The Third Time

To be honest, I’m not too certain how much more of this I’ll be able to tell, or recall, but I’ll try for another. This event occurred not too long after the last, I think a week, or two. It was a Wednesday afternoon, and all seemed normal. I had gotten home from school, usually depressed as I had slowly begun to become a bit of a loner. I could always connect with others, but I never truly fit in anywhere, nor with anyone. The friends I may have had all phased out, it’s really actually quite depressing, but I was young and when your parents split, it’s hard to adjust. In the long run, I know it was for the better of myself and my father, as well as the rest of the family, but still at that age there was still a lot of inner turmoil I simply couldn’t comprehend. I was ten, how could I?

My father was usually home around four, which means I would be alone in the apartment for a couple of hours. Just enough time to work on homework, if I chose to that night. Homework was never really the issue, just the desire to not waste time, that, and I always enjoyed when he would help me with it. He would set a small coffee table up by the couch, or sometimes by my bed and we’d sit together and work through it. Math was always the harder of the bunch, but looking back, I can’t see why. However, we all wish we knew what we do now then, things would be different, of course. I think the outcome of my life would have been different had I known a few things then that I do now, but that’s neither here, nor there.

For this day, I had really only any need to read a few chapters of a book for school. There was a lot of interest in reading and my father even let me read some of the books he enjoyed, both as a child and adult, but the adult ones I found harder to get into. None of them were sexual in nature, as I’d like to always stress that my father wasn’t a pervert. The things we did, I think they were done merely out of some sort of connection, need to connect, or just some mutual expression love. I was learning, and to learn from the man I looked up to was at the time almost awe inspiring. He knew things, and did things I simply couldn’t fathom until grew older and thus much more world wise. Still, there was never any sense of perversion in the few times anything did happen, just a father and his son.

When he got home, I guess I didn’t really notice it had been later than usual. The book I was reading, well, let’s say I got through it pretty quickly. The door shut loudly and I remember being jolted by that, he had never been loud. He called to me and set me at the table to talk to me. Mom wanted back in, not so much in the family, but my life. I was her son, but that was saying about as much as someone that collects porcelain dolls saying that they were one of their children, only I’m pretty sure she’d love dolls more than she did me. She wanted to spend weekends. Every weekend. He was against it, and so was I. There was something inside me that wanted to try, because at that age I couldn’t learn that all some people wanted to do was to damage others.

In any case, we had talked about it and decided not to, but knew she would persist. It was something that worried him and after that brief talk, he did what he could to whip up a quick dinner for me then seemed to disappear into his room. It wasn’t a normal evening for us, I was worried too. Around seven, when I should have been readying for bed, I knocked on the door, which just opened as I touched it. I found him in the shower, or well, I could hear the shower going and figured he was in there.

I was in a large shirt, which covered me to my knees, beneath just white little undies all boys my age should have worn. I went across the room to the bathroom door, which was left slight ajar. I’m guessing in his state of dealing with the ex trying to come back into his son’s life after having cast him aside so eagerly that certain details just kind of escaped him. One of them being me entering the bathroom, I wanted to know what was up, because he was supposed to bring me to bed and he would some times read to me, or just tuck me in, I enjoyed it and maybe, I thought, doing that would take his mind off of mom.

The door was fogged, like a shroud of mist had fallen upon it.