When you learn things late, you put everything you ever knew through a completely different meat grinder and you end up with totally different meat. The sliver of tissue was a test. This is what abuse looks like. It looks like weeks of waiting for your wife to say Why can’t you vacuum up that sliver of tissue? so you can tell her she’s a bitch. It’s a trap. Everything Dad does is a trap. Every shrug, every night he sat and watched TV when there were dishes in the sink—everything was a trap. And Mom knows because after twenty-six years, how could she not know?
