Free The Late Bloomer by Ken Baker

surgery, his right testicle balloons to the size of a tennis ball. An infection in his epididymis, a duct on the testicle through which sperm passes, has caused this most inhumane swelling.
    Doctors inform my mom that this condition often—but not always—is sexually transmitted, meaning he might have gotten it from a woman. Mom tells me that she never has had any venereal diseases: She has only slept with one man—my father—her entire life. After the surgeon removes a portion of his testicle, my mom confronts Dad about the exact cause of the infection. He swears he has never cheated on her. Mom, one hundred percent financially dependent on my father, is totally unprepared to do anything about it if he has cheated on her. Understandably, she gives him the benefit of the doubt.
    Her forgiveness, though, can’t keep my dad from his own self-destructiveness. Following the testicle episode, he spirals into a deep depression. He snores away in the bedroom, with the door shut and curtains drawn, day after day after day. When he is up, he’s watching reruns from the
Get Smart
era. They’re sitcoms, but he doesn’t laugh. He doesn’t even go to work. He’s not angry, he’s . . . just . . . there.
    â€œDad’s chewing Valium like candy,” Kevin tells me one day. “I hope the miserable bastard ODs.”
    I don’t know what Valium is, but I’m smart enough to know that it’s not for happy people. I leave Dad alone. I try to cheer him up bybringing him a bowl of salt-and-vinegar chips—his favorite—or a glass of pop. “Thanks, Kenny,” he says. “You’re a good son.”
    â€”
    As soon as Dad comes out of his “slump,” he returns to snarling at Mom whenever they are around each other more than ten minutes.
    They fight constantly, in fact. Their bedroom is next to mine. I hear all their bickering, word for dirty word. They call each other the worst names in the Book of Defamation (
whore, slut, bastard, fat shit
). I bury my head under a pillow to muffle it.
    My mother, who has since tired of being just a stay-at-home mom, has begun working for the Hamburg Town Clerk’s office, where she grants, ironically enough, marriage licenses. My father resents her job and the freedom she now enjoys after a lifetime of servitude to him, and to us. When she comes home late from work, he’s convinced she must be having an affair with someone in the office.
    My parents fight about everything: money, the car payment, the print shop, the dog shitting all over the side yard and no one picking it up. It’s pathetic, really.
    Judging from my hockey success, I believe God answers my prayers. So I start praying for another miracle: that He will put them—and Kevin, Keith, Kyle, Kris and me—out of their middle-aged misery with a heavenly annulment. . . .
God, I really hope you will make a lot of people happy by getting my parents divorced. In the name of the father, the son and the Holy Spirit. Amen. . . .
    Soon, through the paper-thin wall separating my room from theirs, I hear my parents talking—make that
shouting
—about getting a divorce.
Thanks, Big Guy.
    The morning after one particularly bombastic clash, however, Dad calls Mom at work, and I fear that God might have gone a little too far in answering my prayers.
    â€œMarcia,” Dad says calmly, “I have a gun in my hand, and youknow what? I’m gonna blow my head off this afternoon.” He’s on the Indian reservation, thirty minutes south of us. “I’m going to make you and everyone else very happy today. I’m gonna blow my fucking brains out.” Before hanging up, he closes with an inappropriately sunny, “Bye!”
    Mom immediately calls the police, who promptly issue an all-points bulletin for his arrest.
White male . . . 40 . . . black hair . . . armed and