What the Bread Was For

What she needed from Desmond was not grand — she was not asking him to disown his mother.

She was asking him to say, once, Mom, that’s enough, don’t speak to my wife that way. One sentence.

He never said it.

Not once in five years.

He turned up the volume instead, and told himself that keeping the peace was the mature choice, when in truth he was simply too frightened of his mother to defend his wife, and too invested in his own comfort to risk the scene.

Every time he turned up that television, he taught Junia that Marlowe was undefended, that the marriage had no wall around it, that she could keep going.