Chapter 7

Debbie's natural curiosity was made more firm by her unwillingness to accept that her mother had lied to her. Other than the fact that she and Robby had played at the Nettleton Manor for years, and that they were sexually involved with each other, were bit secrets. But those were the only secrets Debbie had from her mother. She couldn't understand how her mother could be this other woman, and that Debbie had never been able to see even a glimpse of tht woman.

"Mom?" began Debbie tentatively.'

"Hmmmm?" responded Ramona, her mind still on what had just happened.

"Tell me about your boyfriends." said Debbie.

Ramona turned and looked at her daughter. "Whatever do you mean? I don't have any boyfriends."

Debbie pushed the fresh sprout of her anger down and tried to be patient. "I mean when you were my age." she clarified.

Ramona knew her daughter well enough to see that she was uncomfortable ... distant somehow. They had always been loving and close. Was Debbie interested in a boy? That might explain her behavior recently ... her fits of anger. And, even though Debbie's recent outbursts had seemed to be tied to the Nettleton mansion, Ramona knew that ... hormones ... could intrude into life in the most unlikely ways.

"Are you interested in a boy?" she asked her daughter.

Debbie's first instinct was to deny that with a laugh. There were boys who interested her, but not as boyfriend material. She wasn't driven by hormones to seek males. She was quite satisfied with what she and her brother did in that way. But still, boys were ... interesting. And if saying she was interested in a boy would get her mother talking, then fine.

"Sort of." she said vaguely. "I've never had a real boyfriend."

Ramona sighed. Life at this stage of growing up was so hard. She hated the thought of her daughter going through what she had gone through as a girl. But she knew it had to happen. She hoped it didn't have to happen in quite the same way it had to her. It never occurred to her that her son and daughter might have the same kind of relationship she had had with HER brother. THAT relationship had been born of the kind of pain and loneliness that her children had never had to face.

"Well, sweetheart, I'm not sure I'll be much help to you. I didn't have many boyfriends until I met your father." she said.

"Tell me about them." urged Debbie.

Ramona sat down at the table, where her unfinished plate of food still sat. She took a sip of her tea, but left the food alone.

"Golly," she said, her eyes going unfocused. "There isn't all that much to tell. There was a boy named George, when I was twelve. He was nice to me and I kind of thought of him as a boyfriend. We couldn't date or anything like that, of course."

"How about when you were older ... my age?" asked Debbie.

Ramona didn't know how to answer that question. Her "boyfriend" then had been Robert. Her guardian hadn't allowed her to date, and boys didn't come to visit at the house where the waifs lived. There had been boys who showed interest in her, but the whispers of girls her age told her that all they wanted was what she and Robert did in the dark of night, and she wasn't interested in doing that with anyone except Robert. What she had with her brother was precious and special.

But she couldn't tell her daughter about THAT!

"I guess I didn't really have a boyfriend until I went to college and met your father." she said.

The anger swelled again in the pit of Debbie's gut. Another lie.

"No other boy kissed you until you met Daddy?" she asked, her voice tight.

There was a slippery slope here for Ramona. Another boy HAD kissed her, and done a lot more than that before she met Richard. But that boy was Robert, and she couldn't tell her daughter about THAT. She avoided the question by asking one of her own.

"Has a boy tried to kiss you?"

"You didn't answer my question Mom." continued Debbie. "Why won't you answer my question?"

Ramona's reaction to her daughter's interrogation was one of fear. Had someone in the community been telling her children stories of Ramona's past? There were still a few people around who had lived in Nettleton and might have known Ramona when she was a ward. She hadn't worried about them because she had tried to be so invisible before she went to college. And, when she came back to Nettleton with a husband and a baby in her womb, she had thought people would forget her past. Only the oldest people in town might remember that she was the sad little Nettleton girl who changed her name. Was it possible that the renovation of the mansion had brought out old dusty memories ... and idle chatter about the past?

"Who have you been talking to?" she asked.

Now it was Debbie who had to be careful. Any information she divulged about what she now knew about her mother had to appear to have come from some source that couldn't be questioned.

"Nobody" she said tersely. "It's just that everybody has a boyfriend. Everybody has a first kiss. It's just how things happen. I just wanted to know what that was like for you."

Ramona thought about what kind of emotions Debbie might be feeling at her age. She didn't have a good frame of reference to think about that, because her own childhood had been anything but normal. Still, she knew how it felt to be in love ... to want a man's touch ... to want to do things with a man, even if that man had been her brother when she was Debbie's age.

"Sit down, Darling." she said, pointing to a chair.

Debbie hesitated, but then sat.

"Sweetheart, a girl at your age has feelings that are very strong sometimes. It's normal for her to be curious about boys and what it would be like to ... kiss them. That seems like a long time ago, when I felt those things. The mother in me wants to tell you not to kiss the boys. But I know that's not realistic. I guess what I really want you to understand is that it's tempting to do things with boys just because of feelings you have, but it's important not to go too far unless you have real love. Does that make sense?"

Debbie's reaction to that was mixed. What her mother was saying sounded like what any mother would say. But, knowing what her mother had just done, only an hour before, it had to mean that her mother ... loved ... mister Smith, and that didn't make any sense at all. A new thought bloomed in Debbie's mind. She didn't remember her father, because she had just been a toddler when he was killed. And, while she didn't remember any men in her home life, there had been a period of a few years when, if there WERE a man in the house, she might not have remembered it. Could mister Smith be a man her mother fell in love with AFTER her father was killed?

