Page:Clones - Ryan Somma.pdf/28

 "––to own black people!" he finished, eyes wide, mouth agape with the revelation. "You're a racist. It's been right there in front of my nose all my life and I just accepted it as normal behavior. What a hypocrite—―"

Before I knew it, he was on the ground and my hand was prickling in that familiar, regrettable way. I stood over him, daring him. He stayed on the floor, afraid to provoke me further, and that angered me more.

"Stand up," I ordered.

He rose to his feet without looking me in the eye. The handprint was already swelling out on his cheek, with some speckles of blood blooming. He would miss a week of school because of my split-second loss of control. I sent him to his room.

That weekend, after Junior's bruise faded enough to be unrecognizable as a handprint, I tried making amends. When he was younger, he was easy to bribe with comic books or baseball cards, this time I knew there was only one way to console him. It was ironic—yes, I know what that word means-- that exercising my authority was the very thing that forced me to concede.

Junior accepted my offer to drive him to meet his "biological" mother quietly, barely breaking the week-long silent treatment. He called her himself and arranged to visit. I drove him into the run-down, government-subsidized housing where she lived and walked him to the door. It opened before Junior could knock, revealing the short, fat smiling woman who carried him for nine over-priced months. They hugged. As soon as Junior was inside the humid apartment reeking of house pets, her smile dropped into a scowl. She closed the door in my face without a word.

If Junior was slipping away during his teenage years, he was lost on that day. His youthful, heroic illusions of me were vanished. The child who tossed the ball with his dad in the backyard was no more, replaced with a young adult who understood that I was just another human being, full of faults, like my own father.

I learned of my old man‘s stroke months after it killed him, when a debt-collector noticed the smell. Dad's Doberman barely survived that time digging scraps from the garbage and chewing on the old man's corpse. I had it put to sleep.