His exhale was long and ponderous.Noting his jitters, I let him go and stepped back.Giving him some space to gather himself.
“I needed to see my father’s grave, let him know what I thought of him…and then to sit by my mother’s grave.”
He shoved his hands in his pockets and paced between my two couches, long legs eating up the space.“I joined the army at seventeen.I would have cheated the system and left earlier, but my mother needed me.”
He meant to be a stand in.To take the beating she should never have been forced to endure.Steve either.I shivered as I remembered the pain and fear of my recent assault.Nothing prepares a person to be hurt.Nothing.
I’d been thinking a lot about Laurence over the past few days, and I’d realized that when he’d snapped at Cam, when he’d belittled him or yelled at him, Laurence had hurtme.I bit my lip, wondering, as I often did, if that’s why Laurence did what he did.If so, it made him an even smaller man in my eyes.
“My father…” Steve heaved a breath, clearly struggling.
I stepped back in and squeezed my arms around his waist.His hands came up and cradled me with gentle care.I sighed, soothed, and I hoped he was, too.The tick-tick-tick of the wall-mounted clock in the living room continued, as did the steady thump of his heart against my cheek.
“He beat your mother,” I said.“You told me that before.”
His heart rate sped up and he tensed.
“Don’t,” I murmured.“I’m right here.Not looking.There’s no judgment from me, Steve.Finish the story.”
“He hurt us both.Bad.Often.”
I squeezed my eyes shut and gripped him tighter.
“Ihatedthe man.The number of times I begged my mother to leave him—just get in the car and go…it became a daily thing.Almost routine.She never would, though I told her I was old enough to work.We’d start over.She couldn’t…at least, she wouldn’t.I didn’t understand why… The sheriff explained how my grandfather threatened her by threatening me.So she stayed to save me.Even though he was killing her.”
That was its own form of bravery—of love.And Steve had begun to process the horror of her choices, but that would take time.In her way, his mother had shown as much—more love for him than I had for the girls when Frank, the Scum Bag, came at me.
“Then…then, one night, my father.He…he wouldn’t stop hitting me.I must have blacked out.I don’t know.When I woke…” He choked.Huffed.Swallowed thickly.His arms trembled, but he clutched me tighter, yet still with tenderness.
“When I woke, it was light outside.My mother was next to me on the living room floor.She was dead.”
He’d said that before, on my porch all those months ago.“Oh, Steve.”I swayed a little, just as I used to do with the boys and Kate, now with Cash.He moved with me, and I hoped the slight motion soothed him.
“He must have gotten in the car and left.My guess is he thought he’d killed us both.Knowing him, he would not own up to his crimes.He disappeared.I went looking for him.Found him and the car in a ditch.I…I remember little of that, but the rage…it swept over me.I’ve never felt such consuming rage.”Steve’s swallow was thick.“He laughed,” he whispered.“He laughed and said I was finally understanding what it was to be a man.”
The horror dripped off the words and swirled around us.Unable to do more, I simply held Steve as he shook, his body repulsed by the memories.
“I left him there, bloodied.Instead of helping him, I took the car, drove it as far as Fort Worth, where I spent a few days in the hospital.I refused to answer questions about my parents.What was I going to say?I lit out of there as soon as I was sure I wasn’t dying and then, like I told you, I signed up with the Army so I’d have a place to sleep, a job.”
I turned and pressed my nose into his sternum.“I’m so sorry that happened to you.”
He cupped my shoulders.“I went back to the house to see it.”His eyes held shattered bits of memories deep inside.“It’s smaller than I remember.It’s just a house.A sad one, in disrepair.I talked to the sheriff.He filled in some empty spaces for me.”
“Did that help?”Steve nodded, but he was still stiff, still miserable.
“Hunters found my father in a ditch.Maybe he planned to head back home, maybe he planned to walk away.I don’t know.It doesn’t matter, really.”
But it did to Steve.“You told him what your father did to you and your mom,” I said.
“Oh, the whole town knew.They just weren’t willing to step in.Not until…”
Until his mother died.I frowned.That was horrible.
“I knew I couldn’t get close to anyone.Not if I could fall into such a rage, just like my father.”
Ah.The pieces clicked together.He’d been young—a boy—when he’d lived through absolute hell.Of course, the trauma stuck fast.He hadn’t understood that his reaction then, to finally fighting back against his father, had been a mixture of grief and anger and guilt and myriad other emotions that overrode his “thinking brain.”Of course it did.He was a child still, and without a decent role model.
Knowing Steve, he’d absorbed that lesson, created his life choices around the horrors of it.
