Aunt Elizabeth
The next day, Linda, Susan, and I drove two hours in complete silence to an assisted living facility in the suburbs to visit our 89-year-old Aunt Elizabeth, my mother’s only surviving sister.
We didn’t call ahead.
We didn’t stop at the front desk.
We just walked straight into her room.
Elizabeth was sitting in a recliner, knitting.
When she saw the three of us standing together with pale, haunted faces, she stopped.
And when I pulled the handwritten letter out of my purse and held it up, the frail old woman immediately burst into hysterical tears, burying her face in her wrinkled hands.
“I promised your mother I would never tell a single soul,” Elizabeth wept, rocking back and forth. “She swore to take it to her grave. We all did.”
“It’s true then,” Susan whispered, grabbing Linda’s hand.
“Who is their father, Aunt Elizabeth?” I demanded, my voice shaking with a cold, terrifying rage I didn’t know I possessed. “Who did this to me when I was a child?”
She slowly lowered her head, refusing to meet my eyes.
“It’s better if you don’t know, Mary. Please. Let it stay buried. He’s dead anyway. It doesn’t matter anymore.”
Linda stepped forward, her face red and furious.
“We’re sixty-year-old women! Stop lying to us! Tell us who he is!”
Elizabeth shook her head violently.
“No. It will destroy you. It will destroy whatever good memories you have left of this family.”
I walked over, knelt down beside her chair, and gently but firmly took her fragile hands in mine.
“Aunt Elizabeth. I am their mother. My entire life has been a fabricated lie. You are going to tell me who the father of my children is, right now, or we will walk out that door and you will die in this room without ever seeing any of us again.”
Elizabeth let out a long, broken wail.
May you like
She looked up at the ceiling, tears streaming down her face, and then she looked directly into my eyes.
“It was Richard,” she whispered.
