In Broken Places

9




THE DAY MY DAD left had started pretty well. It would go down from there for a few hours, then up again for, oh, about a couple decades. Trey and I followed the smell of bacon frying to the kitchen and observed our usual rituals of breakfast in pj’s, doing dishes to the Beatles, and getting dressed to the smell of the lawn being cut. It was a day that felt cheerful—kelly-green around the edges—and that somehow brought out the sports fans in us. So Trey donned his lucky Bulls championship cap, and I donned my lucky McDonald’s Walk for Life T-shirt, which always felt disloyal to Wendy’s. But I was getting over that.

I think it’s the sports theme that dismantled our lives. That may explain the hate-hate relationship I’ve had with sports ever since then, though I’m pretty sure I was already of that mind-set in preschool, when I staged a sit-in every time my teacher told us to climb the monkey bars. Monkey bars was a deceptive term. Monkey sounded like fun, in a goofy, screechy kinda way. And bars sounded yummy, in a Mars or Snickers kinda way. But climbing? Climbing sounded like something that required physical effort, and that’s where five-year-old Shelby drew the line.

Trey and I wandered outside in our sports gear, and Dad told us he was going to the hardware store to have his lawn-mower blade sharpened. He took Mom’s car since it was parked behind his and she wouldn’t be needing it as she had walked to the hair salon to have her ends trimmed. We stood in the driveway after Dad drove away and had our usual Saturday conversation.

“What do you wanna do?”

“I dunno. What do you wanna do?”

“I dunno. We could go to the arcade.”

“Yeah.”

“Or we could watch MTV.”

I didn’t like MTV. It made me feel like I’d drunk too much Coke. “Or we could go to the grocery store and try their free samples.”

Trey and I weren’t very good at Saturdays. We could never decide what we were going to do—except when Dad had one of his fits. When that happened, life became predictable and manageable and we no longer had to plan our day or come to an agreement. We knew the drill. It took all the frustration out of Saturdays. But Dad had been in a pretty good mood so far, so we were left to our own devices.

Why Trey stayed home on weekends with little old me was a mystery. He had friends on the soccer team and at school, though he mostly just hung out with them between classes and during games and scrimmages. They never came over to the house, but I think that’s because it was too hard to explain my dad to them. And not just the neckties-on-Saturdays thing.

We were about to throw in the towel and head to the video arcade when the sport of basketball decided to turn our lives upside down. See, Trey had his Bulls cap on, and when he was wearing that, he tended to suffer from Michael Jordan delusions. I saw him eyeing the basketball hoop that hung above our garage door and concluded I’d have to find my own entertainment for the next hour or so while my usually fairly rational brother bounced a ball in rhythmic monotony and yelled, “Three-pointer!” at the top of his lungs. I did, however, see an impediment to his plans.

“Don’t you think Dad’s car is too close to the hoop?” I asked.

“I’ll shoot around it.”

“Trey . . .” Dad loved his car. The first deadly sin in our household was messing with Dad’s car. The second deadly sin was everything else.

“Don’t worry about it, Shell.” He was already bouncing the ball and lining up his first shot. “I’ve got all the precision of my man Jordan.”

He had neither the skin color nor the height, so I doubted he had the precision. The first shot went wide and bounced off the backboard directly onto the shiny hood of Dad’s Chevy. I cringed and covered my eyes like it would undo the hollow thunk that I knew must have left its mark on the finish.

“It’s okay,” Trey said a few seconds later, and I uncovered my eyes to find him polishing a blemish off the hood with his shirt. “It’s coming right off.”

“Maybe it’s a bad idea to pretend you’re a Bull while the car’s in the driveway,” I suggested. He got a look on his face that made me want to tie him to a tree with duct tape. It was a look that spelled mischief—only it spelled it d-a-n-g-e-r-o-u-s. “What are you thinking, Trey?” I really didn’t like the glint in his eyes.

He looked into the car and his smile broadened. “You know how I’ve been taking driver’s ed at school?”

“Trey . . .”

“I’m going to be sixteen in two and a half months.”

