The boy rocked from one foot to the other and looked at his father, and then he dashed into the house and began calling, “Mom! Mom!”
He sat on the porch and leaned against the garage wall and stretched his legs. The sweat had dried on his forehead. He felt clammy under his clothes.
He had once seen his father—a pale, slow-talking man with slumped shoulders—in something like this. It was a bad one, and both men had been hurt. It had happened in a cafĂ©. The other man was a farmhand. Hamilton had loved his father and could recall many things about him. But now he recalled his father’s one fistfight as if it were all there was to the man.
(from “Bicycles, Muscles, Cigarettes”)
