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I backtracked to those yelling matches I’d heard as a child. I’d always assumed she was the provoker. Mainly because I had been on my father’s side. He was the one who had swung me around and brought me lollies and hugged me. How could he be the bad guy?
There were all those bruises that she had covered with makeup. Whenever I’d asked, she would blame an accident. I guessed she was protecting me, or was that my father?
As I navigated my turbulent upbringing, I wouldn’t stop until I understood how we arrived at this point in our lives, largely constructed by her questionable choices.
She lit a cigarette, and her hand trembled lighting it. She puffed out smoke and continued, “I met this guy one day while shopping. He offered to pay for my groceries after my credit card was declined. I went back to his and let him have his way. It became the easiest option.”
“But you could have worked.”
She rolled her eyes. “I did work. Shop assistant. Waitress. You name it. That is before you came along, but your father kept gambling everything. We were consistently poor.”
“Then why was he so upset about you being with other men?”
She shrugged. “Because he didn’t want to share, I suppose. I don’t know. Life’s full of contradictions.”
We stared at each other in silence for a moment.
“And about Peyton. Yes, it pained me that I made money out of my daughter, but I had little choice in the matter. It was either that or starve, and I’m weak like that. I was sick of the hard life. I wanted more. And Peyton promised to marry you. To stay with you. Only he let me down. Don’t worry, he got what was coming to him.”
Wrestling with a barrage of emotion, I tried to process her words, looking for bullshit as I always did with my mother, but her haunted expression told me otherwise. She meant every damn word.
Her last comment had only just sunk in, and scrunching my brow, I asked, “What do you mean he got what was coming to him?”
“I set the cops on him. I hate fucking paedophiles.”
“But you played into his slimy hands by giving me to him.”
“Yes. I know.” She puffed loudly. “As I said, life’s full of fucking contradictions.”
“Did he get locked up?”
She nodded. “Last time I heard, he’s still in prison.”
“Did you tell them about me?”
She shook her head. “No way. I’m not so stupid to incriminate myself. I hired someone to hack his computer, and the idiot had images of young girls. Fucking sick cunt.”
I paced about, shaking my head. It was too much. “He promised you he’d marry me?”
Looking into the distance, as though reliving the moment she’d signed my childhood away, she nodded. “If it was good enough for Elvis and Priscilla, it was good enough for my daughter.”
That jarred. Why bring up that famous couple? “What?”
“Don’t worry.” She half smiled. “He was meant to marry you. That’s what’s important here. And… at least you weren’t thirteen.”
My eyebrows crashed. “That happened to you?”
“All kinds of things happened to me that you really don’t want to know about. I’ve wiped them out. I don’t dwell. I move forward. Like I’m doing now.”
Our eyes locked.
Who is this woman?
What has she done with my cold-hearted mother?
I went to her and wrapped my arms around her slim frame. Her emotional response swept me away as our bodies shuddered violently together.
In my arms, and for the first time, my mother cried.
