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Mother-in-law
- Red Hen Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
113 Mother-in-law —Fairbanks, Alaska, May 1905 Maybe it was my skirt, like yours, or my hair, curls tangled with youth. Maybe it was the way we both brought our hands to our lips in surprise, or the girl in me that you had watched come up as you raised only sons. Something the same in us led you to warn me. Leave him before he kills you, you whispered a week before the wedding, brush frozen in my hair, as still as the pins on the dresser. Our eyes locked in the mirror. I gauged your tone, the stillness of your fingers on the back of my neck, the set of your lips and turned my eyes down to the mirror’s handle, silver, black patina broken by prints. His father . . . you started, moving the brush again, stroke and pull. 114 His father, you repeated, breath weary with the storm that threatened every night until his liquid disappearance shamed and freed you. I know, I said and thought of your boy, gray eyes, his smooth promise, our planned escape I weighed the mason jar, its cool contents, the burn in the back of the throat, my youth, the boy in him, the man not yet born, and I stayed. Mother-in-law, I took you at your word, but it took me twenty-one years to do it in. [34.204.3.195] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 01:48 GMT) 115 I know now what you knew, my own boys newly men. In one I see the promise liquor and time washed away. In the other I see their father, your son. I would warn a woman against him, my own boy, tell her to leave. Our skirts would rustle, my hand would freeze on the worn handle of the hairbrush. She would meet my eyes, gauge them, and then she would look away. And I would smooth her hair, pin it up, and ready her for dinner. ...