“Why? You had to know you’d go to prison if you did it.”
“I didn’t care. I spent the first twelve years of my life treating my own mother like a child, like she was beneath me. I was mean to her, distant, would say horrible things to her, about her. My only memories of my mother are my father coaching me to say things like, ‘Tell your mother the steak is too tough. Men like their meat raw.’ Or he’d say, ‘Your mom’s not as smart as us, so we have to try to be patient with her. I’d just go along with it because I thought he knew everything.”
“But you were just a kid.”
“That’s right. I was a kid. That man not only spent years psychologically torturing my mother, he spent years teaching me to do it, too. And it wasn’t because he had any real interest in having my mom be the perfect woman. He enjoyed hurting her. He liked making her cry. He liked that she would beg him for another chance, would do anything to get even a scrap of kindness from him. At first, I blamed her. Why didn’t she leave, fight back, tell him to fuck off? But then I realized my father had rewired my mother’s brain to a point where she didn’t even realize she was her own captor.”
When Preacher looked again at Memphis, he had tears in his eyes. It was good he could still feel things for others. He wasn’t as dead inside as he believed himself to be.
“You said you didn’t regret killing him,” Memphis reminded him.
“I didn’t. I don’t. My mom tried to kill herself the week before I shot him. My father, of course, called it an accidental overdose, but I knew the truth. My mom had caused a small kitchen fire. Not a big deal. There wasn’t even a mark on the stove. But my father’s constant harassing was enough to send her into a psychotic break.” Preacher had no idea why he was telling Memphis all this but now that he’d started, it felt impossible to stop. “My mom swallowed a bottle of Benzos because she set a dish towel too close to the stove. That was it for me. I knew if I didn’t do something then next time, she’d succeed.”
“Where’s she now?”
“Dead.”
“Did she…” Memphis trailed off.
“Kill herself? No. She died of cancer. At least, that’s what Nicky told me.”
Even in the dark, Preacher could make out Memphis’s frown. “What do you mean? You haven’t seen her?”
“When I shot him, I might as well have shot her, too. She was the one who called the cops on me. She was the one who told them that I murdered her husband. It was like she didn’t even see me as her son anymore. Just the person who took her husband away. Even though her husband was an abusive piece of shit, she still saw herself as the problem and him as her one and only solution. In court, she wouldn’t even look at me. Told the jury that my father was a kind and patient man. She told them to lock me up and throw away the key. Said I was dead to her.”
“Still, you don’t regret it?”
“No sense in regretting things you can’t change. I did what I thought was right at the time. I regret letting either of them steal over twenty years of my life. My mother never once came to visit me. She remarried, had a daughter. I hope her second husband wasn’t a bastard, too. But she died of lung cancer six years ago, so I really don’t know.”
“You have a sister?” Memphis asked, moving closer to Preacher until their thighs touched.
“I have a person I’m genetically related to by blood. She’s almost twenty years younger than me. She lives in Florida. Works at a restaurant in Disney. She seems happy. I don’t think she wants to meet her ex-con murderer half-brother.”
“I mean, Knox says your friend Nicky married his step-brother and he was a murderer.”
Preacher cut his eyes to Memphis only to see him grinning. An honest to god grin. Preacher’s heart rate began to gallop. Memphis was gorgeous even when frowning, but when he smiled…goddamn, it was like the clouds parted and the sun appeared. What would Preacher have to do to see him smile like that more often?
“Perceived murderer. Now exonerated,” Preacher reminded him.
Memphis’s smile faded, and he looked at Preacher with such sincerity and sadness that it made his chest tight. “I’m sorry your mom never visited you. I’m sorry she didn’t see what you did for what it was.”
Preacher’s chest tightened. “And what do you think it was?”
“An act of sacrifice. Of love. You gave up your life to make your mother’s better and she betrayed you.”
Preacher shook his head. “She didn’t. She was too far gone. If I had acted sooner, gotten the police involved, found a way to prove what was happening…maybe he would be in jail and I wouldn’t have lost a quarter of a century rotting in prison.”
“Why didn’t you? Call the police?”
“Because, at the time, I thought he was invincible. Unstoppable. He had friends on the police force. My Uncle Joe was a sheriff’s deputy. My Uncle Seth was an attorney. They all saw the same man I had at first. The perfect father and husband. They all talked about my mother with the same level of disdain. They called her things like a ditzy broad and talked about how she was such a burden to my father.”
Memphis opened his mouth to ask another question, but Bo and Luke came trotting up the drive. When they stopped in front of him, there was blood on Luke’s muzzle. There was no hiding it. “Did you catch yourself a rabbit out there, boy?” he asked, hoping to appease the sudden apprehension returning to Memphis’s face.
Luke just panted, tongue hanging from his mouth in what looked like a smile. Whatever the dog had gotten a piece of out there, he was real proud of it.
Preacher stood, holding out a hand to Memphis, who hesitated before taking it and letting Preacher pull him up. “Come on. Let’s get some sleep. I have a feeling things are only going to get harder from here on out.”
With one last look out into the woods, he followed Memphis and the boys inside, setting the alarm and keeping the gun at his side until he made it to the living room. Memphis went to plop himself down on the couch, but Preacher gently gripped his arm and swung him towards his bedroom. “Uh-uh. I’m taking the couch tonight. This lets me keep an eye on both of you.”
