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“Mrs Rose?” Patrick asks.
She looks up from her cup, as if she's been caught doing something she isn't supposed to. It’s odd seeing her like this, Patrick thinks, her trademark red lipstick and heavy eyeliner gone, leaving room only for tired eyes and pale skin. It feels as if he’s doing something wrong, too, like he’s ambushed her with her defenses down.
That seems at least partially true. David and Moira both brandish their monochrome wardrobe like a shield on the best of days, and like an unscalable wall on the worst.
“Oh, my apologies, Patrick, if I woke you at this godless hour. My room is horribly drafty. Have you looked into getting the window fixed?”
Patrick feels a smile creeping up on his face but he presses it down. She’s sitting at their dining table, cup of something hot between her hands, casting long strips of steam over her face. Her makeup and day clothes have gone but she’s no less Moira Rose, legs crossed over each other, brooch reflecting the dim light of the overhead bulb.
“I’ll mention it to David,” Patrick says, and makes his way over to the kitchen cupboards, his back to Moira.
“Hmm. See that you do. Apart from that small quandary, I do love this quaint little abode of yours, although I’m still not fond of the location. Have you given any more thought to moving closer to us? With the renovations on the cottage you could very well sell for much more than you purchased it for.”
Patrick shakes his head to himself, still trying his best to dampen down his smile as he pulls his green tea out of the cupboard and places it into his mug. Mrs Rose is humming a tune from behind him now, voice falsely airy in the same way David or Alexis get when there’s something on their mind. Patrick has long been immune to the not-so-subtle tactics of the Roses, and has learnt there is nothing better to do than to wait them out.
As he fills the kettle with water, Moira begins tapping out a rhythm on the wooden table. The sun is rising through the kitchen window, overlooking the sink, and it bathes the room in a soft, stilted light, like the day isn’t so sure of itself yet.
“Don’t you just adore sunrises?” Moira says. “The dawn of a new day.”
“Yep. Get some nice ones over here. When we do the porch I’m thinking of setting up some seating, so David and I can sit out there when it gets warm,” Patrick replies, and pours the water over his teabag, hearing the familiar trickle of water as it fills the mug. Mrs Rose just hums in response. He turns around to face her, mug in hand.
“I actually really like doing renovations,” he says, and Mrs Rose raises an eyebrow. “There’s something about, I don’t know, building something up from the ground. Putting it together yourself. Picking out–”
“Patrick, will you sit?” Moira interrupts. She pulls out the chair beside her and pats the base softly, her wedding band clinking against the wood.
“Sure,” Patrick says, and hiding his smirk is becoming an impossible task with the passing minutes. He sits down beside her and sets his mug down before pulling the chair into the table. “Do you want to hear about how we did the downstairs toilet?”
“Yes, I did actually have something to say, thank you for asking,” Moira says, lifting a hand from her mug to wave it about in front of her dismissively. Patrick can imagine David or Alexis saying those exact words in response to his teasing, but if there’s something that they got from their father it’s a sense of self-awareness, though faltering.
“Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t realize you wanted to talk about something.”
“Yes, yes, I’m sure. Not all of us are blessed with astute perception, my dear. Be glad you will have little need for it in this miniature hamlet.”
Patrick smiles then, but he keeps it small. There’s a ghost of a grin on Mrs Rose’s lips and Patrick wonders how much of her ice-cold persona is just that – a persona, something she can slip in and out of like one of her lavish dresses or her heavy makeup.
They stay silent for a few moments as Moira takes a long sip of her drink. Patrick wraps his hands around his, lets the warmth from the mug seep through into his palms. A lifetime of winter mornings and he would never get used to the bone-deep chill that settles over his house in the early hours of the day.
“How is David doing?” She says, finally, after she’s set her mug down. And– oh. That’s definitely not the question Patrick was expecting. He was expecting something finance related, or something about the store, or a question about when he and David would come down to LA.
Though it catches him off-guard, he knows the answer. “Good. He’s very happy here.”
If Patrick knows anything, it’s the mark of a happy David Rose. Shoulder shimmies and falling asleep on the sofa and the pile on his bedside of everything he’s read so far this month, the look he got in his eye when he told Patrick he wanted to take an accounting course at Elmdale College, the tipsy smile he had when Patrick opened the passenger door of their car and the mumbled ‘I love you,’ he whispers every night into the crown of Patrick’s head. He’s happy. Patrick knows it.
He thinks some of the confidence comes through in his tone, from the way Mrs Rose’s face softens, just slightly, lips still set in a straight line but her eyebrows dipping down.
