“Still, Eddie envied the way his brother looked in the evenings, so tanned and clean. Eddie’s fingernails, like his father’s, were stained with grease, and at the dinner table Eddie would flick them with his thumbnail, trying to get the dirt out. He caught his father watching him once and the old man grinned. “Shows you did a hard day’s work,” he said, and he held up his own dirty fingernails, before wrapping them around a glass of beer. By this point—already a strapping teenager—Eddie only nodded back. Unbeknownst to him, he had begun the ritual of semaphore with his father, forsaking words or physical affection. It was all to be done internally. You were just supposed to know it, that’s all. Denial of affection. The damage done.”
―
Mitch Albom,
The Five People You Meet in Heaven
