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Show to see more trees, frustrated with tools, and tires, and Winnies that failed to work, properly, sick of children who never listened, complained of long drives, and seemed to only want a hot shower and McDonald's, and tired with all the pushing, pulling, earning, driving, scaling, humping, pleading, winning, falling, failing, he snapped. My brothers and I scattered, all in opposite directions. Whatever it was that for six weeks had been allowing us to keep coming back, to return to the breakfast table in the morning after hearing how much time we had lost, to laugh an hour after my father raged about the cost of ice cream cones in New York, to reassemble as a family even when all the forces in the world seemed to be breaking us apart, whatever it was that allowed me to once write in the journal I kept that summer "I ended up in tears but it was good," was broken. I ran to a rock in the middle of a stream where I sat watching the moon rise behind a dark green curtain of trees. Along the instep of my foot, I still felt the mirror cracking. At some point my dad found me. His face matched the sound of the crickets, worn and grated smooth, the force of will replaced by surrender. / want to go home, he said. The second year, he spent more time pondering the possibility of Flag. Ace had committed professional suicide recently, choosing an unpopular and ultimately untenable position on ship travel through the Persian Gulf. As his lawyer, my father had found it necessary to justify legally an extremist point of view, leaving him vulnerable to a kind of national criticism he had never encountered before. Additionally, his friend and advocate, Jack Grunawalt, the man who could not keep his penis contained, had been found running 209 |