Bad Memory

~ Sweet and Sour ~

It took Ezra under a minute the next morning to realize something was wrong. When he woke up, he turned to me, kissed me, then immediately frowned.

“What is it?”

I considered excusing it as residual emotions and fatigue from last night’s activities, but I wasn’t confident in my ability to fool him, and I wanted to do a better job of upholding my promise of honesty to him regardless.

So I decided to use it as an opportunity to find out if he also intended on honoring his promise to me.

“I couldn’t sleep last night, so I went to get a glass of water. It was one in the morning, but I heard you talking on the phone. Who were you talking to?”

He stared at me, expressionless, contemplating something. Finally, he answered.

“Your mother.”

He hadn’t lied, which did comfort me. But he was also admitting that he had spoken to a bound woman outside the presence of her husband.

“You’re violating the law,” I told him.

“The law doesn’t apply to immediate family,” he pointed out. “And she is technically my mother now.”

“Then why talk to her in the middle of the night if you’re not worried about it?”

Ezra sighed. “What do you know of your parents’ relationship?”

“My parents have been bound for nearly three decades. Their union has produced-"

“Not biographical data, Shiloh. The quality of the relationship. Are they happy?”

I paused.

Honesty, Shiloh.

“No,” I admitted.

Ezra waited quietly for me to say more.

“My father is…he has a temper. He can be controlling.”

“Do you think he would permit me to speak to your mother privately?”

I shook my head. He wouldn’t permit my mom to speak to anyone privately except me and my brother. Not even her own parents.

“That’s why we speak after your father goes to bed,” Ezra explained. “The law wouldn’t punish her, but we can’t be certain about him.”

“Then why take the risk at all?”

“Your mother is the one taking the risk. I’m simply choosing to honor her decision.”

“What do you even talk about?”

“You,” Ezra answered simply. “She worries about you, Shiloh. A lot.”

I didn’t know how to feel about his response. In one sense, the fact that my mother felt checking in on me was worth risking my father’s wrath emphasized how much she cared about me. But I was already paranoid about people talking about me behind my back; now I had come to find my husband and mother had been doing it regularly.

“What do you tell her?” I asked.

“The truth.”

His answer uncovered another probable lie. My mother said she came the other day because Ezra had begged my father to take me back. But now I realized that Ezra probably hadn’t spoken to my father about it at all. My mother had just used him as a cover for their clandestine conversations about my well-being.

“Is that why she came over the other day?” I asked. “Because you told her I wasn’t eating or sleeping?

“Probably.”