Darling Rose Gold(71)

“And what about Deadwick?” Mom asked.

“What about it?” I said.

“Do you still talk to anyone? Our old neighbors and friends?”

“I rarely see Mrs. Stone anymore, if that’s who you mean,” I said without thinking. I knew this news would please Mom, but it was also true. Mary Stone had failed me just like everyone else. She still treated me like a child and kept reminding me she was my shoulder to cry on. But I was tired of crying, tired of people caring more about who I had been than who I am. Mrs. Stone liked me better broken. With every good deed, she needed confirmation that she was my savior.

I’d be my own goddamn savior, thank you very much.

Predictably, Mom was pleased. When Mrs. Stone had lambasted her to reporters during the trial, my mother was not happy. Until she was arrested, no one had ever turned on Patty Watts.

“How is my old friend?” Mom’s voice dripped with fake sweetness. This was the mother I knew: color had returned to her cheeks, her eyes bright and attentive. She hung on my every word, noting every detail.

“Annoying,” I said, trying to put an end to the topic. I’d come here for answers, and so far I’d been the one doing all the talking. My mother was manipulating me the way she manipulated everyone, the way she’d controlled my entire childhood.

“Listen, Mom,” I said, giving up altogether on calling her “Patty.” “If we’re going to start over, I need you to be honest with me. No more trying to steer the conversation or deflecting my questions by turning around and asking your own.”

Mom watched me, not saying anything.

“If you lie to me, I’m out of here,” I said, staring at the table between us. I forced myself to meet her eye. “And I’m not coming back.”

A beat of silence passed that felt like three eternities.

“Are we clear?” I said.

Mom nodded. “Of course, darling,” she murmured. “I would never do anything to screw up our relationship again. I already lost you once.”

I wasn’t sure whether she was telling me the truth, but this seemed like the right tack. I had plenty of questions to test her commitment to honesty.

“Good,” I said. “Then let me ask you again: how did you split your lip?” I crossed my arms and leaned back—my best no-BS pose.

Mom folded her hands in her lap. I knew if I peeked under the table, she’d be twiddling her thumbs. She told me she had gotten that habit from my grandfather. I’d caught myself twiddling my own thumbs while watching TV one night last month. I sat on my hands for the rest of the episode.

Mom sighed. “Another inmate hit me.”

“Why?” I demanded.

“She doesn’t like me very much.”

“Mom,” I warned, “don’t be evasive.”

Her eyebrows rose in surprise. I wondered if she was questioning where I’d learned the word “evasive.” She hadn’t taught me the term during any of her hundred vocabulary lessons, so where could I have picked it up? I was supposed to be an extension of her, a product of her creation and fine-tuning.

She rubbed her eyes. “Stevens has had it out for me since I got here. Every few months, she gets her band of cronies together to gang up on me. Two of them pin me against a wall while she takes a few swings.” Mom shrugged. “Don’t ask why she hates me. I haven’t done anything to her.”

Based on my mother’s track record, I doubted that, but decided to let it go for now. I had bigger fish to fry.

“Why did you lie about how you hurt your lip?”

“Because I didn’t want you to worry,” Mom said, exasperated. “Because that’s what mothers do. We shelter the hardest truths from our children to keep them safe. We take the hit so they don’t have to feel the pain.”

“I’m not a child anymore,” I said calmly. “And I’ve dealt with some pretty hard truths the past few years.”

Mom patted my hand. “It doesn’t matter how old you are. The desire to protect your kid never goes away. I’m not going to apologize for that.” She winced. Good—she was taking my threat to leave seriously. “You’ll see when you have kids of your own,” she added.

I snorted. Like I’d ever have kids after the f’ed-up childhood I’d endured.

“I want you to tell me about your family,” I said. “Every time I’ve asked about them, all you’ve said was you had a tough childhood. I want to know specifics. What was so tough about it? What were my grandmother and grandfather like? And my uncle David?”

Mom groaned. “This is how you want to spend our first afternoon in almost five years together? Talking about our degenerate ancestors?”

“Mom,” I warned again, “you promised you’d be honest.”

“That doesn’t mean I have to like it,” she grumbled. She pushed up her sleeves and leaned her chest forward on the table. “My father was drafted when he was nineteen and went to Belgium in nineteen forty-four. This was after he’d met my mother, but before they got married.”

For the next thirty-five minutes, Mom painted a picture for me of her childhood. She told me, in sickening detail, about my grandfather’s abuse. She told me about her brother’s suicide. She told me about her mother’s miscarriages: three, to be exact, between David and her. She explained the Wattses had been an every-man-for-himself family. Her mother hadn’t stood up for her. Neither had her brother. As soon as Mom had turned eighteen, she’d moved out of the house into an apartment on the other side of town and found a job as a certified nursing assistant. She cut all ties with her parents. Sometimes she’d see one of them at Walsh’s or the bank and would turn around and leave without saying a word. Mom never reconciled with either of them.