Stories I Only Tell My Friends: An Autobiography Read Online Free

grandparents’ (without my dad), and it became normal that my dad’s presence in the house was minimal. One day when I was four years old, my mom told me I would be having a brother. Looking back, I might have assumed as much, as the third bedroom had been redone in a Dumbo, the flying elephant, motif. “I’m going to name him Chad,” she said. I remember thinking that the name “Chad” reminded me of the word “ChapStick.” I didn’t get it and I asked her to reconsider the name. Invoking her parental prerogative of not having to explain herself to her four-year-old son, she told me that the matter was closed.
    My brother was born on January 15, 1968. I have no memory of Chad’s birth, although I know my dad fainted dead away when he was told about it in the waiting room. Apparently, not letting him hold his newborn had some wisdom to it after all.
    Baby Chad came home, my father did not. At least that is my assumption, as he is absent from my memories of this time. But these recollections are fuzzy and likely distorted. I believe it’s not because I was so young as much as it is because the house was so filled with unhappiness; my mother’s, my father’s, and as a result, my own. I had already begun to tune out reality, to retreat to a private world and block out any pain. From this period of my life I have only two distinct memories—both events are unique; impossible to experience more than once in a lifetime: a stopping of time after which nothing will ever be as it was. One is my mother waking me up for the moon landing. The other memory has played out in my mind again and again over the course of my lifetime. I knew the moment it happened that all I had known was over; it has taken forty-three years to begin to understand the ripples that have emanated from that day. The shattering, dull wounding, the mistaken lessons, and also, the circuitous road that opened up that day, leading me to eventual happiness and fulfillment that would have been impossible to achieve otherwise.
    Again, it is just my mom and I. I’m five years old. Chad is not there, and I am waiting for my mother to finish her errand at the lumber store. It’s a big place, brightly lit, with giant stacks of two-by-fours and other cuts of wood, all in rows, one after the other. I’m sitting on one of these big stacks, watching my mother at the cashier. I’m sipping chocolate milk through a straw. It’s summer and even though I am wearing shorts, it’s hot and humid in the giant store, and I’m restless. I’m also thinking that there has been something bothering me, I’ve been sad and uncomfortable, anxious now, for a while. When feelings well up I push them down, lose myself in make-believe, play, cartoons, toys. I can’t name this thing that is bothering me; I’m not old enough to know that I should even try. And today, in the sticky Dayton summer it’s upon me again, this unease, this feeling of something bad about to happen. Usually chocolate milk from Mom can make it go away. Today it won’t.
    I’m watching my mom walking toward me. Later in life her hair will turn brown, but now she is still blonde, with a perfectly shaped nose and clear blue eyes. She seems tiny in this giant store, alone. Inside me something clicks. I see our life together very clearly, in all its reality for how it is and is not what I want it to be. Everything falls away, all other thoughts, all other feelings. Just a question forming now, for the first time, triggered by my mom walking toward me in a lumber store. She looks at me and smiles. I blurt out, “Is Dad ever coming home?”
    My mom pauses for just a moment, then answers. “No, he isn’t. We’re getting a divorce.”
    I have spent my career on high alert to clichés, excising them from scripts and speeches whenever I could. I’m deeply suspicious and rarely entertained by conventionally accepted turning points in a plot, of events that are meant to seem earth-shatteringly dramatic when in