"Eric… I'm your mother."
He turned his face away, unwilling to say another word to me.
Something in me went cold, and I looked out the window instead.
The car pulled into a quiet neighborhood of large houses, and I studied the one in front of us, uneasy in my own skin.
Compared to my dirt-floor place back in the country, this looked like something out of a dream.
Constance smiled and handed me a new pair of slippers, gesturing for me to put them on.
Once she'd gotten me settled, she disappeared into the kitchen.
The living room went silent in an instant, and Joseph lowered his voice to demand:
"What exactly do you want?"
"Is it money?"
I looked at him blankly. In my memory he was still the man from ten years ago.
Back then he worked the fields in a white shirt.
When people mocked me for having no father and no mother, he'd raise his hoe and curse them right back.
When exactly had he changed?
I lowered my eyes and signed:
"I haven't seen my son in seven or eight years. Ever since he moved to New York, he's found every excuse not to come home."
Joseph frowned, his eyes running over me from head to toe.
"He's getting his doctorate at an Ivy League school. His future's wide open. What did you come here for?"
"Do you even know what kind of occasion this was? His advisor was there, his classmates, even a few reporters!"
I felt something rise in me, and my hands moved wider than I meant them to.
"I came to see my own son. What's wrong with that?"
The hurt boiled up inside me like water reaching a boil, and I signed:
"Joe, why did you lie to me?"
The man across from me looked away. "What did I lie about?"
I glanced toward the kitchen, then pointed at the family photo of the three of them on the living room wall.
"You said you were afraid your debts would drag me and our son down. You said you'd come back and remarry me."
"But now you've used the five hundred thousand I gave you to marry another woman."
"If that isn't lying, what is it?"
Joseph's throat bobbed. Then he pulled out a cigarette and lit it.
"Back then I was buried in debt here in New York. It was Constance's father who paid it all off."
"Constance is good to me. Good to Eric."
His eyes settled on my face, and he was quiet for a moment.
"Just pretend you never had this son. That you never married me. Can you do that?"
My eyes went hot, and I lifted my hands in disbelief.
"I carried that son for ten months, and you want me to pretend I never gave birth to him?"
Behind us came Constance's voice calling us to dinner. Joseph didn't look at me again.
We went to the table, and Constance stepped back into the kitchen to bring out the dishes.
Joseph turned his head toward me and said in a low voice:
"Constance is a simple soul. She doesn't know any of it."
"If you still remember what we were to each other, if you still care about your son."
"Then don't say the wrong thing. Consider it me begging you."
Constance laid a piece of ribs in Eric's bowl.
"Eric really made his mom proud today,"
"You have no idea, so many people came up to ask me how I raised such an outstanding son."
Eric looked up and smiled at her.
That sweet, obedient look. I hadn't seen it on his face in eight years.
"It's because Mom raised me right."
The words had barely left him when his gaze drifted across me, and all that was left in his eyes was cold indifference.
After dinner, Constance insisted I stay the night.
She even went to the trouble of making up the guest room for me.
In the night, I got up to use the bathroom.
I heard my son's and my husband's voices coming from the study.
Joseph kept his voice very low:
"If you hadn't been so quick back then, going back to drug Valerie and make her mute."
"Who knows what she might have said today, and ruined everything for us."
