Mothers and Daughters

This is the 15

th

, and for now at least, last, in a series of chapters about Melissa, a young woman who brings her boyfriend home to meet her family at their remote Eastern Oregon ranch and learns that while she has been away at college her father, Luke, and Mother, Lisa, have adopted a swinging lifestyle. Melissa and her boyfriend, Jamie, have joined right in with her parents liberated style. It will be helpful to have read the prior chapters.

The next morning dawned clear and bright in the Owyhee high country. Melissa found her mother sipping coffee on the big covered porch of the ranch house. No one else was up. She sat beside her and poured herself a cup from the fire blackened coffee pot that rested between the two rocking chairs. The sun was barely up, lighting the top of the low ridge beyond the pasture, but leaving the grassland still in deep shade, as it did every morning at this hour.

"It's beautiful this morning Mom. Is the eagle up hunting rabbits today?" Melissa said.

Lisa chuckled. "I don't know. Haven't seen him. I was just setting here thinking."

"Are you ready to talk to me yet about what it was in those diaries that upset you so?"

"Yeah, I think I am." Lisa paused and shook her head. "I went through it all with Luke last night, and like your Dad always does, he helped me a lot. I'm feeling pretty good about things this morning." She paused in thought again. "I'll tell you what though, let's saddle up a couple of horses and go up to the Headwaters. This is one of those mother-daughter conversations that works best up there." The Headwaters was a spring and pool several miles horseback ride up into the mountains where the little stream originated that made the family's remote ranch in Eastern Oregon's Owyhee mountains viable. Lisa and Melissa were in the habit of riding there to chat when they didn't want to share their conversation with Luke and Jamie. An hour and a half later they were hobbling the horses in the grass just beyond the aspen stand that surrounded the little pool so the horses could graze while the women talked.

"Are we going to undress this morning, Mom?" Melissa asked. It had become a custom over the summer for Mother and Daughter to sunbathe nude while they talked on the edge of the little pond at the Headwaters.

"Not today," Lisa responded. "We just need to talk. I'm not going to read you any of Grandma Louise's racy diary entries today. But I am going to tell you what I read in them yesterday that explained a whole lot about why my childhood was the way it was. Not everything, but a lot. Come sit," she said as she spread an old blanket alongside the little pond.

"First I know you want to know what the diary says about how Louise answered the question about 'the Kid'. I know I left you hanging yesterday when I quit reading aloud, but I was in shock about what I'd read."

"I just couldn't believe the diary entry ended without a response to Carmelita's question about why your mother always referred to you as the Kid rather than using your name, but I figured you'd tell me when you had digested whatever it said," Melissa responded.

"The answer to Carmelita's question was, 'Because she is the kid I didn't want, and besides, my mother Carolyn picked out her name anyhow'." Lisa shook her head.

"Really, Mom? That," Melissa said. "That's what it said? You were the kid your mother didn't want and your mother didn't even name you? That's awful."

"Yes, that is exactly what Louise wrote in the diary. And you are right, it was awful, but

before you start to yell and swear about your Grandmother Louise. There is a lot more, some of which was in the diary entry I was reading you and some of which was in the volume we picked up in Boise that I was reading on the way home. I didn't bring either volume along today so I'll just talk you through them." Lisa shook her head. "I'm not sure I'm ready to read them again."

"Okay, go ahead." Melissa wasn't sure at this point whether she wanted to hear the rest or not.

Lisa sighed. "Where to start. That's always the problem with my family. Our problems always go way back. I guess you first have to understand a bit about my grandmother, Carolyn."

"Carolyn?" Melissa echoed. "She was your mother's mother, right?"

"Yes, and that's where the problems start. Carolyn was the matriarch of my mother's family. Her husband, Louise's father, was, as far as I can tell, missing in action."

"Missing in action?"

"Yes, just never around. He didn't care about his family and was out of the country more than he was around. Mostly in London, even during the war years. He didn't serve in the military, but he wasn't around home either. Who knows. Maybe he was a spy or something. The result was that Carolyn was the one who ran things and raised my Mother Louise. Also you need to know that her family came from old money. Money made by Southern carpetbaggers after the Civil War. There was money in England too, but I know nothing about where it came from except that it is old money. Generations old. Who knows. Maybe I had relatives who were English slave traders before the civil war. There is just no way to know where that money came from.

