Monday's Lie by Jamie Mason Page A

travels there might have been some hurts I didn’t know of, losses that had sentenced her romantic heart to solitary confinement.
    I knew my mother didn’t trust love.
    She’d kept the last name Vess but unmoored her life (and ours) from the man himself, Jonas Vess, when Simon was still a baby. She explained, when I was old enough, that she’d delivered an ultimatum and that he had wasted little time in trampling all over the line she’d put in the sand.
    The rift had to do with his drinking, which in turn had something to do with his poorly managed dissatisfaction over being occasionally left at home as a househusband in a time when that sort of thing was less than fashionable and more than odd. My mother traveled much less once we were born, but still more than could go without notice from the nosier neighbors. She had trusted her husband’s discretion.
    When she’d been confronted by the tipsy Tupperware lady at a block party with a smile and a nudge and a “What have you been up to, Mata Hari? Jonas says it’s all very hush-hush,” the match hit the kindling.
    His intemperance was incompatible with her obligations, both her contractual need for control and her instinctive one. When she deemed me ready for the whole story, I took away a decidedly good-news/bad-news interpretation of the facts. My mother was extremely protective of us, and I basked in the safe perimeter of her fierce glow. On the other hand, I didn’t know the word intractable at the time, but I did know what it looked like: my mother, dry-eyed, rescinding her love and closing the door in my father’s defeated face. And never a tear shed over it, that I had ever seen.
    We saw him only twice more before I started school and then nothing but the occasional letter after that. He did what divorced men did in those days. Starting over most often meant starting all the way over, as if the other life and the starter family hadn’t happened. I knew several kids who saw their dads on weekends and maybe for a few weeks in the summer, but I knew just as many whose fathers were a birthday card with cash in it and a single present in the mail at Christmas.
    Jonas Vess died of lung cancer before the surge of the Internet. The absence of his digital footprint made him seem less real to me than even the vagueness of my impressions of him: the cactus scratch of his bearded face against my cheek, the taste of red rope licorice that he bought for me in the grocery store, his pitch-perfect whistling in the garage, in the yard, in the kitchen . . .
    When she had told me that she’d struck a deal with Paul Rowland to stay on as both his hammer and nail, I knew it had something to do with Aunt Marie. My mother had seemed resolved to be rid of Paul and his erratic, wall-dinging business when she first returned from the Long Trip. She avoided him when she could and firmly distanced herself with the coldest of shoulders when she couldn’t. But I overheard hints of tears and snippets of conversation in her first weeks back, on the telephone or in the living room with her sister, until ultimately, my mother wedged herself between Marie and whatever had happened while my mother was away.
    Paul and Marie played house during those months that my mother was gone, while Simon and I were quasi-in-her-care. At first, Paul had come over regularly to deliver messages from our mother. He brought news and assurances of her safety in the days that turned into weeks and months. Eventually, he sort of never left.
    Aunt Marie was the pretty one. Annette was the younger sister and was certainly no mountain troll, but Marie had every physical gift that my mother owned, only slightly Snow White–er. At the crossroads of our need and her availability, when my mother was called away, Marie was divorced with a son in college, who had fallen estranged by the law of tough love.
    My cousin, Justin, had found that he was even better at