As Good as True

by Cheryl Reid

We had been married twenty-seven years and I felt relief to have him gone.

He never hit me in front of the children. He tried to keep his cruelty hidden, but they must have known.

Family duty and pride were tied to honor and shame, how a person was seen, how things appeared, whether a person was respectable or not. All efforts to save face must be made.

Papa gave in to me because he wanted me to be happy, but he should have told me, then, that Elias’s father beat Nelly and abused his boys.

Papa should have heeded his worries that brutality seeped down through generations.

Not until years later, when Elias first hit me, did I know what my father meant when he’d said, “The Nassads are hard on their women.”

I was the scapegoat that she pinned every sorrow to, never good enough for her son. She never missed the chance to say how I brought him misery, how I was weak or lazy, how unfit a mother I was.

“Water is life,” she liked to say. “It reminds us we are always moving, that we are alive.”

The wind was dead and the river was still. It looked dark and peaceful, like a sheet of black glass, but lurking beneath the surface was a current, cold and deep, with snakes and tangles of vegetation that could be your end. People could be the same. They could smile to your face with hatred in their heart while they pulled you down.

I wanted to forget the humiliation of the night before and have his arms around me. But by falling into that embrace, I silently agreed that what he had done had no consequence.

I defied the old notions that boys should be more celebrated than girls.

I felt a wave of shame, because he knew I would not be his innocent girl anymore. I was another man’s wife.

She wrapped her arms around me and whispered in my ear, “I did not want him to marry you, but he decided on his own. I pray you will be a good wife to him.”

She wanted everyone to see that she wished me well, but the tone of her voice sent chills down my back.

Loving a child was the most bittersweet joy, maybe the most difficult thing in the world. I wanted to tell her, she could do her best and her child might see it as all wrong. She would know soon enough, this terrible chain of love, from mother to child, how the love was not always returned in the same measure, how it can hurt as deeply as it could be sublime.