"But the peculiar part, the part the diaries I've read so far don't explain, everything, all the money, all the sharecropping farms and plantations in the South and the industrial businesses farther north, even the investments in England, they all belonged to Carolyn. Her parents had died young, from the flu epidemic in 1917, and she was raised by a maiden aunt in Richmond. Somehow, she had inherited everything and her husband had no ownership interest. What's more he apparently had no interest in the businesses, in his family, or, as near as I can tell, in Carolyn. And that was apparently just fine with Carolyn."

"Okay, so your mother didn't grow up with a strong father figure?"

"Lisa laughed and shook her head. "That's a massive understatement. For that matter neither did my grandmother, Carolyn. It was a matriarchal family for at least a couple of generations. But I can say with confidence that Louise sure as hell grew up understanding what it was to be a strong, self-assured woman. When she was 17, which would have been about 1970 or so, she decided she didn't want to follow in her mother's footsteps and run the family business, so she ran away, headed for California and the Haight Ashbury. She did it twice, but her mother's private detectives dragged her home each time. After the second runaway, her mother took action that sealed her fate. She forced her to marry James. James was at least 20 years older than Louise and for the life of me I can't find anything in the diary that explains why Louise went along with it.

"The other part of the deal was that Carolyn put James in charge of running all of the family businesses, or at least nominally in charge. I think Carolyn was still running things from behind the scenes. But that only lasted a couple of years because Carolyn's near-do-well husband made one of his guest appearances and was around long enough to get both of them killed in an auto wreck shortly after Louise was born. The wills made Louise the sole owner of the business, but required that James act as the general manager. Your grandmother made sure James didn't own any of it. He was just put in charge of running the businesses and paid a good salary for it."

"Who the hell was James, and where did he come from?" Melissa asked.

"Just wait. I'll get to that."

"And all of this was in the diary entry you were reading to me yesterday as we drove over to Boise?"

"Oh no, not all of it. Some of it doesn't come out until the end of the opening diary entry in the volume we picked up in Boise. That one was a doozy. Louise and Carmelita really did a number on James."

"What happened?"

"Carmelita and Louise hatched a plan to get even with James. Well, really more to find out what he knew. Carmelita went to one of her usual evening trysts with James but she turned the tables on him. She sweet talked him into letting her handcuff him naked to a chair. That was when Louise walked in and demanded to know why James had lied to her for nearly twenty years about his interest in sex. The diary says that when Louise walked in the erection James was sporting for Carmelita wilted like a dead flower."

Melissa laughed.

"James came apart and started to blubber about how everything was Carolyn's fault and a lot of other stuff that didn't make sense. Eventually the two women got him to calm down and tell the story. They left him handcuffed to the chair while they interrogated him."

"The first really shocking thing that came out was that James was Louise's half-brother, a bastard son of her father, born and raised in England. That's why he wasn't willing to have sex with her."

"Carolyn had always known about him and had even paid for his education at Princeton. He had been running the family businesses that were based in England and she had reeled him in to run the whole show, or at least to be a front for her continued control. It was tough in those days for a woman to be the boss of a big business, so she decided to step back and control from behind. She told James he would have to marry Louise, if he ever wanted to have an ownership interest in the businesses. That was a lie of course. Carolyn wasn't about to let any man own any part of the family business."

"What?" Melissa exclaimed. "My grandmother had sex with her brother and she gave birth to . . ." Melissa paused, unable to get the words out.

"Yup," Lisa said, "Me. But before you come completely unhinged, and I have to tell you I was about ready to jump out of the truck when I got this far, there is one more detail that's important. James wasn't my father."

"How?"

"You have to remember that James and Louisa only had sex once. That was the night of their wedding and Louise acknowledged that it was completely dark. When Louise and Carmelita interrogated James he told them he had not been the man who had sex with Louise on her wedding night. He couldn't do it. He was her brother, and no matter what Carolyn demanded, he wasn't willing to go that far. He got a friend of his from Princeton to stand in for him. It was dark and Louise and James hadn't done anything beyond a kiss at the altar. How could she know who it was? Louise got pregnant on that first try and James never had sex with her after that. He had sex with lots of other people, like Carmelita, but not with Louise."