“Only if Dad doesn’t kill you before then.”

Trey leaned down and eyed the garage doorway like a golfer lines up his shot. “All I’ve got to do is put it in gear and let it coast into the garage.”

“Uh, Trey . . .” I was trying to figure out how to express my true feelings without resorting to nasty words.

Trey opened the driver’s-side door and got into the front seat. I was rooted to the spot with a combination of terror and reluctant admiration. My brother, the idiot, was truly a courageous guy.

“You sure you know what you’re doing?” I yelled as the engine came to life and he put it in gear. The car inched forward and I could see how it was perfectly lined up with the garage. I think Trey and I were both so focused on that, neither of us realized he had left the car door open. I saw it just as it was about to make contact with the garage’s doorframe and yelled, “Trey! The door!” so loudly that I startled myself.

I apparently startled Trey, too, because he panicked. He didn’t know what I’d yelled, but he knew it had sounded urgent, and in his frantic attempt to bring the car to a halt, he hit the wrong pedal, just for a second, and jolted the Chevy into the workbench on the back wall of the garage.

I’ve heard it said that time stands still at critical moments in life, like when someone says they love you or you win the lottery or your brother plows your dad’s prize possession into the garage wall. But time didn’t actually stand still in the aftermath of what we would come to refer to as the Big Bang. Time actually took on a life of its own and started to rock and swirl around me, and I think the whole earth kinda bucked along in rhythm. It was a cataclysm of unimaginable consequences, and time was thrashing around in a desperate effort to reverse itself. It didn’t succeed. When the earth settled a little under my feet, I heard a lone wrench fall off its wall hook and land on the hood of the shiny black Chevy.

This was not good—a very bad, very scary, very irremediable version of not good.

When Dad returned, he found us sitting on the stoop at the front of the house. We’d passed the minutes trying to make light of the situation, but I could see from the sweat on Trey’s forehead and the wideness of his eyes—like the top lids were stuck on something—that we hadn’t succeeded. That was a little disappointing, because we’d tried so hard.

“So do you still feel like Michael Jordan?” I’d asked.

“This is the end of my life.”

“Maybe we should run away to Mexico and build a Huddle Hut on the beach.”

“He’s going to kill me, Shell.”

“We could make up a story. We could say some homeless guy jumped in the car and rammed it into the garage. Or maybe a druggie.”

“Or maybe the pope.”

“Yeah—the pope’s a good one too.”

“The damage isn’t too bad, right?”

I hesitated. I didn’t know much about cars. “Well, the door is . . . It just has a few scratches, but . . .”

“He’s going to kill me.”

“Maybe if you tell him how sorry you are, he’ll understand. Or maybe he’s one of those people who get all upset about stupid little things but don’t really worry about the big things.”

He gave me a my-sister-the-moron look. We were in deep doo-doo and both of us knew it.

“I hear Mexico’s really nice this time of year.”

That’s when my mom’s car, with my dad in it, pulled into the driveway. It took a while for him to open the door, and that was scarier than anything that came after.

Trey stood and waited. I could see he had dark spots on his back and under his arms where the sweat had soaked into his shirt. When Dad got out of the car, Trey took a step back. I stood and touched his arm, and then he stepped off the stoop and went to stand in front of the man whose lips had disappeared and whose neck was popping with veins and sinews and fury.

Dad didn’t take his eyes off the car and the mess of tools and paint cans on the floor around it.

“Dad, I—”

He backhanded Trey so quickly, like a lightning strike, that it was over before I’d seen it coming. Trey fell against Mom’s car so hard that his back curved over the hood. My dad kept him plastered there with his hand on his throat, pushing down on his neck like he wanted to crush it.

I felt like I was watching the scene through a wall of buzzing bees, so thick and seething was the air.

The sky lowered and added its weight to my dad’s. The trees in the yard bent forward, forcing more air out of my brother’s lungs.

