I saw the look of fear and shock in my son’s eyes as he heard his name, Ethan, expel itself from my lips in wrath. He still held the paddle overhead and his eyes had torn themselves open enough to drown his pupils and irises in seas of white and tiny red veins.
With the sharp electric sting at the top of my skull ran a sudden flash of memory rip roaring through my mind.
I had a paddle ball set similar to Ethan’s—one of those thin flat wooden rackets with a ball and string attached at the center. I’d been smacking it around in the direction of my father in spite of his warnings. I inched closer and closer to his face, then the string snapped and the ball went flying, caught my dad right in the eye and busted his glasses. He leapt up out of the chair, snatched the paddle from my hand and smacked me over the ass I don’t know how many times—the loose string flying back and forth like a party streamer—until the wood itself cracked in two and I was sent to my room.
My mother found the larger of the two paddle halves in my room some time later. I had drawn two dots over a curved line sloping downward at each end and scrawled the word “Daddy” underneath.
I think my memory of this incident is false because I see it happening in the third person. I remember it mostly because my mother loves to tell this story. Kept the paddle, even. I think she still has it. She laughs when she tells the story and calls the sad face daddy scribble adorable.
The pain atop my head was already retreating into a dull ache and a memory. Ethan dropped the paddle, turned, and ran. I heard his bedroom door slam. I wondered how he would remember this incident, if at all. He was only four, but big for his age, precocious, a prankster.
I picked up the paddle and squeezed the handle. In the kitchen, I opened a junk drawer and picked up a pen. I set the paddle down on the counter and wrote Ethan’s name and an accompanying sad face. I put the paddle back on the floor where he would find it and got an ice pack for my head.