"And did James have any proof of that?" Melissa asked.

"Yes, a birth certificate, my birth certificate, that showed someone named Allen Afterton as the father. It is taped into the diary. Even though it shows Afterton as the father, it shows my last name as Smithson. I don't know how James arranged that--a bribe to the attending physician I suppose. Before you ask, I've no intention of looking for my biological father nor do I want to find any of my relatives in England."

"But wait a minute. If James was Louise's half-brother, why didn't she know him."

"James never lived in the Smithson family home in Richmond. He was born and raised in England. The only time he spent in the America was his four years at Princeton. Neither Carolyn nor her father ever told Louise James existed, and when he showed up as groom, he and Louise's parents had made up a fictional history for him. She was told he ran the English part of the family business. The fact that he had the same family name, Smithson, as her father should have made her suspicious, but she just took it as a coincidence. There are a lot of Smithsons in England. The diaries don't say anything about who his mother was."

There was a long silence while Melissa digested all she had been told.

Eventually Lisa spoke up, "Yes, if that's what you are thinking, all this makes me my mother's bastard child, but I really don't care about that. I am not at all embarrassed about who I am and that is Luke McTavitt's wife of twenty-five years, a good, hardworking, honest man that I am always proud to be married to, and the mother of two fine children, you and Sam. I'm proud of my family, or at least my Oregon family, and I don't really give a shit about my Virginia family. Besides they are all dead now anyhow.

"Oh and there is one other thing you should be aware of. All this makes me very rich. Louise's will echoed her mother's will in that it vested everything in me. Carolyn lied to James about him ever getting ownership of the businesses and Louise wasn't about to give him anything beyond a salary for running the businesses. That way, when he died none of the assets could bleed off to his mother in England and her family, whoever they were. It also has provisions that try to prevent me from willing anything to any male heirs I may have, so if I fall off the horse and break my neck on our way back to our Serving Wenches' dinner tonight, you will suddenly be a very rich college kid."

"What? Wait? That means Dad and Sam get nothing? That's not fair."

"Don't worry, I got a passel of smart lawyers working on it. They tell me they can unwind the trusts in my Mother's will that contain the restrictions, but it will take some time, especially in England. I want you and Sam and Dad to be treated equitably. There is plenty to go around. I'll get that taken care of. Besides your Dad is hardly a pauper in his own right. He has built himself quite a cattle empire out here, even if you don't see any cows on this ranch anymore."

Melissa looked at her mother with a twinkle in her eye. "Yeah, I know Mom. This ranch is just for fucking now."

Lisa laughed. "Yes and speaking of fucking, we better get back on down the hill so we can clean-up and dress for the Serving Wenches' Dinner."

Just as they were about to begin their ride home, Melissa said, "But wait. What did Grandma Louise do about her brother, James. She didn't just let him get away with all his lies, did she?"

Lisa chuckled. "Oh no. Before she and Carmelita untied James, she took pictures of him, sitting naked, with his erect prick that Carmelita had resuscitated by sucking him. He was wearing his shiny black oxfords, black silk stockings, and the old fashioned stocking garters like he had before. He looked like such a perverted dirty old man. One of the pictures is in the diary. Lisa told him she was going to keep the pictures as insurance, and he was going to keep running the businesses. If he ever tried to quit or get a divorce, she would make sure the whole world saw the pictures. As to who he fucked and how, that was his business with the same standards he applied to her--no scandals. She also told him he would not inherit anything from her if she died first. Apparently, he went along with her rules for the rest of his life.

As Melissa swung into the saddle, she said, "Wow, who knew I had such perverted relatives."

"Well, darl'n," Lisa responded. "Most people don't really know much about their parents sex life."

