This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, merchandise, companies, events and incidents are either the products of the author's imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. All characters in sexual situations are 18 years or older.
Chapter One
Home for the Summer
It was a hot and muggy day, and Kaylee Montgomery knew that's what you got when you spent a summer in Cincinnati. The world was a smaller place there, shrunken by provincial thought and conservative Midwestern values. Most were born there, lived there and died there. It was hard to escape the orbit of a family hard steeped in Cincinnati, but somehow Kaylee did, becoming the first Montgomery to attend college outside the State of Ohio.
Kaylee was the oldest of two, her brother still in middle school. Chad was a "surprise," given his mother Sandy was told by her gynecologist that Kaylee was going to be an only child. Kaylee welcomed the arrival of her baby brother, as it gave her "alone time" she didn't have when she was on her own. Her father Ted was still protective of her. She'd always be his baby, even though she was grown up and going to college at the University of California, Berkeley.
Ted was a self-made man, tall and broad shouldered. His father was a carpenter and his mother was a school teacher. He and Sandy were high school sweethearts, and Sandy's unexpected pregnancy just after high school graduation put Ted's college plans on permanent hold. Instead, he took a job at a pool cleaning service. After ten years he purchased the company with the help of a financial partner. He built the company up from two to twelve employees and earned a low six figure income that allowed him to buy a Colonial style house in a neighborhood reputed to have good public schools. His lone hobby was his meticulously restored 1969 Porsche 911 SC, his pride a joy since he bought it twenty years ago.
Surprisingly it was Ted who encouraged Kaylee to attend UC Berkeley. He saw her as someone with the potential to accomplish bigger things, and had the foresight to convince his wife to let their baby move two thousand miles away.
Kaylee's relationship with her mother was much more complicated. Their relationship was at an ebb. Kaylee was discovering a whole new world in California, and had a headful of ideas that made her mother's head swim. Kaylee grew up in a primarily white neighborhood, but the co-op that she chose to live in her freshman year was heavily Asian, Latino and Black. Two of the couples in her co-op were gay, and one household member was in transition from a male to a female. Kaylee spoon fed this information to her parents on her living conditions. Her mother's shock at the "diverse" make-up of the co-op dissuaded Kaylee from sharing more details with her mother.
If Kaylee had a mother she could have truly talked to, she would have told her mother that she'd experimented with sex with men, but was emotionally unsatisfied. They lacked the sensitivity she thought was essential to a lasting emotional connection. A casual liaison with a female housemate convinced Kaylee that she was gay, though she had yet to have a girlfriend. She dreaded the task of telling her parents her true sexual orientation.
Kaylee sat in the bedroom that was hers since she was a little girl, curled up in the window seat, listening to the incessant buzz of cicadas and gazing out into the kaleidoscope of red, yellow and orange roses planted in the garden just outside her window. Her long legs barely fit in the tight space and were folded under her. She fingered the fuzzy ears of her favorite stuffed bear, the edges of it repaired more than once by her mother with scraps of plaid material.
She remembered with fondness Princess Di, the family chocolate Labrador, who in a fit of jealousy chewed the bear's ears off. Princess Di was really her dog, and spent every night sleeping (and snoring) under the covers with Kaylee. She had just passed after a long bout with cancer while Kaylee was away at college, and it pained her that she wasn't there to comfort her puppy during her final days. Being in the room of her childhood brought back memories, many good and some bad, and the flood of emotions, along with her reminder of her dearly departed dog, brought a tear trickling down her cheek.
She heard footsteps coming down the hallway towards her room. Her doorknob turned and her mother, Sandy, poked her head in.
"Dinner's ready, honey." Familiar smells of fried chicken and mashed potatoes wafted into her room. "It's your favorite," she said, as if her daughter needed an additional inducement to get up. Her mother saw the single tear streak down Kaylee's cheek.
"What's wrong Kaylee?" she asked, her only daughter always being a little girl in her eyes.
"Nothing Mom," Kaylee replied, though Sandy knew that there was something troubling her.
"We're all in the dining room when you're ready." Sandy closed the door, not wanting to push her daughter. Their relationship was strained when Kaylee was a senior in high school, and her recent return home after her freshman year at college was awkward at best. Sandy wasn't quite sure how to handle Kaylee, as the young woman in the room was a different person than the girl who left home just nine short months ago. She didn't want to think about the fact that her daughter was living with homosexuals, or God forbid, that she was one.
So Kaylee's stomach churned as she thought of her summer in Cincinnati, working in her father's pool servicing business and dealing with the pettiness of her high school relationships. Of course Kaylee was wrong as to the latter. Her friends from high school had also gone off to college, to see life for themselves, unshackled from the cliques and prejudices of suburban Cincinnati, and they too had new experiences to share.
"Kaylee, dinner's ready!"
It was her brother Chad who was shouting. That meant the family was seated and waiting for her. Kaylee put the bear back on her bed and left the sanctity of her bedroom and into the time warp back to her childhood.
* * *
The dinner table looked as it always did. Her father Ted sitting at the head, her mother at the other end, flanked by Chad and herself. Kaylee took her usual seat, and suddenly her apathy to food turned to hunger. A plate heaping with crispy fried chicken, a bowl of mashed potatoes topped with pats of butter, and a gravy boat filled with the drippings of the fried chicken, were sitting in the center of the table. Everyone looked to Kaylee to begin, as the dinner was made to welcome her home.
"Hurry up Kiki!" Chad said, using the nickname that he first coined as a two year old when he couldn't pronounce Kaylee. The name stuck, and was used by her family and friends. Even though Kaylee liked her nickname, she never told her college mates as she wanted to get a fresh start in every respect.
Kaylee took a wing and a thigh and a heaping spoonful of mashed potatoes, dousing them with gravy. Her first bite reminded her that all was not bad when returning home. There was a certain comfort in eating with her family in familiar surroundings. She quickly fell into playful banter with her younger brother, much to the delight of her parents, the unexpected somberness of her homecoming hopefully already in the past.
* * *
Kaylee was always the apple of her father's eye, the overachiever and book smart student that Ted never was. Ted achieved his modest success through hard work, building his pool maintenance business, marrying his high school sweetheart, and saving enough money to buy a house in the suburbs and to help with Kaylee's expenses at school. Fortunately, Kaylee received a generous grant from the university that helped defray the bulk of her college costs.
It was expected that Kaylee would return home for the summer. Summer internships at her level in school were difficult to procure (it being customary to secure an internship after the junior year), so Kaylee knew she'd be spending the summer working in her father's business. The summer was the busiest time for Ted's business, and Kaylee's prior experience made her invaluable seasonal addition to his crew. It wasn't Kaylee's first, or even second or third choice, to spend her summer as a pool maintenance worker, but she realized that her parents had made a significant sacrifice to help pay for her college, so she didn't raise a fuss when her father penciled her into the summer work schedule.
Ted and Sandy were full-time occupied raising Chad and running Ted's business (Sandy was the phone receptionist and bookkeeper). Kaylee required little attention as a child, with her nose often buried in a book. It's not to say that Kaylee didn't have a loving relationship with her parents, she did, but the emotional upheavals in her life made communication with her parents difficult at best.
