It was a November Sunday afternoon. Which meant no game, no practice, no escape from the hell I lived next door.
Dad was out fishing with friends. Mom was where she spent most of her free time when my father wasn’t around: alone in her bedroom. I’d spotted Mr. Walton in his backyard deadheading flowers and volunteered to help.
“How are the chess lessons going?” Karen Walton asked, sweeping into the room with two bags of groceries.
“Great,” Mr. Walton insisted.
“Terrible,” I said.
We both rose from the table and each relieved her of a bag. While Mr. Walton laid a loud kiss on his wife, I busied myself with delivering the bag to the huge central island. There were small messes and chaos here. A haphazard stack of cookbooks, a flour spill next to the porcelain container that no one had gotten around to cleaning up. The bowl of apples sat half on and half off a magazine open to an article about sending kids to college.
Messes weren’t tolerated in my house. Anything that might be a trigger had to be avoided at all costs.
“There’s more in the car,” Mrs. Walton announced, giving Mr. Walton an embarrassing pat on the ass. Affection was something else that didn’t exist at my place.
“We’ll get them,” Mr. Walton insisted. “Treat yourself to a cup of coffee while my protégé and I unload.”
“What would I do without you two? And I think I’ll have wine instead,” Mrs. Walton said, giving me an affectionate pat on the arm as she headed toward the large built-in china cabinet that housed a menagerie of mismatched bar glasses.
I didn’t quite manage to hide the wince when her fingers accidentally came in contact with my latest bruise. The Waltons drank. There was wine at the dinner table, and I saw Mr. and Mrs. Walton sometimes enjoying cocktails on the front porch. But I never saw either of them drunk.
That was the difference between Mr. Walton and my father. Self-control.
Maybe that was what he was trying to teach me on the chessboard.
“Football injury?” Mr. Walton asked, looking at my arm.
“Yeah,” I said, tugging the sleeve of my shirt down to cover the bruise. The lie stuck in my throat.
Mrs. Walton crooked her finger at me and pointed up. I hid my smile. I liked being needed even if it was just for my height. I found her favorite long-stemmed wineglass with flowers etched on it on the top shelf and handed it to her. She wiggled it in her husband’s direction, asking a silent question. Mr. Walton gave her a geeky thumbs-up, and I pulled a second glass off the shelf.
“Lucian, I don’t like you playing that game,” she lectured, taking the second glass and heading to the counter. She put the glasses down, rummaged through one of the bags, and produced a bottle of wine. “There are too many ways to get hurt. And yes, young bodies heal faster, but you don’t know what that kind of damage can add up to later in life.”
“The boy is starting quarterback in his senior year, love,” Mr. Walton pointed out. “He’s not quitting the team and taking up knitting.”
“Nobody said knitting,” she said. “What about softball? Sloane hardly ever gets hurt. Where is our daughter, by the way?”
I’d been wondering the same thing for the last two hours but had refused to ask.
“On a date with the Bluth boy,” Mr. Walton said with an exaggerated eyebrow wiggle.
I stiffened. This was news to me. We’d talked about it. Not at school because we never talked at school. It was some unspoken rule between the two of us. She probably thought I was an asshole. The popular quarterback who thought he was too good to be seen talking to the sophomore bookworm.
“I forget. Do we like him or not?” Mrs. Walton asked, inserting the corkscrew.
Jonah Bluth was a punk-ass junior defensive tackle who’d made the mistake of running his mouth in the locker room about Sloane Walton’s tits that he was going to get his hands on. I’d waited until we’d gotten out on the practice field before I hit him hard enough to knock some sense into him. Unfortunately for him, that sense didn’t tell him to stay down, and Nash had been the one to pry us apart.
I’d told Sloane in no uncertain terms to dump Jonah’s ass. She’d demanded to know why. For some reason, she felt like she had the right to know everything about everything. It was infuriating and endearing at the same time.
I told her he was an asshole and that she deserved better. Both truths.
She said she’d think about it, which apparently meant she was going to do what she damn well pleased no matter what.
“I think we’re withholding judgment to see if our daughter likes him,” Mr. Walton said. Then he beckoned to me. “Come on, Lucian. I’ll tell you about the Scandinavian defense while we cart in the groceries.”
“I’m making your second favorite for dinner tonight, Lucian. Frozen ravioli with store-bought sauce,” Mrs. Walton called after us.
I didn’t recognize the warm feeling in my chest, but I liked it.
The metallic tang of blood filled my mouth. My arms and shoulders sang from the half dozen bruises I’d have to hide. My jaw ached from his fist. And for once, the knuckles of my right hand were bruised and split.
The blow had surprised us both.
Worse.
He was getting worse.
And so was I.
“Your father didn’t mean it,” Mom said in her whisper of a voice. She always whispered. “He’s got a lot on his mind.”
We were sitting side by side on the worn linoleum of the kitchen floor in the middle of the mess like we were two pieces of trash waiting to be scooped up and disposed of.
“That’s no fucking excuse, Mom. Mr. Walton next door—”
She flinched. That was what had started it this time when Dad came home stinking of booze.
It was always something. Dinner was cold. I’d parked my fourth-hand car wrong. A tone of voice wasn’t respectful enough. Tonight, it had been the chess book Simon Walton had given me.
“You think you’re better than me?” Dad had growled. “You think that fucking pussy next door is better than me? You think you can read a fucking book and forget where you came from?”
There were nights that I prayed to a deity I didn’t fully believe in, begging the divine to have him arrested for drunk driving or something worse.
It was the only way we were going to survive.
Though part of me worried that it was already too late. I was filled with the kind of anger that festered deep down, that never found a release, that changed who you were as a person.
As hard as I tried, I couldn’t seem to unfist my hands.
He had done this to me.
It wasn’t so much the pain. At least not anymore. It was the humiliation. His demands that Mom and I both cater to his every whim. His belief that he was the center of our universe. That our needs were secondary to his own.
I was big enough, strong enough that I could fight him if I had to. He realized that now. He realized it and hated me even more for holding back from doing just that.
I didn’t want to be him, and he knew it. So he was going to do his best to break me. And if I wasn’t there, he continued to break my mother.
Broken men broke women.
That refrain echoed in my head as I got to my feet, helped my mother to hers, and then slipped out into the backyard.
The autumn chill cooled my skin. Dead leaves crunched softly under my feet.
I wanted to run. To leave this place far behind and never look back. But without me, it would only be a matter of time before he killed her. Before he pushed her too hard or lost control and couldn’t stop swinging.
I was the only thing keeping her alive.
I didn’t know why the three of us continued to pretend that college was an option. That I’d actually take the football scholarship I’d worked so fucking hard for. We all knew what would happen if I left. Yet we never spoke about it. We never talked about the dirty secret we shared.
I spit out the blood and bitterness into the dark and started to work out the pain in my right shoulder with arm circles. He always knew just where to hurt me. Just enough to remind me he could but not enough for anyone else to take notice.