Brazen Virtue

airport.”
    “It’s good of you to fit your wife’s funeral into your schedule. Doesn’t it bother you, Jonathan, to be such a hypocrite? Kathleen meant nothing, less than nothing to you.”
    “I don’t think this is the appropriate time or place for this discussion.”
    “You’re wrong.” She took his arm before he could pass her. “There’ll never be a better time or place.”
    “If you push, Grace, you’ll hear things you’d prefer not to.”
    “I haven’t begun to push. It makes me sick to see you here, playing the grieving husband after what you put her through.”
    It was the murmurs that made up his mind. The murmurs, and the almost guilty glances over the shoulder. Clamping his hand to Grace’s arm, he drew her outside. “I prefer to keep family discussions private.”
    “We aren’t family.”
    “No, and it would be foolish to pretend there’s ever been any affection between us. You’ve never bothered to disguise your contempt for me.”
    “I don’t believe in veneers, especially over feelings. Kathleen should never have married you.”
    “On that we agree completely. Kathleen should never have married anyone. She was a barely adequate mother and a poor excuse for a wife.”
    “How dare you? How dare you stand here, now, and speak that way? You humiliated her, you flaunted your affairs in her face.”
    “Better if I had had them behind her back?” With a half laugh, he looked beyond her to an elm that had been planted when the church’s cornerstone had been laid. “Do you think she cared? You’re more of a fool than I believed you to be.”

    “She loved you.” Her voice was furious now. Because it hurt, hurt more than she’d ever conceived of to stand here on the steps where she’d stood so often before with her sister. In the May Procession in frilly white dresses, on Easter Sunday in yellow bonnets and Mary Janes. They’d walked up and down those same steps so many times together as children, and now she stood alone. The organ music came low and mournful through the cracks of the doors. “You and Kevin were her whole life.”
    “You’re very much mistaken, Grace. I’ll tell you about your sister. She cared about no one. She had no passion, no capability for it. Not just physical, but emotional passion. She never turned a hair over my affairs, as long as they were discreet, as long as they didn’t interfere with the one thing she really prized. Being a Breezewood.”
    “Stop it.”
    “No, you’ll listen now.” He caught her before she could run back into the church. “It wasn’t just sex she was ambivalent about, it was anything that didn’t fit into her plans. She’d wanted a son, a Breezewood, and once she had Kevin, she considered her duty ended. He was a symbol more than a child to her.”
    It hit home, too close to where her own thoughts had drifted over the years. And it made her ashamed. “That’s not true. She loved Kevin.”
    “As much as she was capable. You tell me, Grace, did you ever see one spontaneous act of affection from her, to yourself, to your parents?”
    “Kathy wasn’t demonstrative. That doesn’t mean she didn’t feel.”
    “She was cold.” Grace jerked her head back as if she’d been slapped. It wasn’t a surprise to hear it; it was a surprise to realize she’d harbored the same secret opinion all of her life. “And the worst of it is, I don’t think she could help it. For most of our marriage we went our own ways because it was convenient for both of us.”

    It made her worse than ashamed. It made her sick. Because she’d known it, she’d seen it, but she’d refused to believe it. She saw the way he smoothed his hair when the light breeze disturbed it. It was the casual gesture of a man who preferred no imperfections. Kathleen might have been at fault, but she hadn’t been alone.
    “Then it stopped being convenient for you.”
    “That’s correct. When I asked her for a divorce she showed the first emotion I’d seen from her in years. She refused, she threatened, even pleaded. But it wasn’t me she was afraid of losing, it was the position she’d grown comfortable in. When she saw I was resolute, she left. She refused a settlement of any kind. She’d been gone three months before she contacted me and asked for Kevin. For three months she hadn’t seen or spoken to her son.”
    “She was suffering.”
    “Perhaps she was. I no longer cared. I told her she was not going to uproot Kevin, but that we would