Beauty & the Beasts by Anne Weale, Janice Kay Johnson Page A

didn’t show.” They entered the subwaylike people mover, and the doors glided shut. Garth grimaced. “But Chuckie always shows. As long as Mom feeds him, anyway.”
    “Is he overweight?” The image of Chuck Morrison, ideal man, as obese held a certain appeal, Eric was ashamed to discover.
    “Just…soft.” His youthful state of fitness without effort allowed Garth to be disgusted. “He likes to eat.”
    “Your mom’s a good cook.”
    “She used to be!” Garth burst out. “You ought to see the stuff she cooks now! It’s all weird. Like—” He broke off suddenly, his expression closing. Apparently he’d realized he was being confiding.
    Eric pretended not to notice. “She always did like to experiment. You didn’t mind when you were little.”
    “Yeah, well, if she’d put squid in ink sauce down in front of you, would you have eaten it?” the boy challenged.
    Parents should stick together. “I would have, uh, taken a bite. You never know…”
    “Oh, right.” His son sneered.
    Glad of an excuse to change the subject, Eric nodded toward the revolving belt that carried a planeful of luggage. “Which is your bag?”
    From then on, Garth answered Eric’s questions inmonosyllables. An hour later, just breaking free of Everett’s rush-hour traffic, Eric flexed his fingers on the steering wheel and glanced at his son, whose face was averted. The boy was slumped in the passenger seat, nibbling on one fingernail and staring out the window. A few minutes ago he’d pulled a Walkman from his pack and put on headphones, shutting out Eric’s increasingly desperate attempts at conversation. Despite the headphones, a monotonous bass beat thudded through the pickup cab.
    Why the hell hadn’t Noreen warned him? Eric wondered, his anger growing with every mile that passed. Had Garth changed so slowly she hardly noticed? Or was she afraid he’d opt out of his parental responsibility if he knew what a fun summer lay ahead of him?
    “Goddammit,” he muttered, “she should have known better.”
    And he couldn’t even call her. She was off on her honeymoon to Tahiti. No phones in the grass hut presumably. Although something told him that Chuck Morrison, CEO, had booked a somewhat more upscale room. The new wife just wanted to be incommunicado. Eric looked again at their son. Who could blame her?
    Actually she had left an emergency number. But he didn’t figure this was an emergency. Yet.
    At home he carried Garth’s suitcase to his bedroom, unchanged from last year. The seemingly perpetual sneer never left the boy’s face as he looked around at the books he’d left on the shelf, at the mountain bike Eric had put in here the day afterGarth went home last August, at the sports posters he’d reverently hung two summers ago.
    “You don’t care if I tear those down, do you?” Garth asked.
    “Of course not. It’s your room.”
    The boy didn’t move. “Why did you make me come?”
    His answer mattered. “Because I want to be part of your life.”
    His son turned a heated stare on him. “You mean, you want me to be part of yours. This isn’t my life.”
    There was some truth to that. Enough to make Eric uncomfortable. Was it fair to Garth to haul him across three states every summer and expect him to slide into a new slot as if he fit perfectly? Did Garth really need a father, or was he, Eric, being selfish in putting his son through this?
    “It could be,” he said quietly. “You used to make it yours.”
    “You and Mom never gave me a choice.”
    Pain stabbed his gut. “Are you saying you’d never have come if we had?”
    “Maybe.” Garth hunched his shoulders. “I don’t know. I just don’t want to be here now.”
    “Where do you want to be?” Eric made his tone brutal. “On your mother’s honeymoon?”
    “I could have stayed home alone,” his son said fiercely. “Or with a friend. Mom’s not going to be gone that long.”
    Keeping his voice level, being the adult he theoretically was,