Total pages in book: 123
Estimated words: 115833 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 579(@200wpm)___ 463(@250wpm)___ 386(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 115833 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 579(@200wpm)___ 463(@250wpm)___ 386(@300wpm)
“My dad,” I sighed.
“Yes. I’m sorry, I just keep wondering what happened, then I think about your brother, and I’m just trying to connect the dots.”
“Yeah. I did promise to tell you.” I took a sip of sweet tea. “To put it simply, he’s an alcoholic. Well—according to my sisters and my mama, he was one. He’s sober now.” I scoffed at the thought, taking another bite of lasagna. “Anyway, uh, he used to drink a lot in the afternoons. Every day he’d have a six- or twelve-pack of beer. Sometimes he’d go to the liquor cabinet. Didn’t matter what kind of alcohol it was, so long as he was drunk.”
Davina nodded, with sympathetic eyes.
“Whenever he drank, he became hostile and violent. He didn’t get heavily into drinking until I was around eleven, but before that, he was all right. He’s the one who got me and my brother into basketball. He showed us the fundamentals, taught us how to be respectful. He even taught us how to ride our bikes. To see him go from a stand-up dad to a raging alcoholic was shocking to me. My mom says it was because he was injured on the job and they let him go. He worked in construction, broke his arm somehow, and when they said it was his fault for not following protocol, they fired him.
“She said he was broke, injured, and angry, and that’s why he resorted to drinking. He was struggling to find another job that could pay him enough to provide for four kids, so my mom would do double shifts at the hospital. She was a triage nurse—still is to this day. I can only assume he wasn’t pleased that she was bringing in all the money and that he couldn’t find a job, so he started drinking.” I paused, swallowing thickly.
“It started slow, you know? Like a snowball effect. It started with him shouting at us, telling us to pick up our stuff or to clean something, and he only ever directed it to me and Damon. But we listened, because, you know, he was our dad, and back then, he was still a good man to us. But eventually the yelling shifted to grabbing and shaking. Then he’d slap us or push us, tell us to buck up and stop acting like girls. And then it progressed to punches and beatings.
“He never did it to our sisters, though. Camille was already on her way to college, and Whitney was hardly ever home. Damon got the worst of it, though. If Damon lost a game, there my dad was throwing shit at him and punching him. Shouting at him about how sorry he was. If I lost, he did the same to me. Sometimes he took out a belt and hit us. Sometimes he grabbed us by the backs of our necks and would drag us all the way outside, force us to grab a basketball, and run drills until we were bone tired. And during all this, my mom would try and stop him, but whenever she did, he’d hit her too.”
I sucked in a breath, realizing Davina’s hand was on top of mine. I met her eyes, and they were glossy, her mouth trembling. “Deke,” she whispered. “I’m so sorry.”
“Yeah, but that’s not the worst of it. The thing is, back then, Damon was the weakest of us mentally. He constantly doubted himself, constantly worried, but if there was one thing he was confident in, it was protecting us. There was one night when our dad was beating on him so bad for something I did. I can’t even remember what it was about, that’s how stupid and minuscule it was. Damon took the fall for me, and our dad beat him until his eye was swollen and his bottom lip was busted.” I clenched my other fist.
“Deke, you don’t have to keep going,” Davina whispered. “You can stop if this is triggering you.”
“No.” I swallowed again and stared down at my plate. “Because this shit haunts me, Davina. I feel like it’s my fault Damon killed himself. After my dad beat him like that, my mom was hysterical. She said she was calling the police, and there was a big argument between them. She kicked our dad out that night, and I used to share a room with Damon, so I saw all the mess in there, the broken chair, blood on the floor. When he got back from the hospital, he was crying harder than I’d ever seen him cry before. He was moaning—I can still remember the sound of it.” I squeezed my eyes shut. “It’s been embedded in my brain—it wakes me out of my sleep sometimes, D. Damon kept saying he hated his life that night, that he was tired, that everything hurt. Me and Whitney tried comforting him, and he did eventually fall asleep.