Back then, just before he’d run off, the main thing that had struck the two kids as strange about their father’s behavior was not so much when he set the raw brown egg down on the breakfast counter between their bowls of fruit salad and smashed it with his fist so that it sprayed all over the telephone and their paper bag lunches, but more the way he convulsed into maniacal laughter as he went about cleaning the whole mess up. It was a frightening seizure that gathered such rapid momentum they could see deep in their father’s eyes the terrible self-doubt that he might not return from it; that he might very easily get swept down into such twisted currents of totally conflicting emotions he would not only not recognize those closest and dearest to him but, more importantly, he would no longer recognize himself. This was an instinctive, unspoken revelation in both children and marked the very beginnings of their sense of what it might mean to be totally on their own. Over the years, they had grown used to their father’s screwy bursts of exuberance where he’d, quite suddenly, seem to succumb to some adolescent whim like deliberately swerving into a closed-off construction lane on the highway in order to knock over all the little plastic orange witch hats, shrieking with glee and pounding the steering wheel until his knuckles bled. Or the time he jumped out of the green canoe into the James River when they were very little and thrashed around, pretending to drown. There was always some sense of controlled vaudeville about these acts and, in fact, even at an early age, the kids had the impression that their father was actually performing for them; showing off. They had no idea why. For the most part, they found him quite funny and entertaining. It wasn’t until their teenage years that they began to notice a distinct difference in his digressions. The difference was marked by the degree to which he was able to distance himself from his antics. More and more it seemed that he would take the plunge and get swallowed up, lost in some inner reaction always belied by his eyes. They could see the eyes turning to terror. That was never a factor in their younger days. No matter how wild their father’s choices might have been, he always seemed to be enjoying himself. Now there was a definite turning point. The laughter shifted into a cackle; a kind of staccato rampage that was no longer connected to anything funny. Smashing the egg wasn’t all that funny to begin with; shocking maybe but not funny. Not funny like a comedy anyway, and it was even interfering with their homework and their incoming phone calls. They left the kitchen with their books and papers and took the telephone with them. Their father was down on his hands and knees at this point with wet paper towels and the water running in the sink and the laughter still attacking him in rolling spurts. The kids went upstairs and shut themselves up in their rooms; turned their radios on to hip-hop stations and dialed the volume up trying to drown out the sounds coming from the kitchen below. Sounds which were now deeply disturbing and not resembling laughter at all anymore but more like wailing or mourning or wounded animal noises that went on and on and then suddenly stopped in short blank silences. Silences where both the kids would turn their radios way down to listen for how he was progressing, then turn them back up again with the next explosion. Slowly, the silences began to outweigh the hysteria until there was nothing at all coming from the kitchen. The kids listened to the back door thump very softly and then the sound of the Buick turning over. They heard the tires crunching through the gravel as it backed down the driveway and the gears shifting when the gravel turned to blacktop. They heard the big engine move off into the night and fade away to a hum that sounded like vast empty space. A space not even their radios could protect them from. This was several years ago and they haven’t seen him since.