In typical teenage fashion, instead of answering her mother's question, she blurted out her own.

"Mom, did you have a boyfriend after Daddy died?"

Ramona stared at her daughter. This was a conversation that seemed ... odd somehow. Her parental radar began to have blips on the screen that were disturbing.

"No, Darling." she said. She strained to find the right words. "Things were very difficult for me when your father died. I wasn't ... well. It took a long time to get as back to being normal as I could. I didn't feel that ... seeking male companionship ... was something that would make my life ... our lives ... better."

Ramona saw something like disappointment cross her daughter's face. This was very odd. On impulse she spoke.

"Debbie, why are you asking me all these questions. Do you have a boyfriend? Has he tried to do something that makes you uncomfortable? What's going on?"

Their roles had been somewhat reversed. Initially, Debbie had thought she might pry some information out of her mother that would answer some questions about the man next door. If he was an old boyfriend, what she and her brother had seen would make a lot more sense. Now, however, she heard that tone in her mother's voice that meant SHE was the one being interrogated, and that her mother wanted to pry information out of HER.

Still, other than the fact that her mother did not seem to want to confess to what had gone on in the past with mister Smith ... what was STILL going on with him ... her mother's responses had been what Debbie would have expected ... caring responses that any loving mother might have given. The questions Debbie wanted answers to concerned mister Smith. Something in Debbie had begun to recognize that her and her brother's childhood play-place was gone now, never to return. Now this unbelievable relationship her mother had with Smith had pushed itself into her uppermost mind. She itched to make sense of it, and she took the risk of further questions.

"It's just that you seem so interested in mister Smith." she hazarded. "I mean what with him being a stranger and all, and I know about the bank and all that stuff, but it just seems like ... I don't know ... like you look at him sort of like I look at boys at school."

Debbie held her breath, waiting to see what her mother would say ... or do.

It was a pivotal point in the relationship between mother and daughter. At this point, Debbie knew her mother had lied to her at least twice, and that was something she couldn't understand. She also knew that her mother must love this stranger from somewhere in her past that she wasn't willing to talk about, and she couldn't understand that either. Had her mother laughed, or pshawed the idea that Smith might mean something to her, it might have created a rift between mother and daughter that could have lasted a lifetime.

But Ramona didn't laugh. She was seized by feelings of fear of her daughter finding out secrets that were better off left buried. At the same time she had to acknowledge that her daughter's instincts about this were astonishingly accurate, considering her age. Had she known that her children had spied on her, everything would have been different. She harbored some kind of insane hope in her heart that she and Robert might be able, somehow, to recapture the happiness of their youth together, now that he was back. She felt no guilt about what they had done since his return, but she was fully aware of the pitfalls involved in that forbidden relationship. If she could just tell her children who he was, they would simply assume that the ... feelings ... they saw, and which Debbie had just voiced seeing, were only the natural love of sister for brother.

But could she trust them to be discreet? Robert still had things to do before he took off his disguise in public, or at least until he appeared publicly as Robert Ellsworth Nettleton. Ramona was wracked with doubt. But she saw real questions in her daughter's eyes, and that was important too.

Now it was Ramona who took a risk.

"Sweetheart, there are things about mister Smith you don't know."

Ramona saw light bloom in her daughter's eyes, an obvious interest that shouted that this was something Debbie wanted very badly to know about. Debbie unconsciously leaned forward, toward her mother.

"But ... I can't tell you everything just yet."

The light dimmed in Debbie's eyes, and Ramona saw that too. She went on hurriedly.

"It's not because I don't WANT to tell you. It's complicated. There are legal issues over at the mansion and, until those are resolved, it's very important that no one learn some things about him that could cause him problems."

Debbie clutched at the little part of the secret that her mother had shared.

"OK, I understand that, but why would you be interested in him? As a man, I mean?" Debbie pushed her luck even further. "It's like you knew him in the past or something."

Ramona became wary. "Is this what all those questions about boyfriends were all about?" she asked shrewdly.

Debbie's eyes widened. Her mother was pretty sharp. "Well ... yeah ... I guess so ... sort of."

Ramona didn't know what to say. She knew if she just put her daughter off that it wouldn't work. That much was obvious from her previous behavior.

"Let me say this. I already told you I knew him in the past. And, when I knew him then I liked him. He didn't have that beard then. But he's not my boyfriend." Ramona looked at her daughter to gauge the response.

Debbie was now confused. Her mother obviously liked mister Smith a LOT more than she was admitting to. But what confused Debbie was her mother's unwillingness to admit that. She got an idea.

"Is he married or something?" she asked.

Ramona shook her head. "No, he's not married. But people would be ... upset if they thought we were as close as a boyfriend and girlfriend."

"Why?" asked Debbie.

"That's something I can't talk about." said Ramona, unable to come up with anything else. "You'll understand in a few weeks. I promise you that. You'll understand everything in a few weeks. OK?"

Debbie's curiosity had been both soothed, to a tiny degree, and inflamed, to a large degree. She couldn't imagine why her mother had to wait to tell her just who this man really was. But she knew she'd gotten as much out of her mother as was likely, so she nodded. Then she felt compelled, for some reason, to hug her mother. She got up and bent over to embrace her.

"I love you Mommy." she said into her mother's hair.