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Show All the Variables & Other Love Stories 14 well with my father, her nervous mouse to his posturing lion-she wasn't really a person, just my father's wife. That's all she knew how to be. It was what her mother had raised her to be. She could never say what she felt, only what Dad felt. She didn't recognize anything of her own; it was only her husband's concerns she vocalized. The morning after losing my virginity I found Mom in the kitchen brewing coffee and had to strangle a vision of her performing fellatio on Dad, just one more item to scratch off her list of house-chores. Suddenly, locking the door of my room and listening for her meek footsteps to ascend the stairs, I realized I had lived with this woman-this beautiful, simple, silent woman-my whole life, and I didn't know her. Not at all. It made me wonder if anyone knew her, if there was anything to know. It gave me the shivers. I had to shrug it off by admitting she always warned me when Dad was in a bad mood, and she never told me what kind of person I should be. Mom once told me Dad stayed with her because of Brandon. Seriously. He was going to break up with her; then they found out she was pregnant with Brandon, so instead he married her. It had been enough to save their marriage for twenty years. My grandparents divorced when Dad was six. His father was a track-driver, and it was easy for him to relocate to the other side of the country. He never missed a child-support payment, and every year Dad and his sister received Christmas and birthday presents of the most impersonal variety-five and ten dollar bills-but Dad never saw him again. It never occurred to him that he may have been better off without what he never had; Mom said my grandfather had been a raging bastard-an alcoholic, |