When You Were Mine

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. “An

d 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 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?”