“What have you done?” Dad raged, disgorging a crush of poison words. “What have you done to my car?” I could see the spit flying out of his mouth, even at a distance, and the veins around his eyes were starting to stand out. He was red. Mottled. Rabid. His body taut and straining. His teeth bared in a snarl that belonged on a sick, caged animal—not on my dad. This was not my father. This was my worst nightmare in human form, my greatest, most horrendous fear choking the life out of my brother in Technicolor and surround sound. My legs wanted to buckle and my mind wanted to flee into insentience, but the only good part of me was being broken, that part that walked and talked and breathed as Trey, and I couldn’t let it happen. There was a bright-blue flash at the back of my mind and I launched off the porch, pushing through thick air toward my brother. My friend. My protector.

“I’ll kill you for this! I’ll kill you!” my dad was shrieking, his voice like broken glass. Then he ran out of words and just screamed and howled and thundered while I tried to pry his vicious hands from my brother’s neck. I pulled at his arm, pitting my full weight against his grip, but I was a moth throwing myself against a fortress, feeble and frantic and impotent.

In a desperate last effort fueled by the churning lava in my chest, I jumped onto Dad’s back and braced my feet against Mom’s car and tried to pull him away from the hood, away from Trey, away from the hell of seeing my brother, shattered and helpless, dying before me. And still, my efforts were in vain. I reached around to my dad’s face and started to claw. I clawed at his eyes, I clawed at his cheeks, I clawed at his mouth and ears and nose. I felt wet against my fingers, and I didn’t care whether it was spit or blood or tears. All I cared about was that he was staggering back and releasing his hold on my choking, convulsing brother.

And then he turned, his hands tearing mine from his face, and slammed backward into the car with me on his back, knocking the terror from my lungs, before throwing me over his shoulder like a wrestler onto the ground. I felt my wrist bend too far, but it was only the mechanics of the injury that registered, not the pain. I heard shrieking in the background that sounded like my mom. Then my face hit the pavement in a streak of fire-yellow and blood-pounding red and I passed out.

My first thought when I woke up on the living room couch was, Shoot, I didn’t kill him. I’d really hoped my clawing would have severed an artery somewhere in his face and made him bleed to death. But there he was, sitting off in the corner of the room in the chair that was so pretty that none of us ever used it. My eyes were seeing things a little blurry, so I couldn’t tell if it was blood or just scrapes crisscrossing his face. I hoped it was blood.

“Trey . . .” I croaked, turning my head to find Mom’s face above mine. She was holding my wrist like you hold a dead bird.

“It’s just a sprain,” she said, and I squinted a little to make sure it was really my mom. She didn’t sound like her.

“Trey,” I tried again. “Where’s Trey?” This time my voice sounded less like a bullfrog and more like a cricket. But Mom was so busy staring at my dad, all slumped over in the pretty flowered chair, that I don’t think she heard me. Her face looked stony, like those gargoyles we’d studied in art class. Except she was prettier—but not by much. Hate had turned her ugly just then. It suddenly dawned on my mushy brain that maybe she was ignoring my question because the answer was too horrible to say. I felt like the couch folded up beneath me and I fell through, butt first, and went spiraling into an endless, dark, suffocating hole where the absence of Trey would shred me.

There were weird pictures flashing through my head, like pages of a notebook being flipped so fast that they all blurred together. I saw bits and pieces of Rolos and basketballs and zucchini and Coke cans and the Huddle Hut and the arcade and all these fragile pieces of Trey I wanted to gather up and press into a ball and swallow so he would be a part of me—inside me—even if he wasn’t in the world anymore. The darkness of the hole was blackening my vision and snuffing out my thoughts.

Life without Trey. Life without Trey. Life without Trey. My heart tried to beat through my ribs so it could run away screaming into the attic and curl up in the Huddle Hut and just shriek.

“Is she okay?” The voice was raspy like the smell of burned toast, but it was Trey’s and it was alive and it came from somewhere down around my feet. So I pulled my head off the couch’s armrest and looked down my body through the spinning, rocking world . . . and there he was. He was sitting in Mom’s armchair, holding a bag of frozen peas against his throat. I could see there would be bruises there tomorrow. Tomorrow. Trey would be alive tomorrow. I laid my head back down on the armrest and heard a sob and thought, How embarrassing for whoever was making such a pathetic noise. And then Trey was beside me, his frozen-peas hands cold against my arm. He knelt by the couch and shushed me like a baby, stroking my arm, while Mom stood there and stared at the corner with the pretty chair.

