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“Doesyourmom know?” he challenged me.
I flinched, caught out. “She’s in her seventies now. It’s possible I’ll outlive her, and she’ll never need to know. But your mom is young. You said she had you just out of high school.”
“She’s been through so much,” Minty murmured.
“So have you.”
He shrugged. “I can take it.”
“Baby, you shouldn’t have to ‘take it’, not without her help. She’s your mother.”
Minty shook his head. “She doesn’t need this.”
“No one needs this,” I reminded him.
“My mom…” He trailed off. “She was abused as a kid. Then she married my dad after she got pregnant with me. He was abusive too. And then he—” Minty wrenched one of his hands free of my grasp to wipe over his face. “He did what he did to me. She had to endure the entire fallout from that—”
“Baby, you were the one he raped.”
“Yeah, but she was broken by it, and they almost took me away from her. After he was convicted, he spent five years in prison, and—”
“Just five years?”
Minty nodded. “Good behavior reduced his sentence.”
“Christ.”
“I know.”
“Baby…”
He pulled his other hand from mine, crossed his arms over his chest, and leaned back, diverting his attention to my lawn once more. “After he got out, he came to see us twice. The last time, he tried to get me to—You know. I told you before.” Minty’s jaw clenched tight, and his breath came in panicked huffs. “I lunged at him. Tried to bite his face. He kicked me to the floor. I was scared he’d hurt her too. He spit on me, and then he left. I haven’t seen him since.”
That wasn’t the same story he’d told me before about what had happened the last time he saw his father. In that one, he’d been the one to fight off his father, spit inhisface and go. This time…
Well, it wasn’t the same, and it still didn’t seem like the whole truth, but whatever had happened, he was traumatized by it.
Minty spoke from somewhere far away, still half-entrenched in the memory. “Mom hasn’t forgiven herself for letting him in the house that day.”
“She was there?”
Minty nodded, fading out again. “Yeah. She was in the chairnext to the sofa. He said, ‘Nadine, your son’s a whore. He wanted it then, and he wants it now.’”
Minty went pale as the white paint on my walls, the few freckles on his face looking dark against his skin. “I was already in my room. I heard him say it. That’s when he—” He closed his eyes, swallowing hard. “You know. I already said.”
“Yes.” I didn’t mention that every time he recounted that day, the story changed a little. I had a glimmer of an idea dancing around in my head, but clearly Minty wasn’t interested in sharing the full story yet.
“Mom was devastated.”
Hismomwas devastated? I wanted to find the woman and shake her. How had she ever let that monster back in their house?
“She believed him, you know?” Minty was so quiet, I had to lean closer to hear. “He’d been through rehabilitation and therapy at the prison, claimed he’d found God there too. She wanted to believe he was ‘healed.’”
“Jesus Christ.”
“Exactly. Jesus Christ was the problem. Her faith told her to believe that Christ’s redemption is for everyone, you know?” His voice grew louder, defensive. “But Mom never did anything wrong. She didn’t deserve any of it.”
“Baby…”
