him come home in the middle of the night.
When morning came, the children would wake and stumble into the
kitchen for breakfast, their father sitting at the table in his underwear and a
tank top, their mother at the stove, cooking. The girls would squeal in delight
and run to their father, throwing their tiny bodies into his lap. He lavished
them with kisses, promising he would never leave again. Seeing his father, his
heart would skip several beats and his throat would fall into his stomach. On
the table he’d notice a bouquet of half-dead roses and a box of chocolates. It
was this pattern that taught him apologies, flowers, and candy could get any
man back into the good graces of his woman. And it was this technique he
employed after the fourth month of living in his office.
Every day he waited. He waited and watched the clock, willing
the hands to move faster, for time to speed up so he could rush home.
At the end of the workday, coworkers made small talk with him about
the evening’s activities; theirs were typically filled with children’s baseball
or soccer games, school plays, and countless other “normal” activities.
When they asked him about his, he would smile and lie, saying he was
going to watch his daughter’s softball tournament or take his beautiful
wife out to a nice dinner. Truth was he waited for the end-of-day retreat
bugle to sound so he could punch the clock and get to his car. He had
a few Milwaukee’s Best hidden in a cooler on ice in the backseat and
he would finish these within the hour, before he even pulled into his
driveway.
At home he would find an unsatisfied wife and three teenagers
who hated him. They stopped complaining about his drinking after he
moved back home, finally resigning themselves to his behavior. Now
instead of complaining and begging him to stop, they simply ignored him
or talked about him as though he di F