“Do be reasonable, Claire.” He looked down his nose, giving me Treatment A, long-suffering patience, reserved for students appealing failing grades. “You’re scarcely ever home. If I’m gone, there will be no one to look after Bree properly.”
“You talk as though she’s eight, not almost eighteen! For heaven’s sake, she’s nearly grown.”
“All the more reason she needs care and supervision,” he snapped. “If you’d seen what I’d seen at the university—the drinking, the drugging, the…”
“I do see it,” I said through my teeth. “At fairly close range in the emergency room. Bree is not likely to—”
“She damn well is! Girls have no sense at that age—she’ll be off with the first fellow who—”
“Don’t be idiotic! Bree’s very sensible. Besides, all young people experiment, that’s how they learn. You can’t keep her swaddled in cotton wool all her life.”
“Better swaddled than fucking a black man!” he shot back. A mottled red showed faintly over his cheekbones. “Like mother, like daughter, eh? But that’s not how it’s going to be, damn it, not if I’ve anything to say about it!”
I heaved out of bed and stood up, glaring down at him.
“You,” I said, “have not got one bloody, filthy, stinking thing to say, about Bree or anything else!” I was trembling with rage, and had to press my fists into the sides of my legs to keep from striking him. “You have the absolute, unmitigated gall to tell me that you are leaving me to live with the latest of a succession of mistresses, and then imply that I have been having an affair with Joe Abernathy? That is what you mean, isn’t it?”
He had the grace to lower his eyes slightly.
“Everyone thinks you have,” he muttered. “You spend all your time with the man. It’s the same thing, so far as Bree is concerned. Dragging her into…situations, where she’s exposed to danger, and…and to those sorts of people…”
“Black people, I suppose you mean?”
“I damn well do,” he said, looking up at me with eyes flashing. “It’s bad enough to have the Abernathys to parties all the time, though at least he’s educated. But that obese person I met at their house with the tribal tattoos and the mud in his hair? That repulsive lounge lizard with the oily voice? And young Abernathy’s taken to hanging round Bree day and night, taking her to marches and rallies and orgies in low dives…”