I didn’t know what to do to stop sobbing, and I think I looked at Trey like, Help me! because all the crying was hurting my ribs and my head and my wrist. But Trey just kept on shushing me. And then his shushing got a little jagged. And then he put his face down next to my head, kind of burrowed it into the pillow under my neck, and I could feel his sobbing matching mine.



I couldn’t stop the tears. They had started when I’d gotten into Gus’s car, and they hadn’t abated during the fifteen-minute ride home. He had tried to console me as best he could, but his reassurances had been weightless on the scales by which I judged the good and bad of my life.

“You couldn’t have seen him coming,” Gus said. “It’s a blind intersection and you did everything you should, but he just came around that corner too fast to miss you.”

“He didn’t listen,” I said, swallowing the sobs that tried to overcome my self-control. I would not let them out in front of Gus. “I kept telling him that I don’t speak German and he just kept on yelling at me. I even told him in German—but he kept pointing at his car and at me and . . .” I had to pause because the exertion of trying to maintain my dignity was making it hard for me to catch my breath. “And I don’t have a cell phone!” I finally wailed.

“It all worked out,” Gus said in a soothing voice, reaching awkwardly to pat me on the shoulder as he drove. “That store owner let you call Bev, and she got ahold of me.”

I felt another wave of humiliation and horror rushing up from my stomach to my throat. “He just wouldn’t stop yelling, Gus!”

“The damage isn’t bad.” He was trying hard to drag my mind off the yelling, but it had apparently made quite an impression on my conversational skills. “I’ll go over this afternoon with someone else and drive your car home. We’ll have it back in shape in no time. And it probably won’t even cost that much.”

That launched another tears-versus-self-control battle. Money. Money had become more of an issue than it had ever been before. I did have the income from my dad and from my church, but every month still felt like a desperate countdown from one paycheck to the next.

“We can help you pay for the repairs,” Gus said, misinterpreting my increased crying for concern about the bodywork my car’s rear fender would require. He didn’t realize how much deeper and wider my anxiety was. This wasn’t about an accident. This wasn’t about another bill. This was about the utter foundationlessness I felt in every facet of my out-of-control life.

When we got home, Bev was waiting on the doorstep for me. She rushed over and helped me out of the car, while Gus took the keys from me and opened my door.

“Oh, Shelby, honey, I’m so, so sorry,” she said, wrapping me tightly and rubbing my shoulders as we walked. “Is the car badly damaged?”

“Just a scratch and a dent,” Gus said as we passed in front of him and entered my apartment. “I’ll keep your keys so I can get your car later, okay, Shelby? And I’ll pick Shayla up from kindergarten in an hour, so don’t you worry about that.”

“We’ll be okay,” Bev said, walking with me to the couch. Gus told her to call him if we needed anything, then left.

Now that I was in my own home and in the comfortable presence of my friend, I had no command left over the torrent of emotions that had been months in building up. Bev went to my bedroom and came back with my pillow. “Here,” she said, “hang on to this. It’s no good to cry without something to hold on to.” And she sat down beside me on the couch and patted my back while I hugged the pillow to my stomach and let the torrent rage. The force of my crying was terrifying, so powerful that I pitched slowly sideways as I sobbed, my head finding the armrest and my legs curling up under me. Bev’s hand never ceased its movement on my back and shoulder. She just sat there quietly and let my anxiety flow.

“I don’t know why I’m doing this,” I sobbed, minutes later, when I couldn’t seem to get a grip on my emotions. “I don’t know what’s happening to me.”

Bev’s voice was gentle and laced with understanding. “It’s been a long time in coming, hasn’t it.”

I nodded, powerless to gain control.

“And it’s not just about your accident,” she said. “But you know that, too.”

