Dear Wife(70)

Then again, if she’s looked in my kitchen, which she most definitely has, she already knows. The dirty Tupperware is piled high, smelling up the sink.

“I just came from Leon’s,” I lie, knowing the restaurant name will make her back off from this portion of the argument, at least. Leon’s is known for their fried catfish, fried shrimp, fried everything, the kind of fare that’ll keep you full for days. “Look, I appreciate you coming all the way over here, but—”

“Marcus Robert Durand, you tell me what’s going on right this second.” She stabs a fist into her hip and scowls. “Where is Emma? I thought she was sick. Why isn’t she here?”

Mistake number three: I should have had a story ready, a believable excuse I could pull from my sleeve without stumbling over my words. Both of us know Emma would have called to thank Ma for the chicken soup. She would have texted or sent a note. My mother coming over here now isn’t about seeing to the health of her favorite daughter-in-law, or bringing her some more soup. It’s about snagging the thank-you she should have gotten days ago.

I sigh, nudging my mother inside. “She didn’t want you to know, okay? She didn’t want anyone to know.” I shut the door, leaning against the cool wood. Ma’s right. This place is a pigsty, and it smells like a barnyard. “If I tell you where she is, you can’t tell a soul. Not Camille, not Duke, not anybody.”

Ma is already nodding, quick and manic like a bobblehead. “Of course, of course. My lips are sealed. You have my word.”

I look my mother in the eye, and somehow manage to hold her gaze. “She’s at a retreat.”

She frowns. “What kind of retreat?”

“The kind that makes her better. Less...depressed.” My mother squints, folding her arms across her chest, closing herself off. She always knew when I was lying as a kid, and she knows it now. I kick things up a notch. “The thing is...it’s just... Em cries all the time, Ma. She... You know what? I don’t want to get into the ugly details. What? Why are you looking at me like that?”

“Because this story makes no sense. If your wife is depressed, the last thing you do is send her away. You definitely don’t send her off with a bunch of strangers. You keep her here, under your own roof, and you fix things. Above all else, you hold your family together.”

For my mother, there’s no other option. Family is why her kids haven’t moved more than five miles away, why she summons us to her house every Sunday and on birthdays and holidays, why we haul our asses over there without complaint. Camille and Duke might not remember how Ma practically killed herself providing for three kids on a minimum-wage, single-mother salary, but I do. I remember her constant exhaustion, the way her worries—about money, about what people were saying about our jailbird father, about how the gossip would affect me and Camille and Duke—filled my stomach with something sour and itchy. I remember the sound of her tears when she thought I wasn’t listening, how they boiled inside me into a white-hot rage. When Dad died in prison, she lined us up along the grave site and ordered me to look sad, even though I detested the man, even though I’m pretty sure by then she detested him herself. “He’s your father,” Ma said, smacking me on the back of the head. Family.

“I am holding us together,” I tell her now. “Or at least, I’m trying to. But I can’t do that when I’m standing here, arguing with you.”

“Does this ‘retreat’—” she uses air quotes and pursed lips to let me know what she thinks of the word “—have anything to do with what happened at Easter?”

I wince, wishing to all hell that she hadn’t brought it up. I don’t know how else to explain that it was nothing, the product of too many of us crammed into her tiny kitchen. I tossed Emma a pack of napkins, but all she saw was something coming at her head. She let out a scream so bloodcurdling, it froze everybody’s shoes to the linoleum.

We all tried really hard to laugh it off, especially Emma, but I saw the way Ma looked at us after that. Like she was worried.

Like she’s looking at me now.

“Ma, I told you, that was nothing. Em just...thought she saw something that wasn’t there. That’s all.”

She watches me carefully, her expression hard. “And what were all those papers on the kitchen table?”

“Work. I’m in the middle of a missing-person investigation, remember? I’ve been working 24-7.”

“What do hundreds of Emma’s emails have to do with the search for Sabine Hardison?”

Her question tightens around my chest, pushing into my lungs and expanding, sucking up all the air. I need to get Ma out of here. I need her to leave. The last thing I need is for my mother to be butting into my case.

“Maybe nothing, but maybe everything. Sabine showed us a house last year, and she sent Emma a list of people to work with. Inspectors, lenders, things like that. I need to find that list, and I need to talk to those people. They might know something about Sabine.”

“Why don’t you ask Emma where the list is?”

“Because I’m not allowed to talk to her. The doctors won’t let me. Not until she’s done with the whole program.”

“And when will that be?”

“I don’t know yet.”

Ma doesn’t say anything for a really long time. She looks at me, and I look at her, and the longer this staredown drags on, the more my skin turns cold and clammy. Emma has a good life. She lives in a nice house, drives a nice car, goes to nice restaurants and parties, all things I provide for her. It’s more than my deadbeat father ever did for Ma and us kids, and yet there’s a hurricane whipping up in my gut at the look on Ma’s face. I turned thirty-six last month, and my mother can still do this to me.