It happened the day he heard Mommy talking on the phone with her friend about how Daddy had knocked her down the back-porch stairs. Mommy had started to cry, and Ronnie came into the kitchen so quietly that she didn’t hear him, and he touched her hand. That was all. But it was enough, because in an instant he Knew everything, he Knew all about the Hurting.

Mommy was supposed to be using something called a diafram but she’d forgotten to put it in so she and Daddy had made Ronnie one night (he wasn’t sure what “doggy-style” meant, but that’s how he’d been made) and when Mommy found out, she waited eight weeks before she told Daddy, and Daddy had been mad and hit Mommy real hard and then dragged her out the back door and hit her again so she’d fall down the porch steps and land real hard, land face-down on the concrete patio, and Daddy shouted “That ought to do it!” and then gone back inside to open a fresh beer because it helped him to not worry about the lay-offs at the plant that Everybody Knew Were Coming while the other kids came running to help Mommy, and one of the neighbors, Mr. Wade, he’d insisted on driving Mommy to the hospital where she sat in the Emergency Room for four hours before a doctor saw her, and that’s when she’d found out that Ronnie was okay but something had been damaged in her you-tor-us so she’d have to make weekly visits to her obeey-gee-why-en to make sure nothing went wrong, but when it came time for Ronnie to be born something did go wrong, Mommy lost a lot of blood and the doctors had to perform a sissy-air-eyan to get Ronnie out and then do something called a history-ect-omy on Mommy so she couldn’t have any more babies (that part made Ronnie very sad because he thought it would be neat to have a baby brother or sister someday) and ever since then Daddy and Mommy hadn’t had any “sects” or even kissed and Mommy was so lonely…

Ronnie smiled at her and left the kitchen after that because it was too sad and confusing. He was almost six years old that night, and if he understood nothing else, he understood that the boring visits to the doctor made Mommy…if not happy, then at least not any more sad, so he decided that he wouldn’t whine and complain about going to the doctor or riding on the short bus to school or getting upset when the kids called him a “ree-tard” or a “sped.”

He wondered, though, if there was anything he could do to make Mommy’s Hurting stop, but he couldn’t think of anything.

Then one day he was out in the backyard playing by himself (he was the Green Hornet spying on a Bad Guy) when he spotted a small bird lying on its side, twitching. He crawled over on hands and knees (didn’t want the Bad Guy to spot him; the Green Hornet was a phantom, he was invisible) and saw that the bird was bleeding.