were just a baby, show you off to all his customers. It was me he hated—he told me that every day, did his best to make my life as miserable as he could, and I took it, for your sake, but…” She lets out a shuddering breath. “It was hard, Beth. It was so hard.”
I don’t know what to say to any of that, and so I just shake my head. Considering how my dad treated me, maybe I shouldn’t be surprised that he acted similarly towards my mom. And yet it doesn’t explain everything; it doesn’t fix anything.
My mother sighs wearily. “I didn’t want to leave you. I asked you to come with me. Maybe you don’t remember that.”
Vaguely, I do. In the heat of an argument, and I’d tossed it back in her face because of course I wasn’t going to move to New Hampshire two months before graduation. “Why couldn’t you have stayed in the area, at least? I could have stayed with you then.” Although I probably wouldn’t have.
“I had no money.”
“You had a job, Mom—”
My mother sighs and shades her eyes with a trembling hand. “My paychecks went into your father’s bank account. He gave me housekeeping money.”
“What?” That is so ridiculously old-fashioned and sexist I can’t believe my mother put up with it for years. Decades.
“It made sense at the beginning,” she says wearily. “Your father had a way of making things seem reasonable. Of course we should keep all our money in one account. We were married. It was only later that I started to question it, why he had access and I didn’t, and by then it felt too late.”
“Couldn’t you have told your boss you wanted your paychecks moved into a different account?”
“Yes, I suppose I could have.” My mother drops her hand from her eyes and for the first time she looks almost angry. “If I’d been thinking sensibly. If I hadn’t been so worn down. If you hadn’t been so angry, and had seemed as if you wanted to stay with me. But I didn’t, and you weren’t, and Ron had this lovely house and open arms and I needed that.” Her voice trembles.
“I don’t even know how you met him,” I remark, and she gives me a watery, wobbly smile.
“At the hospital, actually. He was visiting his grandmother. I gave him change for the coffee machine, and we got to talking…” She shrugs. “He was so nice, Beth, and I needed that. I still need it.”
“Don’t we all?” I say a bit sourly, and she nods, as if expecting this.
“I know I let you down. I told myself it was for only a few months, that soon you’d be in college, and you wouldn’t be so angry with me, and you could spend holidays with us here. I had a vision of how good it would be—you could have stayed with us during your breaks—but then you met Marco and you didn’t seem to want to have anything to do with me…”
“You never really tried.”
“No, not hard enough. I know.” My mother bows her head, as if accepting my judgment, and yet suddenly I find I don’t have it in me to condemn her anymore. I almost wish I did, but I don’t.
My throat aches and I have to look away, caught between sympathy and an anger I am still trying to hold onto, even as I yearn to let it go. I know she means what she says, but surely you can’t wipe away nine years of hard history with a couple of heartfelt sentences. And yet perhaps that would be easier… for both of us. “And in all the time since then?” I finally ask.
“What do you mean?”
“You hardly ever call. Barely visit.”
“You haven’t wanted me to.” She sounds surprised, even disbelieving. “When I came after Dylan was born, you basically told me to go home. The same thing happened after Marco left. You said me being there made Dylan anxious.”
“It did, but—”
“I invited you for Christmas when Dylan was a baby, and at the end of the visit you said it didn’t work and you wouldn’t be back. Yes, I could call more, Beth. I know that. I could ask you to visit more. I should. But I feel like I put myself out there again and again only to be rebuffed every time, and after a while I stopped wanting to do it. You’re a grown woman now, and you have been for a