I stared at her through my tears. She hit me again, but I broke free and ran to the other room where the other couches were. I crawled under the coffee table and listened to them fight.
“If you would have spent time with him during the most crucial developmental stages of his life, maybe he wouldn’t be this way!” Dad yelled.
“I was home with him! While all my friends went shopping or out for drinks, I was home with him!”
“It’s called being a responsible parent, Miranda! You didn’t sit with him. You didn’t talk to him. You didn’t read to him. You did nothing but pour your shitty genes into him.”
“And what the fuck did you do?”
“I fucking worked to build my medical practice so you had a huge home to impress your Beverly Hills friends! You had one job! You couldn’t even handle sitting and reading to him or coloring with him. How many times did I come home to find you passed out on the floor, drunk or high?”
“You know what, William? I’m leaving. Fuck this shit!”
“You’re not leaving me with the mess you created.”
“Wecreated! You and I created him! If I had known we’d have a kid who wouldn’t even talk, I’d have aborted it.”
“Like I said, Miranda, those are all your genes at work.”
“Fuck you, William Dawson!”
“Miranda!” Dad yelled at the top of his lungs. “If you walk out that door, you’ll never walk back into our lives.”
Was she really leaving?
I crawled out from under the coffee table and hid against the wall on the other side of the entryway.
“Don’t worry. You’re an asshole, and he’s a throwaway. I’d be stupid to come back to this.”
“Miranda!”
The door slammed so hard that the picture fell off the wall. Dad threw the glass thing that had the flowers in it against the wall. I could hear the glass going everywhere in the entryway. I waited a few minutes before I walked around the corner. Glass, water, flowers, and green stems were all over the floor.
Dad sat on the stairs and looked at the mess. He didn’t see me yet. He’d say something if he had. I knelt on the floor and waited. Dad sat on the stairs for a long time and then he stood and started toward the living room and kitchen when he saw me.
“Patrick, get in the living room and clean up that mess you made. Then stay out of my sight.”
Six years old/1st Grade/ November
Isighed and turned my head in the direction my WWF lunchbox had just tumbled to. Two pairs of brand-new Nikes stopped next to me. My stomach still hurt and hadn’t gotten any better since last night. I ignored the boys in the Nikes and sat against the fence to continue looking through the patch of clover leaves beside me. Maybe if I could find a four-leaf clover, things would change and Dad wouldn’t marry Raquel. I hated Raquel’s son, Sebastian.
“Hey, Patty!”
My name is Patrick.
I looked up at the kid who was making my life terrible.
“Looks like your lunchbox took off on you,” Sebastian said.
I looked at it lying a short distance away.Too bad he wasn’t a very good kicker. Being a fourth grader, he should have been able to kick something farther than that.
“Man, that sucks. Even your lunchbox hates you,” the other kid said.
“Everyone hates him. No one lets him play with them, and he doesn’t have any friends. My mom said he should go to a special school because he’s dumb. He can’t even talk,” Sebastian told the other kid.
When the bell rang for the fourth and fifth graders, I breathed a sigh of relief. He’d go in soon.
“Hey, I’ll race you to your lunchbox, Patty. If I get to it first, I’m going to throw it over the fence,” Sebastian threatened.
