Family & Fatherhood

Me and the Boy

In another, he blew his nose so loudly at the table it trembled the water glasses.

"He's yours," I said to the woman.

If he did not like the taste of something, he just spit it out.

"He is not unusual," the woman told me, but I saw doubt in her eyes.

I hoped a boy so nasty would be tough, gritty, but instead this was a child of piano lessons and gifted schools, a child once rushed to the hospital with a tummy ache, where an X-ray showed that he had merely overdosed on cinnamon Pop-Tarts and Chick-fil-A.

He yelled for his mother to come stomp a spider.

He wept from a boo-boo or if he was tired.