Whatever Mother Says... by Wensley Clarkson Read Free Book Online Page A

Theresa Knorr once again ignored Howard’s pleas when he voiced his concern, and she banned him from ever mentioning the subject again.
    The beatings rapidly escalated after the eyelashes incident. Howard Sanders walked in on his mother whipping Suesan with a plastic tube one day. He immediately snatched it curtly from his mother and broke the tube into tiny pieces. But much of the damage had already been done.
    Suesan, five feet five inches tall, was approximately the same height as her mother, but Theresa Knorr vastly outweighed her. She had turned into a turtlelike waddler who rocked from side to side as she moved. Her face had become almost square from overeating. Her expressions, even during the most violent exchanges, ran the gamut from stolid to grave.
    Sometimes the violence inflicted on Suesan would subside long enough so that Theresa Knorr could sit her bruised and battered daughter down and make her read excerpts from the Bible. Theresa Knorr also talked about calling in priests to perform exorcisms to get the devil out from within her daughter.
    Around this time, Theresa Knorr’s drinking increased. She would often keep the children up all night, interrogating them on the different oddities of the Bible.
    Theresa Knorr indicated her true feelings about her daughters by always referring to them as “your sisters” during any conversations with the boys. She would spit the words out.
    Her possessiveness also knew no boundaries. She tried to encourage her children not to attend school because she wanted to keep an eye on the girls and get the boys out to work from as early an age as possible.
    Suesan’s last school was Arcade High School, on Watt Avenue, but she only got as far as seventh grade when her mother pulled her out of school, just as she did with Terry a few years later. Sheila managed ninth grade at Casa Robla before she stopped attending.
    About the only one who continued with his studies was Billy Bob. By all accounts he had a good head on his shoulders. He was smart and good at sports. The other children believe he stayed in school so much because he was trying to keep out of his mother’s reach.
    Amazingly, despite all the children’s appalling record of absence from school, no one investigated the family’s home life to find out where the problems lay.
    Both Robert and Billy Bob had part-time jobs before they turned fifteen, and Billy Bob was extremely bitter about his mother having put all the utilities in his name so that he had to pay for everything out of his modest pay packet. Billy Bob saw it as yet more evidence that his mother was trying to control his life.
    It also had a chillingly familiar ring to it. For Theresa Knorr had made every man—including the husband she shot dead—part with his wages the moment he walked through the door.

Four
    All happy families resemble one another; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
    Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
    Theresa Knorr rocked back and forth in her chair, Terry recalls. Back and forth. Back and forth. Not a glint of emotion in her steely blue eyes. Just an empty stare at the person sitting just a few feet away.
    In front of her—crumpled at the kitchen table like a rag doll incapable, afraid, to defy any order—was her seventeen-year-old daughter Suesan, whose sin was to be prettier and thinner than her mother and who was rumored to be mixing with the devil. It infuriated Theresa Jimmie Knorr to even look at Suesan. She accelerated the pace of her movements on that red rocking chair. Her eyes locked on Suesan. All the children knew that was a sign.
    The chair creaked under the weight of her 250-pound frame.
    Theresa Knorr pushed a pot filled with macaroni cheese into her hands.
    It was the first of four boxes of the stuff that she would make her daughter consume that night.
    Suesan shook as she grabbed the saucepan filled to the brim with food. The scorching hot pot sizzled as it touched the skin of her bare legs.
    Suesan’s first