The Whore's Child

insupportable, I took out the AAA map book and thumbed through its pages dully, noting Carlsbad Caverns, south of us, without interest. We flew past scenic vistas—lava beds and Indian reservations—without even slowing.
    And I was not surprised when at Flagstaff my mother turned down the highway toward Phoenix, where my grandparents lived. It made me bitter to think that we’d never make it to California, that we were not bound for freedom and never had been. This whole trip was nothing more than a joy ride, like the one my junior high friends had taken, and now I could understand their reluctance to talk about it. No doubt it had been a shabby thing, devoid of glory.
    And I could see how our own joy ride would conclude. My grandparents would be expecting us when we arrived, my mother having telephoned from Joplin. She’d make a show of rebellion, refusing to return to her life in Maine, insisting she was through with all that, including my father. But they would point out that we had no money, that California was a scary place to live, especially for a woman on her own. She wouldn’t say, as she had to Bill, that she wasn’t alone, because she knew she was now, if she hadn’t known all along. A twelve-year-old boy could protect her only from people who meant her no harm in the first place. “What day is it?” it occurred to me to ask.
    â€œWhat difference?” my mother said.
    â€œDate, I meant.”
    She looked me over for a minute, blankly, then returned her attention to the road. So I did it myself, counting the days forward in my head, starting with the day we left Maine. If my count was correct, then yesterday had been my birthday. I wasn’t a twelve-year-old boy. I was thirteen. But like my mother said. What difference?
    All of this was long ago. More than twenty years now, and as I think back on our joy ride that spring, it seems far more remarkable than it did at the time, and what followed more remarkable still. My father did not come for us, as I’d imagined he would. He couldn’t afford to close the hardware store for that long, and it was cheaper for us to sell the Ford and fly back. He met us at the airport in Bangor, proclaiming it was the most wonderful thing in the world that we were back, and he hadn’t been himself even for a minute while we were gone. And that was that.
    My mother was from then on a dutiful wife, at what cost to herself one can only guess, and I choose not to. When he was diagnosed with cancer, she nursed him faithfully through long months of chemotherapy and radiation, and when he died, her heart was broken. This, I’ve come to conclude, is what people mean when they refer to life as a great mystery.
    After returning to Maine, my mother and I seldom referred to our flight, and over the years she came to insist that it had been nothing more than a vacation. We’d gone to visit my grandparents. My father simply couldn’t get away from the store. After he became ill, this fiction became especially necessary—even essential, as I learned only after his death when, still stunned by the loss, I tried to open the subject of our betrayal so many years before. Probably it was forgiveness I was after, but if so, I’d come to the wrong person, because I’d never seen my mother as angry as she was when I suggested we’d actually wanted to break free of him all those years ago, that we’d made fun of him halfway across the country. She seemed to have forgotten entirely all the conversations I’d overheard during the days we spent at the trailer park in Phoenix, when she’d confessed to my grandparents that she’d fallen in love with a wild and beautiful man who, though he didn’t love her the way she loved him, had made her understand that her marriage to my father was little more than slavery. She had a wonderful spirit, he’d told her. She deserved to be free.
    My mother’s staunch denials angered me, and I let her know it. “Don’t tell me you don’t remember the boot, Mom. How you made me say it until I got it right, that Dad didn’t even have enough sense to pour piss out of a boot.”
    â€œNo, John,” she said. “I don’t. But I’ll tell you what I
do
remember. I remember that the reason for that trip was
you.
What I remember was the vicious little monster you were becoming.” She proceeded to remind me about all sorts of things I