“I thought so too,” she mutters, and looks off to the side. The day is beginning to break, slivers of red and orange rising from over the horizon. “It would be dishonest for me to pretend I did not have my qualms about leaving him in the care of a man in this town.” She turns back to Patrick. “You, of all people, should be no stranger to how others have treated him in the past.”
Patrick exhales softly. He thinks he knows what this is about.
“He misses you, Mrs Rose.”
She scoffs out a laugh. “I think he’s having an unquestionably wonderful time without us.”
Patrick drinks his tea, allowing himself to sigh a little at the bitterness. Moira is looking down at the table, a manicured finger running over the ridges of wood in a repetitive motion.
“It must be hard. After spending four years so close to them, to suddenly be in a different country.”
She shrugs. “It’s hardly a plane journey away.”
Patrick rolls his bottom lip between his teeth, looking at Moira. She fiddles with the string of her teabag, nail flicking at the tag, finger running up alongside the mug.
“My parents live a four hour car journey away, but I miss them all the time. Even though I moved out when I was eighteen. It makes sense that you’re struggling when you were so close for so long.”
Moira lets her lips ease into a smile at that, and she shakes her head minutely. “Most mothers cling onto the last vestiges of parenthood. I don’t believe I ever saw David as someone in need of that sort of treatment. He was traipsing around with self imposed authority before he had shed the last of his diapers. I bet your mother, on the other hand, is a positively devoted matriarch."
Patrick can’t deny it. He thinks of long summer days out in the sun with his cousins, his mother dutifully smearing sunscreen across his cheeks, plastering bandaids on scraped knees, bringing out pitchers of juice and water for them. He thinks of her beaten up old car pulling up outside his elementary school in the fall, the way he would jump for joy at not having to take the bus, the way she would always stop at the ice-cream truck on the way home and let Patrick buy a bubblegum popsicle and lick it until his tongue turned blue.
From what he knows of David’s childhood, it was nothing like his. Long, marbled corridors and even longer nights alone, Moira’s affection translated so often through starched shirts and appraising looks, a cheque every birthday, every Christmas.
“You can’t change the past,” Patrick reassures. “All that matters is that you’re here for him now.”
Moira sets down her mug with a thud, and runs a fingertip across the rim, looking thoughtfully up at Patrick.
“When David was thirteen, he had to get his stomach pumped. He had thieved from the bar at home and drank an entire bottle of our best gin.”
Her expression is carefully neutral. Patrick clears his throat and meets her eyes. He has the urge to ask “ Was he okay?” even though he already knows the answer.
“I did not go to him. I was filming at the time so I procured one of my assistants to visit him in hospital.” Slivers of golden light rise through the window, and cast her face in stripes of yellow. Her eyes seem impossibly light in the sun. “He was always vying for attention, doing the most outrageous things to garner attention.”
She chuckles, and redirects her gaze from Patrick down into her almost empty mug. “I felt bad, of course. But I was also furious. I had things to do, Pat. Important things. I saw my mother waste away under the pressures of children. I did not want to follow that path. And when John started his company, well, why would I raise a child when there are people we could pay to do it better?”
Patrick stays silent.
“Has David informed you of his surfeit?” She says.
He raises an eyebrow. “Sorry, I don’t follow.”
“When he was in college, he ended up in hospital again. An overdose. I take it he has told you about it?”
Patrick exhales softly. “No. He hasn’t.”
Moira doesn’t offer sympathy. She just shrugs, and tugs at the string of her mug, the soft splash of tea the only noise in the quiet.
“I wouldn’t take it so personally. I doubt he thinks about it much, these days.”
“What… what did he take?”
“I would assume cocaine. Although at the time, no-one was sure. I was the one who dialed and secured an emergency vehicle for him, and I followed him to the hospital. The nurses told me, all we can do is give him diazepam and wait. It was the most terrifying experience of my life. I saw all those years flash before me, the incident with the stomach pump coming back. Somehow, I think not being at the hospital then had led me to this moment.”
Patrick is torn between empathy and fury and sadness. He supposes that’s how it always is with the Roses: a family so torn between right and wrong that they land smack in the gray, a constant battle between what was good and true and who they were, as people, as humans. Looking at Moira, now, Patrick sees an old lady: frail, drinking tea at dawn, talking with her son-in-law. He thinks that she would kill him if he told her that.
“I went to the chapel in the hospital. I had parted ways with the church many years prior, but I found myself in a pew regardless, praying fervently to a God I wasn’t sure existed, begging that He would let me right my wrongs and grant me forgiveness.” A sad smile appears at the corner of her mouth, and she looks out, through the window, into the yard of the house. The sky is still pink. “Then I boarded my flight to Japan, because I had an advertisement to film. I can’t even remember what it was for.”
