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the
headboard.
    Lying about it
was easy. The truth was becoming a little too scary to
explain.
    There was
something lurking about our new house.
     
     
     

Chapter Five:
Daddy’s Home
     
    About three and
a half months after he left, in mid-December, my father came back
home from Central America. The climate within the house was
immediately different than it had been all the weeks before. The
affect was the most noticeable on my mom, whose demeanor changed
dramatically. She no longer walked about light-footed with a smile,
her eyes alight with the next project in mind. She became
withdrawn, sullen and spoke in muffled tones like there was a
blanket pulled over her head.
    We kids just
stayed out of his way, which wasn’t all that hard to do, because he
immediately delved into his old routine – leaving before seven in
the morning and coming home after ten. He seemed more tired than
normal as if he’d actually exerted himself over the course of his
day, which was absurd. He detested anything overly physical, so his
fatigue seemed unusual. I mean, he was a pencil-pusher, what was
physical about that? Still, I couldn’t help but notice the slowing
of his gait, the dark smudges under his eyes and the increased
slackness of his face.
    Of course with
the exhaustion came an additional layer of surliness, if not
downright bitchy-ness, keeping the rest of us at bay. Thus, our
interactions were kept to a minimum. We all knew he could explode
over the tiniest misstep and, like always, he proved true to
form.
    It was toward
the end of the first week when I overheard my mother ask him what
seemed to me to be an innocent question.
    “ Who’s
Roxanna?”
    “ What?” he had
replied with a question.
    “ Roxanna, she’s
been calling all week. Is she a new colleague of yours?”
    I waited,
feeling a wince about to form at the edge of one my eyes. This
could be good, or this could be bad.
    “ She’s none of
your god damned business. Do you hear me, Pillar?”
    It was bad.
Whenever he called my mother by her first name, it wasn’t
good.
    I breathed a
weary sigh, not wanting to hear yelling in our new house. It seemed
like a deflowering of sorts. I wanted no part. So, I got up, turned
off the TV in the living room and went to my room.
    I had just
enough time to close the door to my bedroom when I heard him start
to yell at my mom. I hated the sound of his voice when he spoke to
her in that manner (if you want to call it “speaking”. Speaking was
a form of communication. What he did to my mother was dominating,
something entirely different).
    I could already
sense why he was angry in the first place. It was something he did
when he felt cornered, backed-up against a wall of his own
manufacture. Roxanna was most likely his latest “fuck” in a long
line of “fucks” he’d had over the duration of his marriage. How he
managed to do so well with the ladies was anybody’s guess. He
wasn’t, at least from my perspective, a particularly good looking
man.
    Already, I was
taller than him by a few inches and I was no more than five foot
nine. His body tended toward lassitude, and this wasn’t due to his
age. Like I’ve said numerous times, he was physically lazy, shunned
anything cardial. And, because of this, his physique had suffered.
His hairline had been receding for years, even at thirty-nine. The
remaining hair was almost all white. Premature, yes, but white
nonetheless. He had light-brown, beady eyes that could burn with
fury within seconds. His nose ended in a bulbous knot and his lips
were much too wide for his narrow face. This was accentuated by
their color – somewhere between a deep pink and a washed-out red
that made them all the more noticeable, out of place. His chin was
squared and cleft deeply. So much so, my sister had often commented
it looked like he had a pair of butt cheeks on the lowest portion
of his face.
    “ Dad’s such an ass, because he has one on his face.
Hahahahaaa!” she’d been found of
saying