the secret

Everyone has a secret, his mother once told him, and, she said, it’s often better if you don’t know exactly what that secret, their secret, is. He never asked her about that bit of advice, but he would, now, if he could, and the question would be, perhaps a bit inappropriately: what was yours? He suspects hers, his mother’s, might have been that she’d been molested by her father. He’d always had this creepy, gut feeling about that and about his grandfather. In the broader view, he’d always looked differently at people after she’d said that to him. It was a bit of a game, at first – who was doing what to whom? But later it became more and more of an obsession: what was his, hers, theirs? And why was it a secret? His secret? He wasn’t telling anyone, ever. It was better, that way, for everyone – especially his siblings.