Free The Late Bloomer by Ken Baker Page B

Saturday morning in January of 1983, Dad is supposed to drive me to a game in Rochester. Instead, he spends the day loading his car with boxes of his stuff while I sit laconically in the garage watching him. Figuring that I am too upset to play hockey today (I cried into my pillow all morning), my parents suggest I stay home.
    But we are playing the Rochester Americans, a pretty good team, and my team needs me if we are going to win. And I need them. I call my teammate Jay’s father and ask for a ride.
    During the entire hour-long drive I don’t think about my dad’s engorged veins popping out his temples, about his throwing a coffee mug into the dining-room wall, about how earlier this morning Kevin (who is now bigger than my dad) threatened to kill Dad if he even laid a finger on Mom, about how the next few years of my life are probably about to be made extremely complicated by my parents’ marriage meltdown.
    I block all of it out on the ice too. It’s generally considered an excellent save percentage if a goalie stops at least nine out of every ten shots. I stop 63 of 64 shots, and we win by a score of 2 to 1. When I return to the de-fathered war zone that is my home, I lie in bed and write in my diary about the big win. I write about how I will kick just as much ass in my next game, how I won’t let any of this family mess distract me from being the greatest goalie in the history of the game. After all, I have learned a thing or two from my father about blocking out the past in order to survive the present.
    â€”
    My parents, now separated, put our house up for sale. It is a four-bedroom ranch-style home with an in-ground pool and a two-car garage in an upper-middle-class neighborhood with manicured green lawns and street names suggesting suburban loftiness. We live on Yale Avenue, which runs parallel to Harvard, Columbia, Dartmouth and Princeton avenues.
    Dad is in the process of selling his print shop, partly because he is feeling burned out but mostly to avoid being forced into a divorce settlement in which my mother, whom he now despises, gets half the ownership.
    Mom has won the right to custody of us three youngest Ks, as well as the honor of becoming a single mom who, with an annual income of $15,000 a year, makes a little more than minimum wage but also has the burden of supporting three kids. Even with my dad’s court-ordered child payments, she can only afford a $250-a-month duplex on Harwood Avenue that is located, like most every low-rent dwelling in Hamburg, within earshot of the railroad tracks. It’s only five miles from our old place on Yale Avenue, but it may as well be five hundred miles away. The duplex’s shit-brown (Kris’s adjective) paint is drab and peeling from the siding; a hideous yellow coat of paint flakes underneath. Being a duplex, we live in, basically, half of a house. That means everything is half the size of a regular house. Our beds take up nearly all of the floor space in the bedrooms.
    Keith and Kevin have moved into their own apartments in another part of Hamburg. My dad has rented a place with his new love a few towns to the east, in a much nicer neighborhood than ours, a fact that my mother regularly reminds us of. Kyle’s a year older, but since he is so quiet and Kris considers me his true “big brother,” my mother informs me that I am now “the man of the house.”
    My life is about as Dickensian as one can get in the suburbs. Mom’s income is low enough for us to qualify for free school lunches and amonthly ration of government surplus cheese, huge blocks of cheddar wrapped in cellophane, which, until we’ve eaten it all, serves as the centerpiece of our diet. Grilled cheese sandwiches. Cheese omelets. Cheese and crackers. Macaroni and cheese. Mom has enough money to buy us new clothes for school every fall—usually two pairs of pants, two shirts, new shoes (but only if the tread is worn on our old