They disliked each other from the first week. Thirty one years of forced smiles, of one of them finding a reason to leave early, of my mother never once calling my husband son. Curtis told me he would rather work a Christmas shift than sit at her table again. When I asked, they both gave me the same line about coming from different worlds, and I decided it was money, because Eleanor had built a business and Curtis had grown up with nothing. Then one evening after a bad argument I heard her hiss that he knew exactly what he had done, and he said nothing at all, and after a few years I stopped asking.
She died at eighty one. At the funeral Curtis slipped out of the reception, and I found him alone beside the coffin telling her he had kept their secret, that nobody ever found out, that it would stay buried under the red maple in her yard forever. She had planted that tree thirty one years earlier and guarded it like a child. No landscapers. No moving it when the roots split the walkway. She once nearly shouted at my daughter for digging near the trunk with a toy shovel.
I went back that night with a shovel from her garage. Three feet down, wrapped in layer after layer of plastic, was a rusted strongbox. Inside were a revolver, a wallet, and a man’s driving licence issued in 1994. The name was my biological father’s, and I had been told my whole life that he left before I was born.
He had come back that summer. He had put my mother in a hospital twice before, and when he broke in a third time, Curtis was twenty three and there and it ended the way it ended. My mother chose the tree. Curtis dug the hole. Neither of them ever forgave the other for what the night had made of them.
The detectives took eight months. The medical examiner’s old file, her hospital records, and the neighbour who had heard him at the door in 1994 were enough. No charges were filed against my husband.
I sat with Curtis on that porch for a long time afterward. He said he had spent three decades certain that if I ever knew, I would look at him differently.
I do look at him differently now. I finally see the whole of him, and I have never once wished to unsee it.
