Two days later, Daddy got a letter from Mom. I don’t know what it said, but he started swearing and breaking things. I took Carol and Sara down to Aunt Ethel’s. I told her Daddy was throwing things around.

“The natural man is an enemy to God,” Aunt Ethel said. I thought she’d go into one of her sermons, but she didn’t. Instead, she sent me to the freezer in the basement for a package of chicken strips. When I got back, Carol and Sara were chopping up a salad.   

After we’d eaten and cleaned up the kitchen, we went for a walk past our house. Everything was quiet. The front room window was broken; a chair lay in the front yard. The inside was even worse. The dinning room table had a missing leg. I think Daddy had knocked over or broke everything except for great grandmother’s silver tea set on the mantel.

Aunt Ethel helped us nail cardboard over the window. We tried to nail the leg back on the table, but it wouldn’t stay. Carol came up with the idea of putting two five gallon buckets together under the table. Grandma Dougan sent us the buckets full of potatoes last fall. I wondered what we’d do when she wanted them back. Grandma is what Mom calls a scorekeeper. She keeps track of little things like empty buckets.

I told Sara and Carol to go to bed. Aunt Ethel went home. She said she hated to leave us, but we could come to her house anytime--even in the middle of the night.

Friday morning, as Daddy left for work he handed me some bills. “For groceries,” he said.

I didn’t want Daddy yelling at me over shopping like he did Mom, so I scooted right down and asked Aunt Ethel to help me figure out how to spend it.

She helped me make a list, told me to check off stuff as I put it in the cart, and add up the prices as I went. I got everything on the list except for rice and still had a dollar and twelve cents left over. When Daddy got home, I showed him what I bought. 

“How much did you have left?” he asked.

I held out my hand to him with the change. He backhanded me, and I fell over a kitchen chair.

“You spent all my money,” he shouted.

 My mouth was bleeding, and my left arm felt broken. I lay on the floor afraid he’d hit me again if I stood up. Tears stung my eyes, but I fought them back. I decided right then if Grandma Dougan paid me for picking strawberries again this year, I’m hiding it from Daddy.