It Was Me All Along: A Memoir Read Online Free PDF Page A

kind of smile I didn’t return. If smiles were as varied as the flavors of cupcakes, I’d found one I didn’t like.
    When he saw that the kitchen was filled with pots, pans, and dishes, Dad offered to help.
    She took the porcelain gravy boat from his hands. “I’ve got it, Rob.” I could tell she was using her polite voice. Ignoring her urges for him to go to bed and that she’d handle it, Dad moved around the kitchen picking up plates, shuffling them from one counter to the next, from the table to a chair, from the sink to the stove. Iwatched, puzzled, as he moved the dishes in no order closer to and farther from the sink. For a few minutes, Mom pressed her lips together to prevent impatience from spilling out of her mouth. I wondered if Mom would yell at him the way she yelled at me that time I spread Elmer’s glue and flour on my bedside table playing bakery. “Rob …, please, honey.” She reached for the stack of china that balanced on his forearms before he could take it to the living room.
    “I’ll clean up,” he said and tried to move backward, angry at her interference.
    Before she could take the plates fully into her own arms, he pulled his arms clean out from under them and the stack shattered beneath them on the tile. It felt as if minutes had passed before all the crashing and clanking stopped. Dad began yelling. “See what you did, Mere?!” When she began yelling back, I could see that her eyes were filling with tears. Instantly, mine filled, too. Those plates had been her favorite.
    Dad’s hollering sounded more like rumbling, like the earthquake that split the earth in
The Land Before Time
, when Little-foot’s mother died. His face puffed and reddened. Soon he was standing with his face so close to Mom’s, I wasn’t sure if his yelling would turn into a kiss, but she pushed him backward, and he stumbled toward the stove. “This is fucking bullshit!” he shouted. He tilted sideways to reach for his thick green glass ashtray on the kitchen table, and, before I knew what he needed it for, he cocked his arm back and swung it full force at the wall just to the left of where Mom stood. Mom shrieked, and that shrill sound, coupled with the smash of glass pummeling through plaster, made me yelp. I looked at the floor to find translucent shards of green glass allaround Mom’s feet. I noticed how closely they resembled the green apple Blow Pop I’d dropped on the sidewalk last weekend.
    “Jesus, Rob!” Mom screamed, grabbing me and tucking my head into her chest. She held me as tightly as Anthony did when we wrestled. I felt the tears that raced down her cheeks splash onto my forehead, the tip-tops of my ears. Soon her tears were coming so fast, they slipped from her chin straight onto my eyelashes and halfway down my cheeks as if they were my own.
    I stared as Dad stumbled backward and onto a chair at the kitchen table. Something had changed in him. The tiny red branches that sprouted in his eyes, the beads of sweat that poured from his temples—they frightened me. He no longer looked like my dad. He no longer looked like anyone’s dad. Seeing him then was like staring at the old mahogany piano we had in our living room. When Mom brought it home from the antiques shop, I’d thought it was perfect, a unique treasure that was ours alone. But now that I’d been looking at it long enough, I could see its flaws: the grooves that ran like fault lines across the surface, how wobbly the whole thing was when it wasn’t supported by the wall it leaned against, the nicks, the dings, the ways it had been damaged in a previous life and in ours.
    By the following afternoon, all had returned to normal. Everyone went about living as if it were a typical morning, with no mention of the night before. Mom cleaned and swept the broken bits of ashtray into the trash; Anthony went to a friend’s house to play flag football; Dad resumed his somber daytime routine. It seemed the only one who wasn’t the same