Chapter 2: Broken Plates, Broken Promises

The year I met Derek Hanson, I was fourteen.

Years of barely scraping by had left me short and skinny, looking much younger than my peers. Even at school, folks sometimes mistook me for a sixth grader—a stray in thrift store jeans and a faded hoodie, shoes patched up with duct tape. I got used to pretending not to notice. Every mirror in the house told me I was invisible, and that was safer.

For as long as I could remember, my father had never held down a real job. The three of us survived entirely on my mother’s $500-a-week paycheck from the sewing line at the local factory. She’d come home smelling like laundry soap and motor oil, her hands rough and cracked from endless shifts.

My father was addicted to gambling, but he almost always lost. Every Saturday night, he’d vanish to the back room of Murphy’s Bar or the run-down VFW hall, hoping for a lucky break that never came.

Whenever he lost, he’d be in a foul mood; when he was in a foul mood, he’d drink; and when he was drunk, he’d start beating his wife and kid. Sometimes, the whole block could hear his shouting through the thin walls.

The floor was often littered with broken plates and spilled leftovers. Sometimes, I’d tiptoe through the kitchen, counting the cracks in the linoleum, pretending they were roads leading anywhere but here. The linoleum was pitted and worn from years of his boots stomping across it in a rage, mashed peas and shards of glass ground into the cracks.

When I was five, he lost a lot of money.

That night, reeking of cheap whiskey, he grabbed my mother by the hair and slammed her head onto the linoleum floor, pressing her face down and smashing it over and over. When he got tired, he kicked her in the stomach.

"You think I’m worthless now, huh? Daring to look down on me?"

"You bitch, you didn’t give me a son, now I can’t hold my head up in this town."

"It’s all your fault, you ruined my luck. If I hadn’t married you, I’d have made something of myself by now."

My mother was beaten until she curled up on the floor. Dark red blood matted her hair into thick knots.

She didn’t hide or resist, naively believing that enduring it would awaken whatever conscience he had left. She’d always whisper, almost like a prayer, that if she was just patient, things would change. She believed in second chances, even for men like him.

When there was no good flesh left on my mother to hit, he turned his gaze to me.

"And this little brat, a bitch’s kid is a little bitch."

"What are you staring at me for? What, you want to hit me?"

A heavy slap landed on my face. Pain, then numbness.

It was as if all the sounds around me were muffled under glass, then cut off completely.

He slapped me so hard my eardrum ruptured.

My mother cried and pulled me into her arms, using her frail body to shield me from the storm. She kept murmuring, “It’s okay, baby, it’s okay,” even though it clearly wasn’t. Her hands trembled as she brushed hair from my face.

The man’s curses, the woman’s screams—all stopped only when the abuser was exhausted.

Late at night, the man’s snores mixed with the woman’s sobs.

My mother, her eyes red, finished dabbing ointment on me, then silently cleaned up the mess on the floor. She scrubbed until her knuckles bled, never saying a word about what happened.

We squeezed onto a narrow bed. She held me tightly. The quilt smelled of cheap laundry soap and her fading perfume.

I said, "Mom, can we leave here? I’ll make a lot of money and take care of you in the future."

She looked at the moon outside the window, a big chunk missing from it.

"No, your dad was very good to me when we were young. He saved up to buy me a gold bracelet, carried me for miles just to watch fireworks, bought me so many pretty clothes I couldn’t wear them all."

I reached out and tugged at my mother’s faded, misshapen clothes, worn out from too many washes. Threads dangled from her cuffs, and the color had long since bled away.

"Mom, you’re lying."

She patted my head, her voice stubborn:

"Mom’s not lying. Your dad is just confused for a while, he’ll get better. He said he’d be good to me for a lifetime, he promised."

"Just like the moon outside the window—it’ll be whole again one day." Her voice was a low murmur, as if she was speaking to both me and herself.

The next day, my father sobered up and acted as if nothing had happened, chatting and laughing with my mother, reaching out to ask her for money.

He said, "Lillian, I still love you. I just got carried away because I drank too much. When I win big, I’ll give you a good life."

A few words and my mother was coaxed into submission, handing over her entire paycheck.

This scene was so familiar it was terrifying.

I looked at the money in my father’s hand, wanting to ask my mother, didn’t she promise that after this month’s pay she’d send me to preschool?

I was already five, but I still hadn’t gone to preschool.

But my mother was smiling, her eyes only for my father, completely forgetting about me.

So, I silently closed my mouth.

It’s okay, mom will definitely remember me next month.

But until I entered elementary school thanks to the district’s public education policy, my mother still hadn’t remembered me.

So I missed all of preschool.