Mom got angry. “Don’t you ever say that again about your father. He has his weaknesses. Satan attacks him at his weakest point, which is his temper. But he loves us all very much, and when he’s not in one of his Moods, you know you all love him too!”

She looked around at us waiting for one of us to agree with her. But we just stared at the cracked slate gray tiles on the floor while the moths made big flapping shadows on the wall. We weren’t going to say we loved Dad when he was spoiling our vacation worse than ever before.

“It’s your fault, Mom!” Janet said. “If you just put your foot down, he wouldn’t treat you this way.”

Mom always answered the same thing. “I’m afraid it’s too late to do that now. You see, in my family my father never raised his voice in anger. When I found out about your dad’s temper, I was so shocked I didn’t know what to do. I had never been exposed to working-class behavior of this kind before. I let him get away with it. Now he’s in the habit, and it’s too late to change. I was totally unprepared. My father was an educated man.”

Mom turned to me, and so did my sisters. They looked pretty accusingly at me, then my mom said, “You just make sure you learn from all this and neverever treat your wife this way!”

“He’d better not,” Rachael chipped in.

“He won’t dare to if I’m around!” said Janet.

I knew I never would, because now I wanted to kill Dad and I knew I never wanted to be like he was and have my children want to kill me.

I said, “I never will, Mom.”

The girls and Mom all nodded their heads in satisfaction as if they had forgiven me, and they believed some good would come out of this yet if I had learned my lesson. Mom always said she was praying for God to be watching over the right little girl of “His choosing” for me to marry when He’d lead us together at “the time and place of His choice.” That little girl would have been pleased to see how God was using even my father’s sin to teach me a good lesson on how not to be.

Mom started taking my clothes out of the cupboard, she dragged the big blue suitcase out from under my bed and packed my T-shirts. When she put my mask and snorkel into the suitcase, I burst into tears. Rachael came over to comfort me and hugged me. We rocked back and forth together while she whispered in my ear, “He’s an awful man, an awful man,” over and over again.