Forty Steps and Other Stories by Terrence Murphy

Author:Terrence Murphy [Murphy, Terrence]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781532053023
Publisher: iUniverse
Published: 2018-07-27T04:00:00+00:00

The questions began the day Jacob started kindergarten, but Priscilla had long been waiting for that day, and she was ready.

She told him she was actually not his mother but his aunt. Her brother, Henry, and his wife, Beatrice, Jacob’s biological parents, had been killed in a car crash when he was a month old, and Priscilla had adopted him right away. There were no other family members.

What she didn’t say was that her brother, Henry, her only sibling, had fallen through the ice and drowned, at age ten.

Jacob accepted Priscilla’s explanation, as any five-year-old would have, but as he grew, he kept bringing up more questions. Priscilla constructed an elaborate backstory that expanded like the plot of one of her novels. She turned her drowned baby brother into a successful businessman with a paper mill and patterned her fictional sister-in-law, Beatrice, after her friend Gretchen.

The deception grew so complex that she took detailed notes to keep the narrative consistent and logical.

One Christmas, when Jacob was home from college, he confronted her, accusing her of withholding information that he was entitled to know. However, he spoke so timidly and apologetically that she decided to take the upper hand—by stonewalling.

It was a nasty scene. He raised his voice in a way she’d never heard before, she became tearful, and he marched out of the room.

The next morning, Jacob greeted his mother as if nothing had happened, but from then on, a new formality entered their relationship—and never went away.

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