“He wouldn’t understand me,” I cried. “I kept saying it over and over—‘I don’t speak German.’ But he kept on ranting. And when the cops came—” I buried my face in my pillow to stifle the sounds coming out of my throat—“they laughed, Bev.” I turned my head to look at her. “They laughed and said something about Americans.”

“Well, that was uncalled for.”

“I can’t do this,” I said, and the resolve of that statement relieved me somewhat. It also made me angry enough to sit up. “I can’t live here. I can’t keep trying to convince myself that everything’s fine. I can’t keep putting Shayla through this.”

“Don’t make any decisions now, Shelby, not while you’re in this state.”

“But I can’t do it, Bev! I’m sick of this. I’m sick of being a foreigner. I’m sick of not being able to read any labels at the grocery store. I’m sick of being scared on the roads and of getting mail that doesn’t mean anything to me even though I know it’s important. I’m sick of having to beg people for help and being treated like a dimwit!”

“Shelby . . .”

“I can’t take it!” Another crying jag threatened to overwhelm me, so I got off the couch and began to pace, anger adding an edge to my tears. “I thought I was doing okay. I kept telling myself that this is normal, that it’s going to get easier. I keep telling Shayla that too, but how can I convince her when I can’t cope either? I knew it was going to be hard, but nothing like this. Nothing like this, Bev!

“I haven’t even made friends with anyone aside from you and Gus. It’s like every moment I’m awake is consumed with trying to keep Shayla happy, and trying to be a good teacher, and figuring out how to direct a play, and cooking with foods I’ve never seen before, and feeling like an absolute idiot because I still can’t speak German, and . . . and I’m tired of it!”

“Give it time.”

I stopped my pacing long enough to give her a disbelieving look. “How much? I was expecting some tough stuff, but nothing like this—and I feel it all the time. On the outside and the inside. Like my organs aren’t even in the same place anymore. I can’t handle it, Bev. I thought I’d be able to, but I can’t!”

“This is normal, Shelby,” Bev said from the couch, her own eyes bright with tears.

“Well, it’s too much,” I said wearily, my sobs subsiding but my lungs still heaving. I sat at the dining room table and looked at my friend in utter despair. “It’s all too hard. The Germans are always staring at me and correcting me and acting like I’m an imbecile. Nothing is easy here—nothing! I mean, it takes an hour and a half to do a load of laundry! I can’t find a donut to save my life, I can’t buy clothes because none of them fit right, I feel guilty driving because gas costs so much, I only get to talk to Trey once a week . . .”

Bev came to the table and pulled a chair up close to mine. “You’re transitioning. It’s supposed to feel this way.”

“And then,” I added in desperation, “I go to the doctor this morning for a sore throat and he makes me strip to my waist—to my waist!—and he doesn’t give me anything to cover up with. Nothing. No paper robe, no sheet . . . I can’t do it,” I said again, shaking my head in resignation. “And I can’t do this to Shayla.”

“She’ll recover too.”

“Have you seen her since she started kindergarten?” I asked angrily, motherly protectiveness hardening my tone. “She’s come back every day so unhappy, Bev. The other kids won’t talk to her, the teachers refuse to listen to her if she speaks English. How is she supposed to learn when no one cares about her?”

“I’ve seen her when she comes home,” Bev said with the kind of firmness in her voice that told me it was time to become rational again. “She comes straight to my house, remember? So I’ve seen it firsthand, and you know what?”

I shook my head and swiped at my nose with the Kleenex she’d brought me from the box next to the couch.

“The two of you are suffering from exactly the same adjustment pangs. Too much newness and weirdness all at the same time. Too many things that feel like you somehow need to survive them.”

“I need to pull Shay out of kindergarten. It’s killing her.”

“Give her another couple of weeks.”

“Bev! She cries herself to sleep at night and begs me every morning not to send her back. It’s been like that for two weeks! How can I force her to do something she hates so much?”

“You’re not forcing her. You’re allowing her enough time to get used to it before pulling her out of the one thing in her life that gives her contact with others.”

