The Liars' Club

by Mary Karr

“I shit you not,” Daddy said as he tore off a hunk of biscuit. “You touch a dead man sometime.” He took a swallow of buttermilk. “Hard as that table. Got no more to do with being alive than that table does.” That description didn’t scare me so much as the news footage of some daddy folding in on himself once he’d recognized a kid’s face. The mothers cried too, of course, and bitterly. But they seemed better equipped for it. They held each other while they cried, or fell to their knees, or screamed up at the sky. But you could tell by the moans and bellows those grown men let out that their grief had absolutely nowhere to go. I watched from the middle of my parents’ bed, a steaming plate of beans and biscuits balanced on my patch of covers, while one grown man after another buckled in the middle like everything inside him was going soft all at once, and I knew that the dead child’s face would stay on each daddy’s eyeballs forever.