“So, your sisters will be green with envy, unless I do this for them, too,” I remarked now, hoping for a specific answer to a question that I never asked in the past.
“Oh, definitely, especially once I tell them. Don’t worry. They won’t think of you as a pervert or creep. You’re a man… and you’re lonely… well, as much as a loner can be. You’ve always been kind of your own man, even when married to Mom. I think that was what she both loved and hated about you. I, for one, just love it. There’s nothing to hate about your independence and your pride,” Angel told her own perspective on my marriage to her mother.
“I never have been able to get out of her why she cheated on me after pushing for monogamy, which I never wanted… She sold me on it by promising that she would give back so much more than I yielded. That was a lie. But I never understood why she, having gotten what she claimed to desire from me, ultimately broke her own pact to be faithful, her wedding vows, etc. I really don’t get why she got pregnant by another man and had an affair baby. Did she really think that I wouldn’t figure it out? If she wanted to see other people, she could have just agreed to what I wanted instead.
“Of course, she would have had to take… precautions. Then again, she wouldn’t have gotten pregnant by… that guy… The only good thing to come of it, of course, was Brian. While he ain’t my son and I resent that fact, I will never wish away his existence. On the plus side, other than his birth, I was liberated from monogamy, so there’s that. Did she really believe that a double standard would have been acceptable to me or that she could have duped me into an unwitting cuckold?” I wondered aloud as I drove her to a nearby cafe.
“Like most women her age, or any age, I’m ashamed to say, we don’t form a consistent moral code or whatever, just going by her feelings of the moment. If her feelings tell her that she is an exception or above the rules or that this is a special case, then she believes that. Or at least she did. I think that you showed her… and she hasn’t forgotten the fact. Nor forgiven it. I only really feel bad for Brian, not Mom. She dug her own grave. I love her, but whoever said that love is blind? I don’t have to like her that much at times,” Angel stipulated as we were seated by the hostess, a buxom woman closer to Ashley’s age than Angel’s.
“Thank you… Genevieve,” I told her, acknowledging her name.
“You’re welcome. This is Maddie. She’ll be your server,” the hostess told me.
“And I’m Simon. This is my daughter, Angel,” I clarified now, “my eldest daughter. I have two others.”
“Divorced or widowed?” Genevieve pried into our business.
“Divorced. Many years ago,” I said with a sad smile.
“Because Mom was naughty,” Angel dared to be candid, “though I wouldn’t have my baby brother if she had behaved.”
Genevieve’s face went a bit pale at my daughter’s frankness. I got the impression that she expected the usual platitudes about “growing part” or whatever. Nope. Whatever time I had to raise my daughter, little as it was, was enough for some of my brutal honesty to rub off on my firstborn.
“Anyway, Maddie can take it from here. It’s her first night, but I flatter myself that I’ve given her enough training that will do until she gets some experience. She’s my niece, so I hope that she does me proud. She’s twenty-one, so she can serve you drinks,” Genevieve turned things over to her niece.
“And my daughter can drink them, being the same age. I can, too, but someone has to drive,” I observed, making it clear that Angel could drink if she wished, but I would remain sober.
“I don’t think that I need anything stiff… yet. Perhaps just some iced tea. With a lemon,” Angel told Maddie now, the ginger waitress smiling as she wrote that down.
“And you, sir?” Maddie smiled at me, a look crossing her face that I couldn’t quite place.
“I will have some coffee. Do you have a cold brew?” I asked Maddie, who nodded.
“Yes, sir. One cold brew coming up,” Maddie smiled at me again and swished away without even jotting that down.
“Well, she’s a friendly one at least,” I commented dryly.
“Up to a point. She was a lot friendlier to you than to me. Oh, she wasn’t rude. But she smiled at you twice, Daddy. Twice. And didn’t write that down. She just rushed off to get our drinks. That girl’s smitten,” Angel teased me.
“With my old self?” I expressed some surprise.
“What, do you think that I’m the only girl my age who’d message a silver fox? Oh, no, Daddy. So many guys these days… the ones my own age… they’re a bit girly for a lot of ladies’ tastes. The odds are… if a guy actually believes what we tell social media, he’s in for a lot of disappointment. We can smell the estrogen on a soy boy. It’s very… repulsive, at least to me. Of course, I don’t blame guys too much. If we girls don’t know what we want, how can we expect it of dudes? Yet we tend to somehow demand it, insist upon it,” Angel tipped me further about young ladies.
“So… it’s the… testosterone? That’s what draws girls like flies to honey or whatever?” I thought aloud, noting that observation in my own head.
“More or less. Just like the estrogen… we can smell it. Guys your age haven’t been tamed, domesticated, brainwashed, conditioned… emasculated. Well, a lot of you haven’t. You’re a prime example. You drive a pickup! That’s a declaration of war on the feminizers of your sex if I ever saw one.
“Look, Daddy. I’m your daughter. Mom did her best to poison the well, but even more than my sisters, I’m your daughter. I inherited your no-nonsense ways, at least to an extent. I feel bad for Brian. The kid’s confused, bewildered, a bit of a milquetoast and a doormat. He’s never really had a father and he wouldn’t look to you, since Mom basically told him that you rejected him,” Angel explained her perspective as Maddie returned with our beverages… perfectly done.
“There was nothing to reject. He wasn’t my son. He was her affair partner’s, the other man’s. He was the proof of your mother’s infidelity, the fruit of her illicit passion. I mean, he was born just after we divorced,” I countered with a reminder of how obvious a course of action I took.
“I know that, Daddy. So do my sisters. Brian doesn’t. It’s not his fault. Mom really has fucked with him. She drove away her former lover and refused to let him have anything to do with raising the boy, so he’s had no real father figure, no strong man of any kind, no true male influence in his life. He only knows what Mom’s taught him about men and manhood in every sense. Unconditional surrender to all feminine whims, catering and pandering to us ladies at all turns. He’s in for a rude awakening, I fear, and he won’t thank Mom for that,” Angel coughed to express her disgust with her brother’s upbringing.