My lungs spasmed a little and I swallowed hard. My eyes were pulsing with the intensity of my emotions, and my chest felt hollowed out. Nausea came and went like a veil across my eyes.

“And I can’t stand the rain,” I said, every ounce of my rebellion in the words.

Bev laughed and reached across to pat my hand. “Well that, my dear, is the one thing you really can’t do anything about!”

I allowed a smile, but it didn’t feel very hopeful.

“None of this is easy, Shelby. That much you’ve got absolutely right. And combined with everything else you’re coping with, it’s got to feel so overwhelming that you can’t see straight right now. But give it time. Just like Shayla needs a little more time before you decide whether to leave her in kindergarten or not, you need more time to see just how strong you really can be. You’ve only been here a few weeks, and I don’t want to depress you, but culture shock like this can sometimes take a couple years to put behind you.”

I rolled my eyes. “Great. That’s encouraging.”

“Except that you’re doing it right. You’re trying as hard as you can and giving it all you’ve got, which is exhausting considering you’re juggling motherhood and teaching and learning to direct a play. You’ve been through monumental changes in the past few months, and you’ve somehow maintained your sanity.”

I raised a dubious eyebrow.

“You have,” Bev persisted. “This—” she pointed at my swollen eyes and salt-abraded cheeks—“this is sanity. It’s acknowledging that it hurts and that none of it makes sense. And once this passes, once you get your car back and Shayla starts to do better, once you master a few more easy meals to make and get a few more German phrases under your belt, it’ll start to feel better. Just don’t expect it to happen overnight.”

She patted my hand. “What feels overwhelming now won’t be quite so confusing in a month and even less in a year. Every challenge is part of the process. Give the changes the time to become familiar, and give yourself permission to be scared or frustrated or confused. Just like you give permission to Shayla.”

“Hans and Regina went to the pool,” I said in German.

“Come again?”

“That’s the one German sentence I know really well, and I’ll probably never get to say it.” The last words turned into a wail, and I launched into chapter two of Shelby’s Epic Meltdown.

“Hey, consider yourself lucky,” Bev said. “The only sentence I know in French is Voulez-vous coucher avec moi, ce soir?”

I put my wailing on pause long enough to give her a Huh? look.

“From ‘Lady Marmalade,’” she explained. “You know what it means?”

I shook my head. I had heard the song all my life without ever wondering about the French.

“Well, it’s a surefire way of meeting the natives,” Bev said. “It means, ‘Do you want to sleep with me tonight?’”

I laughed so hard I snorted.



“Your nose is red,” I said to Trey. He was lying on the floor next to the couch, his bag of frozen peas still pressed against the livid traces of my father’s shame around his neck.

“I’ve been sneaking out and doing a clown act after dark every night,” he croaked, his eyes closed. “Can’t seem to get all the makeup off, though.”

“Oh, good,” I said, “’cause I thought maybe you’d been crying or something.”

He opened an eye and glared at me. We’d never been very good at crying together.

Mom and Dad were in the kitchen. They’d been in there forever. After I’d come to on the couch, Dad had sat there for a while in the pretty flowered chair. Then, while I went to the bathroom to throw up, he’d gone into the kitchen with Mom. It hadn’t been his idea. Mom had approached him, trying to keep her voice low so we wouldn’t hear what she said. But she was so angry that it was like her words had ultrasound. They weren’t loud, but we felt them vibrate in our bones.

“Go to the kitchen,” she’d hissed, the words sharp and brittle in the silence of the living room. It was the kind of tone we’d used on the dog we had when we were really little. We’d sent him to the kitchen too when he’d peed on the rug or chewed on the furniture. But I never, not in my most psychedelic nightmares, ever thought I’d hear Mom speak to my dad that way.

They’d been in the kitchen for several minutes now, and all we could hear was the occasional word.

“You want me to go put my ear to the door?” I asked Trey.

“Only if you want to.”

“My wrist hurts too much.”

“Okay.”

That’s when Mom yelled. She yelled so loudly that both Trey and I sat up like someone had set firecrackers off under our backs.

