“Fuck!” he yelled as my hands squeezed him hard enough that my own knuckles felt numb.
The smolder inside me erupted into a blast, and my father was flying backward as a loud, deep sound came from my chest. I heard my mother’s voice and she was crying, but I couldn’t focus on that. The man I’d just tossed onto his back was getting up, and I had to stop him.
He sat up and was scrambling to stand. I saw his hatred and anger with a healthy dose of fear in his eyes before my fist slammed into his face, sending him back again. This time his head bounced off the hardwood floor several times before he went still. Unmoving.
The roar in my ears had been deafening, but now it slowly faded as my mother’s crying registered. She rushed past me and dropped to her knees beside his unresponsive body. Her hand went to his neck. She was checking for a pulse. She feared I’d killed him. I’d just hit him. He wasn’t dead. I hadn’t meant to knock him unconscious… had I?
She had to know I was defending her and not trying to kill my father. I ran my hand over my head and stood there staring at him, thinking he’d move any second. He had to move. As much as he deserved all the pain he’d caused turned back on him, he didn’t need to die. At least not at my hand. Jesus, he was my father.
“Get away from him. He’ll hurt you when he comes to,” I warned her, making my way toward her.
She held up a hand at me. “NO! Stay back. Don’t come near him. You’ve done enough,” she yelled at me as if I were the monster. Me. Her son. I’d just stopped the real monster. The man who had beaten her all of her married life, and she was acting like I was the one in the wrong? What was wrong with her? Why was she like this?
“Momma,” I began as my anger began to transform into pain.
Tears streaked her face. “I raised you better. I taught you to be a good man. This is not the boy I raised. I didn’t want you to be like him. I wanted you to be good. I raised you better. Go, just go,” she said as she affectionately placed a hand on my father’s head to brush his hair back out of his face.
She was blaming me. She was acting like I’d become my father when all I had been trying to do was stop the bullshit we’d both lived with too long. I’d done this for her… and I’d done it for me. I wanted the freedom to leave. If she was determined to stay with him, then I needed him to fear me. It was the only thing I could think of to protect her from him.
“How can you defend him?” I asked almost in a whisper. My voice was failing me. My chest felt like it had taken a hard blow.
“He is your father.” She said those four words like it made all of the hell we’d endured from him okay. The life he’d given me, given both of us, was nothing to be thankful for. He’d been my childhood nightmare. I owed that man nothing.
“No, he’s never been a father,” I replied.
She lifted her eyes to look at me, and they were full of unshed tears. “He’s not always… cruel. He has been good, too. He loves you.”
I shook my head. “No, Momma. That man loves no one. Except himself. It’s time you accept that. How can I leave you here alone with him in the fall?”
She frowned at me as if I should know the answer to my question. “I love him.”
Those words hurt me as much as they confused the hell out of me. How could she love him? How did a woman love a man who had not only beaten her but had hit her kid? I couldn’t stand here and talk to her about it. I was tired of trying to get her to see the truth.
I had no more words. I turned from the scene in front of me and walked toward the door. I needed space from this. I’d spent my life worrying over my mother. I used to go to sleep at night praying that my father would be good. That he’d stop hurting us. That he would be nice to my mother. Then those prayers had become that he wouldn’t come home. That he’d just go away.
Those prayers were never answered.
I knew now they never would be.
I Wasn’t Expecting an Audience CHAPTER 4
EZMITA
“Sit down, Manuel, and eat your pozole,” I ordered him, more annoyed with my mother than my little brother.
I had tried twice this afternoon to talk about college, and she acted as if I’d said nothing at all. Both times she had sent me to take care of my younger siblings. If I didn’t do something drastic, I was going to be stuck in this small town the rest of my life, working behind the counter of the store. Giving people coffee and cinnamon rolls. The idea made me cringe.