continue, louder now, “did you have to move to New Hampshire right away? Why did you have to cut yourself off so completely, like you didn’t even care anymore? Maybe you didn’t.”
“Of course I cared, Beth.” The words are quiet and intense.
“It didn’t look that way from where I was standing.”
“You were angry with me.”
“Of course I was—”
“You didn’t want to come with me,” my mother continues, her voice sharpening and then rising like mine. “I’m not saying I wasn’t to blame, I know I was. If I could have waited, I would have.”
“Could have?” I scoff. “You make it sound as if you had a gun to your head.”
“Not a gun, no,” she says quietly, and for a second it’s as if everything has tilted and slid, as if the very ground beneath me has trembled.
“What is that supposed to mean?”
My mother looks away. “It was a complicated, difficult situation.”
“That doesn’t tell me anything.”
“I know.”
“So?” She doesn’t reply and I blow out an impatient breath. “What’s the point of keeping secrets now? You know I haven’t talked to Dad in years.”
“What?” My mom looks shaken. “I didn’t know that.”
“How could you not know that?”
“You never told me. I assumed… I assumed you were still in touch. Quite regularly, in fact.”
I shake my head in disbelief. “Mom, he threw me out of the house after the DUI.”
“What?” My mother looks even more troubled, and I stare at her, trying to figure out why our narratives seem so different. “I thought you left of your own accord. To live with Dylan’s father.”
“Well, yes, but that was a couple of months later.”
She shakes her head slowly. “Beth, you never told me that. If you had…” She draws a quick breath. “Well, there is no point in thinking that way now. What happened? What do you mean, he threw you out of the house?”
“All right, he didn’t throw me out,” I relent. “Like, onto the street. But he made it clear he wanted me gone, and if I stayed, it would have been difficult. Really difficult. So I left.” Looking back, it was probably more childish pique than anything else; I wanted him to ask me to come back. He never did.
“I didn’t know,” my mom says quietly. “You didn’t even tell me about the DUI until six months later.”
“Didn’t I?”
“You were very angry with me, Beth.”
“You left.”
“I know.”
I pull out one of the chairs at the kitchen table and sink down onto it. Sometimes I forget just how angry I acted with my mother, because the truth was all I felt was hurt. Yet now I remember that I refused to talk to her; I didn’t tell her anything about my life until after it had happened, and I didn’t care about it anymore. That wasn’t childish pique, though. That was self-protection. I knew it would hurt too much if she didn’t care about something I did. I’d already found that out the hard way.
“I’m sorry,” she says, coming to sit down in the chair next to mine. “You have no idea how much.”
I give her a look of blatant disbelief, because really? Nine years of barely being involved in my life, my son’s life, and she’s going to come out all apologetic now?
“I don’t believe you.”
“I’m not surprised.”
“Why didn’t you wait until I was at college?” That’s the question that’s bothered me the most. To tell me out of the blue just a month before my final exams? What kind of mother does that?
She sighs and looks down at her lap. “I had to. Your father made me.”
“What…”
“He found out I wanted to leave. I was planning to do it after you were settled in college. Ron was willing to wait. Then your father said if I didn’t leave then, he’d make me leave. And I knew he would.”
“How could he make you leave?”
“He owned the house, Beth. His name was on the mortgage. But more than that, he could make my life miserable when he chose to. He never hit me, but he knew how to hurt me all the same.”
I struggle to process that, because while I’ve always known my dad wasn’t Mr. Sensitive—how could I not—I hadn’t considered anything like this. “And you thought it was okay to leave me with an emotionally abusive man?” I ask after a few moments.
“He loved you. I know he didn’t always show it, but he really did love you. He used to take you to call-outs in his trucks when you