Tragedies. Family tragedies.

He gets up, tops off his cup again. Marks the bottle. Then goes down the hall to his son’s room.

He fingers the Master Lock Paul mounted there last year. He takes out the duplicate key he had made the afternoon he was doing laundry and found Paul’s key, forgotten in the pocket of his dirty jeans. He opens the lock and goes into his son’s room and sits on the bed.

He remembers the room as it was, before it became plastered with posters of Iron Maiden and Van Halen and Ozzy Osbourne and Ted Nugent and AC/DC and The Scorpions and Judas Priest and all the others dripping blood and wrapped in Spandex and surrounded by skulls. He remembers when the floor was littered with Legos and Lincoln Logs instead of microwave burrito wrappers and empty matchbooks and torn copies of Rolling Stone and crushed beer cans pushed under the bed and discarded cigarette pack cellophanes. He remembers this room before it smelled of spilled beer and smoke and the stale incense that’s meant to cover it all up.

He gets up, takes a long drink, sets his coffee cup on top of the dresser and starts to search the room, just as he does every day.

An empty half pint of Fleischmann’s vodka and the same old stash of Playboy back issues with Bob Whelan’s address label on the cover.

Booze and dirty magazines. Kyle Cheney knows there’s worse somewhere.

When Paul first started changing, when his mother took off and left them alone six years ago and he started talking back, that’s when he’d had to start this. She’d driven a wedge between him and his son. That’s what he couldn’t forgive her for. Not the stupid way she left them, but the things she’d said to the boy, the things she’d said about him. Things she’d screamed that scared Paul. Things Paul was just too young to understand.