25. “I’ve always been fair.” #2
Mama stood at the sink with her hands in the water and didn’t speak.
“I never…” Her voice tightened. “You did the right thing. You were a child. You didn’t do anything wrong.”
“Okay.”
She dried her hands slowly on the dish towel.
“Your father was the love of my life,” she said at last. “I knew he was flawed, but I loved him anyway.”
She folded the towel, then finally turned to face me.
“But when you told me what you saw, I had to do something about it. I couldn’t un-know it.” Her voice caught slightly, then steadied. “I would have forgiven him, but he left the next day and that was the end of it.”
“Yeah,” I said. “That was the end of a lot of things.”
“I’ve never blamed you for telling me.”
She believed that.
My eyes went to the ultrasound she’d set on the table.
Maybe it was never that she didn’t have enough to go around.
Maybe I’d just been easier to give less to.
“I don’t think I was wrong,” I said. “But sometimes I wonder if you would’ve loved me easier if I’d kept my mouth shut.”
She opened her mouth.
From the living room, CeeCee’s voice cut through, firm enough to carry.
“I said no, Shaun.”
I was already moving.
He was leaning forward in his chair, earnest, intent.
“Just come home,” he was saying. “Please. I swear I’ve changed. Let me prove it to you.”
CeeCee sat straight-backed on the couch. She looked at me when I came in.
“I’m ready to go,” she said.
Shaun’s jaw tightened, the reasonableness fraying like it always did when he didn’t get his way.
“CeeCee—”
“Shaun,” Mama said from the kitchen doorway. “Let them go.”
Shaun stared at her, working through whether to push, then sat back.
Mama crossed to CeeCee first. She took her hands, pulled her in, held her. Her palm rested briefly on the belly before she let go.
Then she turned to me, and for once, she didn’t look away.
It wasn’t a lot. But it wasn’t nothing, either.
I nodded.
CeeCee and I walked out together.
We got in the car, shut ourselves inside, and didn’t move.
The quiet settled. The exhale after a storm.
CeeCee leaned her head back against the seat.
I rested my hands on the steering wheel but didn’t turn the key yet. The porch light behind us flickered once through the windshield and went steady.
“You okay?”
“As expected,” she said. “He was sweet, like he could be. Asked about the baby. Says he’ll give me money to help with the doctor visits.”
“That’s a good thing, I guess.”
“I asked him for a divorce.”
My head whipped to her.
“He blamed you,” she said. “Said this wasn’t really me talking.
That you’d been in my ear.” Her mouth twisted.
“He used to complain about you. Said you were difficult. Judgmental. Always holding something over his head. I didn’t know what he meant, and I didn’t ask too hard, because he was my husband and I thought taking his side was what I was supposed to do. ”
She looked down.
“There are a lot of things I let myself not ask too hard about. But tonight he said it like I was stupid. Like I needed someone to explain my own life to me.”
“CeeCee—”
My hands tightened around the wheel before I forced them loose and pressed them flat against my thighs.
“He’s not wrong about me having issues with him,” I said. “He’s wrong about everything else.”
“I know that.”
We sat with it.
And I didn’t say that for most of my life I’d believed, on some level, that Shaun was right. That I was the problem.
I’d loved my father, but Shaun had hero-worshipped him. Built himself around him. What a man was. What our family was. What was possible.
And one Sunday afternoon after church, I told the truth about a woman in a blue dress, my father’s arms around her, and me in the hallway with my choir folder, not understanding what I was seeing.
Before that Sunday, Shaun had been the one I went to first.
I ran to him with scraped knees, with school problems, with thunder shaking the windows.
He’d act annoyed every time, like I was a job he’d been assigned against his will, but he always made room.
So when Dad left, I went to his door first.
I don’t know what I thought he’d do. Let me in, maybe. Tell me it wasn’t my fault. Sit beside me in that angry silence until the worst had passed.
Instead, he looked at me like I was something rotten, and slammed the door in my face.
CeeCee turned to look out her window.
I started the engine.
The radio came on low, a man rapping about blood and loyalty.
I didn’t change it.
We drove.
The neighborhood gave way to the expressway, then the long stretch of highway.
Then CeeCee, quieter, “He truly thought you were the reason I wasn’t going back to him.”
“You’ll find that most things that have gone wrong in Shaun’s life could be traced back to me.”
CeeCee looked over. “You know that’s not true.”
I kept my eyes on the road.
Her hand moved to her stomach and stayed there.
I thought about what it had cost her to say that word in that living room.
Divorce.
Seven months pregnant, on her mother-in-law’s couch, with her hands folded and her voice steady. The courage of saying something quietly that would echo for a long time.
Neither of us said anything else.
The house was long behind us.
We didn’t look back.