"Don't use language like that," Lily told him automatically, but she had scarcely heard the words. Her mind was racing wildly. So Albert isn't really the virtuous priggish puritan he liked to pretend he was. Did he have a mistress all along? Was that why he always denied me? Was his professed hatred of anything physical just an act, to hide the fact that he was screwing another woman silly? It could be, it couid just be… If what Eddie says is true, and I'm sure it must be because Eddie was never given to telling lies, then that afternoon on the couch wasn't the first time for Albert… it wasn't just the scratching of a mindblowing itch, like it was for me that time. Yeah, Albert's a son of a bitch all right, the worst kind of lying, hypocritical phony son of a bitch who has no more right to raising a boy like Eddie than… than that Carl Bradley does…

"Mommy," her handsome teenage son implored, "what are we going to do?"

"I… I don't know, honey," she replied. "I have to think…"

"You won't send me back to him, will you? Please Mommy, I won't go back there. I can't. I just can't!"

"Easy, honey, easy," she soothed.

What could she do? Lily wondered. Albert would almost certainly suspect that Eddie had come to California, to her; she had today, maybe tomorrow, at the most before he had the police and the juvenile authorities out here to bring him back. He couldn't stay here… and yet, after what he had told her, it would be a rotten thing for her to send him back into the clutches of that lying son of a bitch! No, she would be the worst kind of mother to do that; she would fail him, fail him badly, the way she had failed him the past three years, Lily thought with sudden clarity, just the way she had failed him when he needed her the most.

There was no use denying it, her mind told her miserably. It was true, damned true. She ran away from her own son, came here to live the free and easy life in California… Only it turned out to be neither free nor easy.