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She’s right, of course. I’m not sure why I’m arguing. I down a second glass of water. The tartness of the lemon helps quench my thirst.
“All right,” Mom says. “Spill it.”
Spill what? There are so many things to spill. How much does my mother even know?
“Why has Dad kept so much from me?”
“It wasn’t my idea,” Mom says. “I got outvoted.”
I jerk backward in my chair. “Yougot outvoted? The one who knows the most about children and their minds? Their psyches? You wanted to tell us the truth?”
“Maybe not the whole truth, but some of it.”
“But they voted against you? The one person who understands children better than any of them?”
“You’re repeating yourself. Yes, they did, and they had their reasons.”
“Which were…?”
“They made some good points. Dale and Donny had just come into the family, and you know what they’ve been through. Your father and the others wanted to make things as normal as possible for those two boys, and that meant not dredging up all the things that had just occurred in our family. Plus Brad was a newborn, and so was Diana. Aunt Ruby had just gotten pregnant with Ava. We had all these innocent souls coming into the world, and we didn’t want to poison them.”
“But still… You disagreed.”
“I did.” She sighs. “Burying the truth is never a good idea. There’s no healing that way.”
“But we didn’t have to heal.”
“No, you didn’t. But Dale and Donny did.”
“Yet here I am, a grown man, and now I have to deal with all this. Why wasn’t anyone watching?”
“I can’t begin to describe the torment of those times,” Mom says. “It’s all very intertwined. Fate seemed to bring us all together. I had a connection to the Steel family through my patient Gina Cates, Aunt Ruby’s cousin. And Aunt Ruby had a connection to the family via her father, Theodore Mathias, who was—”
I hold up a hand to stop her. “I know who the hell he was.”
She nods. “Right. It was so much to deal with, and once everything came full circle, when your grandfather, Bradford Steel, died in prison, we all thought it best to leave it be. To raise our children in a happy environment.”
“Weall?” I say.
“Not all. Not me.”
“How could they not listen to you? You’re the one who’s an expert.”
“They did listen. They listened very intently, while I explained that hiding the truth from anyone is rarely a good idea. But then they decided—and we each had one vote—that it was over and we would do our best to keep the past in the past.”
“Did anyone vote with you?”
“Only one.”
“Which one?”
“Aunt Ruby did.”
“Why do you suppose she did?”
“Because Ruby understood what it was like to have something thrust upon you when you weren’t prepared. She didn’t know who her father was until she was about fifteen, and when he came out of the woodwork, he tried to molest her, tried to sell her into slavery.”
I say nothing. If I open my mouth, I’m surely going to hurl.
