Driving Home

Partly fact, shrouded in fiction.

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I had turned ten, just eleven days before that fateful car ride home. We were coming back from Big Daryl’s annual Chrysler dealership Christmas party. My dad was a salesman there, Big Daryl my Uncle. I spent my childhood surrounded by hemi engines and Alcoholic men. That night I got into the car and fell asleep within minutes of pulling away. After running around with my cousins at the party, the fact that I woke up at all is shocking. I wish I never had, holding onto some delusion. That if I’d somehow heard the news after a good night's sleep could have eased the transition. Instead I woke up to shouting and accusations. My mother saw an interaction between my dad and a female coworker. She said she saw a look in the young lady’s eyes that her husband’s eyes mirrored. For her that shared look was the only evidence she ever needed.

“If he hasn’t fucked her yet it’s only a matter of time,” she would say any chance she got.

I had been a kid running around a Christmas party when we left that night. A happy kid from a happy home. Unfortunately by the time we got back it was a broken home. The two loving parents I had were replaced by two single adults who hated each other and the world around them. They would look at me and see their cheating ex husband or the bitter ex wife. They stopped seeing their son.

By C.L. Norby

From: United States