“Get out!” she yelled. “Get out of the house and don’t come back!”

I had never heard Mom yell that way before. Never. Not even when her brakes had given out when she was biking down a hill during a camping trip. Even then, she’d just kinda kept quiet and aimed her bike at the pond off to the right instead of at the trees to the left. She hadn’t even screamed when the bike had gone off the road, across a bumpy patch of grass, then right into the water. She’d just put her feet down when the bike sank in the silt and walked out of the knee-deep water, leaving the blue Schwinn standing there in the pond all by itself.

We heard Dad go upstairs and rummage around for a while. Then he came through the living room on his way to the door, a garbage bag full of stuff slung over his shoulder, left the house, started up his Chevy, and just kinda poofed out of our lives.

Mom told us over lasagna that night that Dad was going to be staying at his other house for a while.

“He has another house?”

She got that look like she’d said something she hadn’t meant to say. “He’s got a place to stay.”

“Is he coming back?”

“I don’t know.”

I looked at Trey.

“You shouldn’t let him come back,” he said to Mom. I liked it when he said things in that tone of voice. Strong. Like he knew more than Mom did.

Mom had been spending a lot of time moving the lasagna around on her plate with her fork, so I knew she wasn’t feeling too good. She let a long silence pass, the kind of silence that feels like smooth water. Like if you say anything or breathe or move, there will be a ripple and the smoothness will be gone. I don’t think any of us were in the mood for ripples. We’d had enough. So we all ate in silence for a few more minutes, enjoying the smooth surface while we could.

“I want you to know that what your dad did this afternoon was . . .” She paused.

“Bad?” I offered the word, but I knew it fell short.

“Reprehensible.” Better word. Score one for Mom. “And I need you to know that I never would have let it happen if I’d been home.” Like she’d never let him cuss at us or yell at us or shove us around? But her intentions were good. I knew that.

“Why didn’t you call the police?” Trust Trey to jump right in.

“They would have . . .” She put her fork down and rubbed at her eyes like she was sleepy. “They might have . . .”

“They might have given him what he deserves,” said the boy with the purple-red bruises around his neck.

Mom got teary, but she kept the drops from falling off the edges of her eyes. She’d always had a gift for that. “I don’t want you to think your father hates you,” she said.

Trey and I exchanged eye rolls. Right. He loved us. He’d nearly loved us into oblivion, the pig. I didn’t say the word out loud because part of me still thought he was with us, listening to us, waiting to pounce on his kids’ major sins—like not eating zucchini or, you know, calling him a pig.

“He’s got some problems,” Mom continued. “In his head. And he knows he’s hurt you really badly this time.”

“I’m not going to forgive him.” I looked around to see who had spoken and realized it was me. “I mean—not for a very long time.” I knew in my head that it would be never.

“If he comes back, I’m moving out.” This from Trey. I guess having the life choked out of you makes you see things in a more definite light. He had that look about him—like he meant it—and it scared me. If Trey left, I’d have to leave too, and I wasn’t quite ready for that.

Mom stood after Trey’s statement and took her full plate to the counter. “We’ll see,” she said, her back to us, and we knew that meant she wanted him to come back. She reminded me, sometimes, of the fish we used to catch in the inland lake near the cottage we rented in the summer. It’s not like we were subtle about it. We didn’t have real fishing rods, so we’d wade in up to our thighs, fishing line and hook tied to the end of a stick. And we’d just walk around dangling the baited hook in the water, kind of like human trawlers, waiting for something to be dumb enough to bite. And there was this one sunfish—we called him Ringo—who kept coming back for more. He’d bite, we’d tear his mouth off the hook and throw him back in. Then, the next minute, while we waded around the edges of the pond and talked loudly and did everything you’re not supposed to do if you’re fishing, Ringo would come back. He’d bite again, get hooked again, we’d tear him off again and let him go again. After about an hour of this, we’d have to give up and go home. Neither of us could stand the sight of Ringo, his mouth and cheeks all torn up, coming back to bite our icky worms for the umpteenth time.

Mom was like Ringo.