he was a good man once,” she said, pleading. She shoved the sheaf of letters toward me. “Read these, Shelby. Read them and tell me that he wasn’t once kind and romantic and—”
“I don’t want to read them, Mom.”
“Then look at the pictures. They’re—”
“Mom, no.”
“He was another person once. He was good enough for me to love him, Shelby. He was funny and engaging and . . .”
The lights seemed to dim as the walls around me regurgitated their embedded memories. My dad’s voice crashed across the stillness, his words slashing at my fragility with sadistic precision. His savagery overwhelmed my defenses and annihilated the child in me once more, reducing her to an empty shell, swollen with bravado but translucent in her pain and helplessness. I felt the room tilt a little as my mind fell deeper into the remembered vortex of a merciless destruction, a calculated obliteration of all that was strong and soft and yearning in me.
When my mom pushed up to the edge of her chair and covered my hand with her own, it was all I could do not to fling it away along with the letters I still held and the nauseating powerlessness crushing the resolve from my courage.
I rose and moved to the window across the room, the letters falling like dead leaves from my hand to the blue carpet. I stared at the tree where Trey and I had swung as children, and I tried to remember the happy moments but found them all marred by my father’s contempt. I breathed—and in breathing found solace. I was still alive, despite his murderous rages. He hadn’t destroyed me.
“It wasn’t entirely his fault—the way he was,” my mom said quietly, her voice a little raspy. “His father was a drunk who abandoned the family when he was nine. How was he supposed to know how to be a good parent to you?”
I shrugged. There were no valid excuses.
“He grew up poor. Had to work hard—too hard for a boy his age. But he made it to college, got a good job, started his own business. . . . He made sure you and Trey would never be as poor as he was.”
“Hurray for Dad.”
“He tried, Shelby. It . . . it just wasn’t in him to be sensitive.”
“His problems went well beyond insensitivity, Mom.”
“Yes,” she conceded. “They did. But—”
“And whether he was raised by a drunk or by a pack of wolves, it was still him shoving me into the wall of that kitchen,” I said, pointing at the kitchen door, “his hands around Trey’s neck, and his voice reducing you to . . . to this!”
She lowered her gaze as I motioned toward her with my arm, presenting the human incarnation of my father’s degradation. She was a fragile woman, broken by age and devastated by her marriage to a tyrant, yet as toxic as the memories were, she wouldn’t allow them to alter her devotion to the man who had destroyed her. Her willingness to look past my father’s sins was revolting to me. I’d tried that too, even long after he left, but I was beyond it now. He deserved no mercy or extenuation from me.
I turned to the window and tried to wrestle my mind back into the present, away from the images and sensations suffusing the air of this house that still smelled of my father’s maleficence.
I stayed there, looking out, until the chaos in my mind receded, saying nothing until I was sure I could speak without harm to the woman whose life had been as scarred as mine, but whose heart didn’t appear to have been as hardened.
“Sit down, Shelby. Please.”
I turned reluctantly and went back to my mother. She held the letters I had discarded, her knuckles white with strain, her eyes overflowing with tears.
“I know how much he hurt you,” she said, grasping my hand with her birdlike fingers and leaning close to look into my face. “And I know he nearly killed your brother. . . .”
“Then why remember him, Mom? For a stack of letters that only prove that he used to be able to fake being human? For a bunch of pictures that only prove that you used to be beautiful and feminine and . . . and strong before he broke you?” I reached into the box and pulled out the dried rose, dusty and brown and impossibly weightless. “For this, Mom? For a dead flower? Why should I want to