You didn’t know that I saw everything that happened, even when I wasn’t there. When my son was stabbed and in the newspaper as Philadelphia’s hero, you didn’t know that I knew what you were feeling. I saw it in your stretched lips, your sharp eyes, your tense fingers. I heard it in your tinny voice, and I felt it in the cold palms of your hands.
You did your best to hide it from us all – from my husband, from our grandchildren. But you didn’t hide it from my son. I saw it in him, too, because a mother always knows. When something is wrong. A mother can see when her son is hurting, just as she can she when he’s done something wrong. I saw it in the way he looked at you, how he averted his eyes when you entered the hospital room, the quiet in his voice, how he solicited your approval. My son never did that, unless he’d done something very wrong.
Looking at you, looking at him, I knew exactly what had happened. The same thing that happens to most married people – the only question being when. Some couples, it’s two years. Others, it’s twenty. My husband, he did it the same time my son did it – eight years.
A mother-in-law always knows.
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