I am nine, in the fourth grade. It is the age when children have become aware of the world outside their doors, have begun to understand it, or at least believe they do. My mother is a visible part of our small community, somebody different, talked about at dinner tables. She’s far younger and much more beautiful than my classmate’s mothers, and for that I am ridiculed. It never occurs to them that it’s their fathers on the receiving end of the beers my mother serves, their fathers’ lustful looks that fuel discussion. That it’s my mother’s being off limits that incites the very jealousy that often turns to bitterness. I fight often. I lose more than I win. I’m small for my age, but I’m quick. Little do I know I’m toughening myself for the trials that lie ahead.

I enter the bar. It’s Thursday and my father’s already here. He’s been out of work for two months and we’re solely supported by my mother’s tips. The fact that he’s out of work should negate my being dropped off at the bar, but it doesn’t. With him not working, and in turn drinking more without the misery of early-morning rousings, he’s much nicer and far less volatile, so my mother lets it slide.

I walk past him and head around the bar and hug my mother. My bottom lip is cut, beginning to swell.

“What happened to you?” she asks.

“I got into a fight.”

“With who?”

“Donny Smith.”

“Why?”

I shrug. There’s no point in transferring the hurt that I felt onto her. Even at my young age I know that much. The truth is that he called her a whore and said that she’d let everyone in town slip it to her if it weren’t for my father always hanging around. It’s obvious these beliefs were recycled from something his own father had said, a father who comes in most days and drinks past the time he’s due at the dinner table.

“Jesus, Stratton,” she says with a sigh. “Go sit and I’ll get you an icepack.”

I slide onto the stool beside my father. The crooked grin on his face, the slack wrinkles across his forehead, tell me he’s been here awhile.

“Hey buddy!” he says, wearing an expression of puzzled stupidity as if I’d just materialized from out of thin air. His eyes swim above two rosy cheeks. Sitting in front of him is a half-drunk beer and an empty shot glass. “What’s up, man?”

“Nothing.”

My mother brings over a washcloth with a rubber band wrapped around several ice cubes and presses it against my lip and tells me to hold it there.

“Stratton got into a fight today,” she says.

“A fight?” my father asks.

I nod.

“So what’s the other guy look like?”