Patricia
PART 8: "Patricia"
Richard found his mother in Philadelphia.
It wasn't hard. Patricia Hargrove — Patricia Delaney now, she took her maiden name back twelve years ago — lived in a brownstone in Rittenhouse Square that she bought with money she earned running an interior design firm that had nothing to do with Edward or the Hargrove name or anything that smelled like the life she walked away from twenty-two years ago.
Richard hadn't spoken to his mother in five years. The last conversation ended with him calling her a coward and her hanging up without responding, which was Patricia's way of winning arguments — she simply stopped participating.
He called her on a Friday night.
"I need your help."
Patricia was quiet for a long time. Long enough for Richard to hear the television in the background — a cooking show, something with clanging pans and cheerful commentary — and to picture his mother in the brownstone he'd never visited, sitting in a room he'd never seen.
"What happened?" she asked.
"Dad is trying to take my family. He's using Catherine against me. He has my daughter at his house and he won't let me see her."
"Why?"
"Because he's a controlling old man who can't let go of —"
"Richard. Why."
The emphasis was gentle but unmissable. Patricia wasn't asking why Edward was involved. She was asking what Richard did to cause it.
Richard didn't answer for a long time.
"I lost my temper."
"With Catherine?"
"With the situation. I didn't hit her."
"What did you do?"
"I used the cane."
The silence that followed was the longest silence Richard had ever experienced. It stretched across the phone line from New Jersey to Philadelphia like a bridge made of ice, getting thinner with every second.
"You used a cane." Patricia's voice was flat. Completely flat. The voice of a woman who spent fifteen years living with a man who carried a cane and who left everything she had to get away from the sound of it hitting the furniture.
"Not on her. I hit the table. The floor."
"That's what your father used to say. 'I hit the table.' 'I hit the wall.' 'I didn't touch her.' As if the table and the wall and the floor weren't just stand-ins for the person he really wanted to break."
"I'm not Dad."
"You're exactly your father. And the fact that you can't see it is the most terrifying part."
Richard gripped the phone tighter.
"Mom, I need you to talk to him. He'll listen to you."
"Your father and I haven't spoken in fourteen years."
"He's destroying my life."
"No, Richard. You're destroying your life. Your father is just the one holding up the mirror."
Patricia hung up.
Richard sat in the dark of his study in the Calloway Hotel with the phone in his hand and the cane across his lap and the taste of something bitter in the back of his throat that he couldn't identify but that had been there for as long as he could remember.
It tasted like his childhood.
Like the sound of his father's cane on the dining room table. Like the silence after his mother left. Like the sixteen-year-old boy who came home from school to an empty house and decided that the lesson was not that his father was wrong, but that his father wasn't strong enough.
Richard put down the phone.
Picked up the cane.
And for the first time in his life, looked at it — really looked at it — and saw what it was.
Not a tool. Not a symbol of power.
An inheritance.
The worst kind.
May you like
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Keep reading Part 9 — because Patricia Delaney doesn't just hang up. She calls Edward. And what she tells him about Richard is something Edward never knew — something that happened the night Patricia left, when Richard was sixteen and alone in that house for the first time.
