hard working, cheerful, and dedicated. Money had never been an issue for them, exactly, but it was because of his father’s work ethic. An ethic Vince had taken as his own.

“He didn’t,” his mother said triumphantly. “He didn’t have to. He learned how to do all that he needed to when his work needed him, so that he could be here for his family when we needed him. And as a result, look at him.” His mother’s voice softened as she gazed at her husband, his thinning white hair lifting in a sudden puff of breeze, his jowls shaking as he laughed heartily at a joke made by one of his cronies. “Just look at him. He is a healthy man, a happy man. My man.”

She turned and poked Vince hard in the arm. “You should be someone’s man as well. It is well past time.”

---