Chapter 2 - My Mother’s House
The house had belonged to my family for three generations, which was my mother’s favorite way of saying it had never truly belonged to Emily.
It was a narrow Charleston home with old wood floors, tall windows, a damp smell in the walls after rain, and a storage room under the stairs that everyone joked was useless. My father died when I was twelve, and from that day forward, Eleanor turned grief into ownership. She owned the house. Then the memory of my father. Then my schedule. Then my guilt. By the time I married Emily, my mother already occupied every room I had not learned how to defend.
Emily tried.
That is the part that haunts me most.
She brought flowers for the porch. She cooked meals Eleanor criticized before tasting. She remembered my mother’s appointments, drove her to church events, bought her birthday gifts, and smiled through comments that would have made a less patient woman leave after the first year.
Eleanor called her “delicate” when Emily was tired.
“Dramatic” when she cried.
“Ungrateful” when she asked for privacy.
If I defended Emily, my mother went silent for hours, then told me I sounded just like my father before he “changed.” If Emily defended herself, Eleanor cried. So I did what weak men do when they want to feel peaceful. I asked the injured person to be easier.
Emily became quieter over time.
I mistook that for harmony.
The week before I locked her in, she tried to talk to me three times. Once in the kitchen, while washing a mug neither of us had used. Once in our bedroom, standing by the dresser with her hand near her stomach. Once on the back porch, when she said, “David, there are things about your mother you don’t know.”
I laughed then.
God help me, I laughed.
“Emily, she’s sixty-eight. What secret life do you think she has?”
Emily looked toward the hallway.
“She has had this house longer than she has had honesty.”
I told her she was being cruel.
Now, standing in the empty storage room with her ring on the floor and the pregnancy test beside it, I finally understood that Emily had not been trying to attack my mother.
She had been trying to warn me.
Behind me, Eleanor stood in the doorway, fully dressed, hair arranged, face too pale beneath her makeup.
“Where is she?” I demanded.
My mother’s eyes locked on the pregnancy test.
Not shocked.
May you like
Furious.
That was when I knew she had seen it before.
