The Birth of Bane Read Online Free PDF

don’t know. I just think seeing
her contented when I was as little as a toddler would’ve been
sublime.
    Sometimes, I
grow weary of those early remembrances. I’ve come to dislike
witnessing the apprehension, the disquiet upon her face, the
widening of her eyes, because of the fear behind them. Why did my
father have to be so full of hate? Why did he have to vet his
frustration upon the rest of us? All any of us wanted was to be
loved. We would’ve given anything for that. Our love in return
would’ve been a foregone conclusion.
    Often, when I
was younger, I’d look up at the ceiling of my bedroom, especially
after a particularly good day, and ask God why it couldn’t always
be this way. Why did my Dad have to come back? Why
couldn’t he stay abroad and just mail home the money we needed to
survive? Why return to a family he didn’t care for, a wife he could
never appreciate? To me, as a child, it was simple. Why couldn’t
life be simple?
    So, he’d gone to
see the house at 1052 Lincoln Drive and was immediately pissed off
at my mom for roping him into such a horrific ordeal. He had ranted
and raved over every single detail that was wrong with the place,
refusing to see any of the potential my mother could so easily
imagine. After one such visit, he refused to speak to any of us for
five days, including Eli, who was only first grader. It didn’t make
any sense to me. I couldn’t fathom how it was mine or Val’s or
Elijah’s fault we were moving into a big house requiring a great
deal of maintenance. What the hell had we done? Shit, Valerie
despised the place almost as much as he had. How was punishing us
with his silence fair?
    But, that was
him. Good ole’ Leonard G. Favor, forever misappropriate,
unfailingly inconsistent. I think that shit was written in stone
somewhere. It had to be. It was his precise rule-of-thumb, as
though he’d read it on some ancient cave drawing in the middle of
the Pyrenees and took it for the Word of God.
    It had come down
to money, in the end. As I said before, it was the only thing
he understood through and through. He had pulled us all into his
study, six weeks before we were due to move, made us all sit down
as he figured out what the cost of renovating the house. This had
been an agonizing ordeal, because when it came to dollars and
cents, Leonard never missed a single penny.
    He had grown up
dirt poor, slightly malnourished and verbally abused by his
mother’s many boyfriends. (I don’t call her my grandmother, because
I never knew the woman. She died many years before I was born.) I
think because he was often berated and downtrodden as a kid, he was
obsessed with making something of himself in order to claw his way
out of the barrio . Unfortunately for
him, he wasn’t particularly adept at learning and having the lesson
stick. Though he tried hard, his lack of ability, and his temper,
always got in the way.
    He’d never admit
it, but it was my mother who corrected his papers. It was my mother
who stood up late with him combing through his curriculum, again
and again, until he’d retained enough to pass his mid-terms or his
final exams. While she stayed home and took care of us, he got his
degrees, he got his certifications and now, all the hard work was
paying off. Only it was paying off for him and only him. The rest
of us were suddenly beneath him, because, by God, he had a
degree!
    It used to be a
big deal to me until I realized just about everyone and their
grandmother had a degree of some sort, so the super-smart man I
envisioned turned out to be no more than a windbag, jam-packed with
bullshit.
    By the time we
were looking to move and he was detailing the cost down to the very
last cent, he was an Onsite Corporate Controller for one of the big
Hollywood studios. In a nutshell, it meant he was the guy, during
the production of any given film, who wrote the checks and made
sure all of the day-to-day expenses were paid. That was why he was
so often away on