Starting with one, but might add more.
In the week before she died – one of those dreadful mornings – my mother said a strange thing, though I didn’t consider it strange at the time. She said, “Underneath it all, your father loves you.”
She wasn’t in the habit of speaking to us about feelings, and especially not about love – her own love or anyone else’s, except God’s. But parents were supposed to love their children, so I must have taken this thing she said as a reassurance: despite appearances, my father was as other fathers were, or were considered to be.
Now I think it was more complicated than that. It may have been a warning. It may also have been a burden. Even if love was underneath it all, there was a great deal piled on top, and what would you find when you dug down? Not a simple gift, pure gold and shining; instead, something ancient and possibly baneful, like an iron charm rusting among old bones. A talisman of sorts, this love, but a heavy one; a heavy thing for me to carry around with me, slung on its iron chain around my neck.