I was worried.

Not about my mom so much, in spite of the fact that, for weeks, she’d been in bed, her feet propped up on pillows. There’d been hushed conversations about blood, blood, and more blood, a bleeding that just wouldn’t stop. But she was going to the hospital and that meant she’d be fine.

That said, my concern was for us, my brother and me. But mostly just for me.

“Who’s going to take care of us while Mom’s in the hospital?” I asked him.

He was older, wiser, and always seemed to have the answers. After all, he’d already turned 10.

“You’re such an idiot—Dad, of course.”

We’d been left behind before, our parents going off to here and there, leaving us in the sometimes-capable hands of one set of grandparents or the other, but we’d never been left by just our mother, our father staying behind.

“We’re going to starve to death.”

“Are you kidding? The only thing Dad knows how to cook is steak—I bet we have it every night she’s gone,” my brother counseled. “And even if we don’t, I bet he takes us to McDonald’s a whole bunch.” And with the mention of the Promise Land, it didn’t seem so bad that Mom was going to be gone for a week or so. After all, a quarter pounder and a chocolate shake made up for a lot.

And early on, my brother was right: Dad cooked steaks. And the next night, steaks again. And then he stuffed five dollars in our pockets and sent us towards the golden arches at the end of the block. Things were good.

Sure, we missed her. And it was weird that when we came home from school, the air wasn’t thick with the aroma of our dinner already in the oven. But all of that was mitigated by the fact that Mom wasn’t there to enforce the one-Coke-a-day rule either. And thus we drank.

Yet our father wasn’t holding up as well. He truly was a family man, but he was a family man from a different generation, from back when a family man coached Little League baseball teams and dug up the sewer lines when the household plumbing backed up; they didn’t push behind vacuum cleaners or inventory the kitchen cabinets before going to the grocery store.

So, before school, my brother and I took to sniffing our way to the clothes that were the least dirty. And we periodically cleared the coffee table by swiping the dirty dishes onto the living room floor with our feet as we settled in to watch tv. Occasionally, we even hung up our wet towels. We were doing our share, indeed, but, strangely, our father was starting to act like it wasn’t enough.

One evening our television viewing was interrupted when we smelled something like food at the same time that we’d heard the clanging of a spoon against a pan. That was our cue, we’d learned, to find our way to the dining room table since our dad, the grouch that he’d become, refused to serve our food to us in front of the tv. The bastard.

Just as I was sitting down, I looked into the kitchen in time to see my dad dump a pan of steamy, wet noodles into a colander in the sink. I braved asking the question to which I already knew the answer: “What are we having for dinner?”

“Spaghetti,” he growled over his shoulder.

“But I don’t…” and my brother’s punch, landing squarely between where my budding breasts were developing, temporarily silenced my voiced disgust at the menu options.

“Shut up—he’s doing everything he can,” my brother loudly whispered across the table.

“You shut up,” I eloquently replied as I peeked down my shirt to see if there was a bruise. “And I don’t care—I still don’t like spaghetti.”

The words barely left my lips before my dad flung a spoon against the back of the sink then spun around and stormed towards the table. His voice boomed me backwards in my seat. “Oh, but Ann, you didn’t let me finish telling you all of your options. You see, I’ve been in the kitchen for an hour making spaghetti. But, since you don’t like spaghetti, you do have another option. You want to know what that option is, Ann? Do you?”

I knew he wanted me to say that yes, I did want to know, but I had a feeling I wouldn’t like that option either.

He stepped back, raised a finger to side of his lips and threw back his head, as if he was deep in thought. And then he lowered his gaze and directed it right towards me. “Your other option, if you don’t want the spaghetti, is to go hungry. Your choice. Just let me know.” And then he walked back to the kitchen. To the sink. Where he began plopping spaghetti onto plates, pausing briefly at the stovetop for spoonfuls of sauce that he smeared across the pasta, before he walked to the table and dropped our plates in front of us.

“What’s all this watery stuff?” I asked. “Mom’s spaghetti doesn’t look like this…”

“Well, Ann, your mother isn’t here. And like I said before, you don’t have to eat it. You’re more than welcome to go hungry. I honestly don’t care.”

And I’m pretty sure he was being honest about that.

So I sat there and ate. Not because I wanted to, not because it was any good, but because I finally figured out that I’d skated so far out on thin ice that I’d better start circling back towards safer territory. And my brother? He was struggling to choke down his food, too, but he was always better at pretending to be a decent kid. For that reason and many others, he sucked.

But eventually we both finished. And, without bothering to be excused, we abandoned our dirty dishes on the table and made our way back to the living room, wrestling over who got the long couch and who got the chair. And since I was younger, weaker, and, on top of everything else, a girl, I always ended up in the chair…and thus, since the chair was closer to the tv, I was always responsible for flipping the channels between commercials. It was just about the time when we’d agreed on what to watch when we heard the back door open and a thud, then another thud, out in the backyard.

We looked at each other, smiled our knowing smiles, and then tiptoed to the kitchen. There we found our father making his way through a stack of dirty dishes by flinging them towards the orange trees that lined the outskirts of our backyard.

He peeked over his shoulder and saw the audience comprised of his very own offspring. “I…Will…Not…Wash…Another…Motherfucking…Dirty…Dish…,” he declared, pausing between each word to find another dish to fling into the night. “I just washed every single dish in the house last night and here they all are again. Dirty.” The sink was mostly cleared by then, almost all of the dishes already launched into our backyard, but he’d spied the colander, the one still filled with spaghetti. He picked it up and as he walked towards the door, we followed. The pasta looked like a flying white octopus as he hurled it beyond reaches of the back porch light.

“Oohh,” I squealed, “that was neat!”

“You liked that, did you? Did you? Good. Now go get those dishes. All of them. Both of you. Go clean up the backyard.”

“But it’s dark outside,” we argued, stating the obvious. The look in his eyes, however, let us know that we’d be wise to not press the issue. So we went outside and started bringing in the dishes, one broken piece after another.

We hadn’t been at it for more than five minutes or so before my father gathered us in the kitchen. “I’ve got a deal for you kids. I won’t make you clean up the backyard if you promise not to tell your mother—deal?”

“Deal,” we agreed, as my brother and I raced back towards the living room, with him, being faster, getting the couch. Again.

That weekend, we finally got to go to the hospital to visit our mom. Once we got to her room, my father left us with her while he went to find a nurse, and as soon as he was out the door, I bounced onto the foot of her bed while my brother busied himself mashing buttons, raising and lowering her bed into as many unnatural positions as he could manage.

She groaned in pain.

But she was like that sometimes, though, trying to ruin our fun by, you know, writhing in agony.

And when we realized that her groaning was starting to really interfere with our good times, we stopped. And we started filling her in on the things she’d missed in our lives.

My brother was going on and on about school, his friends, blah, blah, blah, but he was dancing all around the big news.

“Mom, guess what Daddy did with all the dirty dishes!” My brother punched my shoulder. Hard. And reminded me that we’d made a deal not to tell.

It was too late, however, and everyone there knew it. So my brother was the one who actually broke the promise. Glory-seeker that he was, he was the one who got to tell our mom the story of our father. Throwing the dishes. The dirty dishes. Into the backyard. Because he didn’t want to wash them. He’d finished about the time Dad made it back to the room. And Mom had started laughing. It hurt, she said, but she couldn’t stop laughing. But somehow she gained her composure just long enough to look at our father and say, “So…I hear we’re getting new dishes.”