Patrick imagines David, pale, hooked up to an IV, tubes in and out of his mouth, being pumped full of medicine to keep him alive. He thinks of that David – small, afraid and coming down off cocaine – waking up alone in the hospital. The thought makes him want to smash his mug on the floor and scream in Moira’s face.
Instead, he flexes his hand around the handle of his mug, and then lets it go. He leans back in his chair and studies Moira’s face. She looks as if she had just told a story about going down to the store to grab supplies for dinner.
“Why are you telling me this?” He asks, voice gentle.
Moira laughs at that, and turns her head back to him.
“To be quite honest. I’m not entirely sure myself.”
Patrick waits her out, and sure enough she starts speaking again.
“I was not a good mother when he needed it. I am not upset with him for consequently being happier that we are far flung from here. He has a life. With you, Patrick. I cannot fault him for that.”
“Is this about last night?” Patrick sighs, and rubs a hand at his temple. “We all had too much to drink. He didn’t mean it.”
She narrows her eyes a little, eyebrows lowered, and it’s an expression Patrick has seen David wear so often that it’s almost painful to see it projected on Moira’s face.
“You were not present for those years of adolescence and early adulthood, before the money was taken. This is who we are, who we were.” Her eyes gloss over, and she seems distant for a moment. “I despise the fact that my residence in your home brings out this side of him.”
Patrick feels like his chest has been hollowed out. He’s unsure of where to stand, toeing the line between sympathy for an underprepared mother, and fury for his neglected husband. He thinks of the early days, when David would get drunk enough to beg Patrick not to leave him if he cried, when his husband would put up with so much for fear of being left behind. He thinks of the stories of Moira with her suitcases leaving the family mansion and her kids behind, and struggles to match it with the frail woman sitting in front of him, her thumb worrying at the ceramic handle of her empty mug.
“I fear I have made mistakes I cannot rectify, Patrick. I fear that in my attempt not to lose myself to the talons of motherhood, I have lost one of the people I value most in this world.”
Patrick barks out a laugh, and Moira looks up at him, alarmed.
“Mrs Rose. Are you kidding?”
She blinks at him, slow. “I’m afraid not.”
“He worships you. He’s always worshiped you. Have you seen him? Not to mention, the two of you call all the time, and I should know because neither of you can speak at a normal volume.”
Moira is still looking through him, disbelieving, so Patrick sighs and continues. “I think you made some pretty big mistakes. Maybe some mistakes that he would have the right not to forgive you for. But he chose to forgive you. He loves you, Mrs Rose. And maybe I don’t fully understand how or why your family works the way it does. But one drunken argument about money won’t change that.”
She exhales, softly, and lowers her gaze.
“It’s not that I agonize about your finances. I trust both you and him. Perhaps I’m losing sleep now to compensate for the years before.”
Patrick lets himself smile, for the first time since the conversation began, and some of the tension loosens from his shoulders. “David is very trustworthy.”
“Mm,” she hums in agreement. “You know of his previous romantic endeavors. Not particularly favorable types. I always found myself in want of someone like you for him. Someone strong, capable… sturdy. I’m grateful he has you. But I wonder if some of the inclination for those traits was based in a belief that those were traits David did not possess.”
She pauses, and lifts a hand up slowly, gesturing to the space around her. Patrick can’t help but follow the movement, her hand sweeping along their renovated kitchen, newly varnished wooden cupboards and countertops, all lovingly put together and created by him and his husband.
“Being here, now… I realize that couldn’t be farther from the truth. He has found himself in this town, Patrick. He’s found himself in you.”
Patrick blushes a little at that, feeling warmth pool in his chest. “He’s done the same for me.”
Moira smiles then, a small, sympathetic thing – but, strangely, Patrick doesn’t feel like the subject of her pity or her scorn, like he so often does. He puts up with David’s mother, sure, but he has never felt so seen in this moment, looking at her in the fresh, gentle daylight streaming through the window, her gaze understanding. He thinks of his own mom then, and aches a little.
“I didn’t know who I was before I found David. Or… I did know, but I wasn’t brave enough to do something about it. He showed me that I could.”
“No need to recount your nuptial vows to me, dear.”
It should be embarrassing or uncomfortable, but she’s smiling, and the day is breaking, and Patrick feels like he’s found solid ground.
“Even if you made mistakes, Mrs Rose… you showed him that he could be whatever he wanted to be. I never got that with my parents. There was one life they expected me to live, and of course they’re fine with David and they’re fine with me but… I can’t help thinking that if I had someone like you. I could’ve been living honestly this whole time.”
Moira scoffs, but she fails to hide her sudden inhale of breath. She shakes her head. “Well. It was all for the best, in the end. Look at you now.”
They stare at each other for a moment, and Patrick's face breaks into a grin.
“Look at me now.” He repeats.