Total pages in book: 75
Estimated words: 77857 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 389(@200wpm)___ 311(@250wpm)___ 260(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 77857 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 389(@200wpm)___ 311(@250wpm)___ 260(@300wpm)
It’s an early November day, a little brisk at around fifty-five degrees. But my parents’ pool is heated, and I feel fine.
Mom rises, walks into the pool house, and returns with a large towel. She hands it to me. “This is heated. Wrap it around yourself. Then go change and come talk to me.”
My mother is a professional talker.
She’s a medical doctor—a psychiatrist who specializes in childhood trauma.
I didn’t have any childhood trauma.
I had an idyllic childhood, unlike my cousins Dale and Donny.
I take the towel, go back to the pool house, and change back into my clothes.
When I return, Mom has lit the gas-powered fire pit.
“Sit,” she says. “Patrice is bringing some water. I want you to drink up.”
That’s Mom, always taking care of everyone. She knows how dehydrated I get when I go crazy swimming laps like that.
“You’re a dead ringer for your father right now, Brock,” she says. “So many times I’d find him out here, swimming until his muscles could no longer move. But you can’t swim your troubles away, son.”
“I can sure as hell try.”
Mom smiles, and Patrice walks over with the waters.
“Thank you, Patrice,” Mom says. Then to me, “Drink up.”
I down an entire glass of water flavored with lemon, and then Mom pours me another, nodding.
“This one too.”
“Making my bladder burst isn’t going to help anything,” I say.
“Two of these glasses is twenty-four ounces altogether, so nothing is going to burst your bladder, Brock. Trust me. I’m a doctor.”
“A head doctor.”
“I went to medical school, and I did all my rotations. I know basic anatomy, and I know how the bladder works. So do you, for that matter, so stop arguing with me.”
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. “You got 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.”
“We all?” 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.
“Aunt Ruby is strong. She escaped him and lived on her own for three years as a minor, and then when she turned eighteen, she supported herself waiting tables until she could enroll in the police academy at twenty-one. Anyway, she agreed with me. If she had known who her father was from day one, she would have been prepared.”