SERVING WENCHES' DINNER

When Lisa and Melissa returned to the ranch they found that the men had managed to thaw out the frozen beef stew Lisa had planned for the Serving Wenches' Dinner. No need for anything more complicated than stew and a loaf of bread she had thought. The focus of this dinner is not going to be on the food. Luke and Jamie were sitting on the front porch smoking cigars. As the women rode up Luke yelled out, "It's the Serving Wenches. Our day is made. When do we eat ladies?" Jamie smirked but maintained a prudent silence.

Lisa and Melissa were sitting on their horses just in front of the porch. Lisa leaned forward and released a couple of buttons on her blouse giving both men a view of her ample cleavage as she answered Luke's question, "That depends on what you want to eat cowboy. If it's just stew that will take a while to warm up, but . . . you could probably get a quicker meal down in the Shag Wagon right now. . . . if you know what I mean."

Jamie's eyes widened at Lisa's proposition, but before he could start for the Shag Wagon Luke put a restraining hand on his knee and said, "Hmm. Tempting. But I just started this cigar and . . . No. I think we'll wait for the trashy Serving Wenches you've been promising us."

"Suit yourself cowboy, but maybe you fellows could put these horses away for us when you finish those cigars." With that she and Melissa dismounted, tied the horses to the rail before the porch, and walked up the stairs and into the house. As she walked past Jamie, Lisa reached down and let her hand drag slowly up the inside of one thigh and over his crotch. He gasped and choked on his cigar. As soon as they got well inside the house both women broke out laughing. "Oh this is going to be fun tonight," Lisa said. "Let's get that stew on the stove over a low burner and get ready for dinner."

Once the stew was warming the girls spent the next hour or so showering, applying trashy make-up, fixing their hair, and dressing in the soccer mom outfits they had retrieved from Boise. When they finished, they stood looking at each other. They both looked like they had just dressed for a Rotary Club luncheon meeting each a tall leggy woman wearing a conservative knee length skirt, a white blouse top, open at the neck with a pearl necklace and gold ear rings. But some things didn't quite match the traditional image. They wore black nylons with a seam up the back. Their skirts were slit nearly to the hip on one side, revealing, when they walked, the lacy thigh high tops of the nylons and the black garters holding them in place. The blouses, made of sheer cloth, fit snugly and the lacy bras worn beneath them did little to restrain their jiggling breasts; Melissa's youthful breasts standing just a bit taller than Lisa's. And of course there were the fuck me red pumps with four inch heels, worn by each woman.

"Oh yeah Mom, we are trashy looking. I haven't worn this much make-up since I was in high school."

"Me neither," said Lisa, "and I'm planning on smearing this red lipstick all over Luke's dick tonight."

"And these shoes. They just scream 'fuck me'," Melissa said.

Lisa laughed. "Yeah, they do, don't they. Think those boys will listen?"

"Hah. They been sitting out there on the porch with those cigars this afternoon thinking about nothing but sex. We could come down in potato sacks and they would jump our bones now."

"That's why we're going to stretch this little game out. Our approach is going to be tease, but don't give in."

"Fun, but sometimes there comes a point when . . . well you know. You just have to have it."

"I know, but hold out. It will be worth it."

The men were still sitting on the porch when Melissa and Lisa came out from the house. "Hello boys," Lisa said. "We'll be your Serving Wenches for tonight." Each of them was leaning against one side or the other of the door, their hips thrust out. "So, like what you see?" she used her hands to push her breasts up and out from below as she spoke.

Jamie's eyes were as big as saucers and he looked like he was about to jump from his chair. Luke was trying to be cooler about it, but Lisa could see a bulge in his pants slowly growing as he looked her up and down.

"But you know, Luke," she continued. "I'm a little disappointed. I thought you boys were going to put those two horses away while Melissa and I cleaned up. But, they are still sitting there, poor dears." One of the horses snorted and shook his head in agreement.

Luke smiled and said, "Oh yeah, I do recall something about that. That's right, we were going to do that weren't we Jamie." He rose slowly from his chair, setting the almost consumed cigar in an ash tray, continuing, "I guess we better get on it." By the time Luke was on his feet Jamie had jumped up and was down the steps. He was releasing the reigns wrapped around the hitching post, but his eyes were glued to Melissa who remained leaning back against the door jam thrusting her hips out. She was looking down demurely and biting a lip.