Free Ash Wednesday by Chet Williamson, Neil Jackson

not leave him. Not just yet.
    So she hung on for the children's sake, and her own, and Brad's. She tolerated the drunkenness, the shouts, the cruelties. At first she even tolerated it when he pushed her, then one night actually slapped her face. But there was always a point, she told herself, beyond which he would not go. She knew he would not hit the children. And he never did. No matter how irrationally outraged he would become at Frankie or Linda Marie, he never struck them. Instead, some other object received the blow—a table at which he sat, a magazine he held, a can he had just emptied, or perhaps Bonnie herself.
    She could not, however, put up with it permanently. Life with Brad hardened her, annealed her in the furnace until his moments of tenderness meant less to her and his times of brutality meant more and more. At one time she had worried about what he would do if she left him, but eventually she was past caring. Being murdered, she told herself, might even be preferable to the life she had with him.
    In 1979, three years after his fits of rage began, Bonnie Meyers filed for divorce on grounds of mental cruelty. She did not tell him she was leaving, not because she was frightened of his reaction, but because she felt he did not deserve to be told. She took Frankie out of school and the three of them went to Allentown to stay with Bonnie's aunt until Brad could hear of and react to the desertion. She'd left him a note explaining things as well as she could, and the attorney she'd hired called Brad the next day at noon. He'd been sleeping, and had seemed calm and reasonable, the attorney told Bonnie. "In fact," the attorney said, "he told me he was surprised you hadn't walked out a long time ago."
    Brad's mother called him, finally breaking her self-imposed lack of intervention in her son's affairs, to ask him if he didn't think the marriage was worth saving. "It's dead," he told her. "You can't save the dead."
    Arrangements were made. Bonnie got the house, the children, and child support, while Brad got visitation rights, the only thing he had specifically asked for. He had not even hired an attorney. Taking his personal effects and what furniture and kitchen things Bonnie felt inclined to share, he rented a small two-bedroom apartment on Market Street for $150 a month. He drank less after the separation, for his weekends were spent working at the 7-Eleven down the street. Along with his job at Universal, his work totaled fifty-two hours a week and as many as seventy-six if he got some extra days at double shift. Often he went home, drank a few beers, and fell into bed, getting up in seven or eight hours to go back to work again. With this schedule, he was able to handle the child-support, mortgage, and rent payments, and save a considerable amount as well, since he seldom had time to spend anything. Slowly he began to put the money into the furnishing of his apartment, buying a water bed one month to replace the single mattress on the floor, a Pioneer stereo system the next, with hundred-watt speakers, on which he played a mixture of rock and classical that had the third-floor tenant, old and half deaf as he was, pounding on the floor, and a four- seater padded bar the next month, on whose shelves he placed no liquor, but only bottles of Heineken. The Nazi flags were almost an afterthought.
    One afternoon at a local flea market he was struck by the bright red, black, and white banner strung up behind a table of military memorabilia, and thought how good it would look on that large bare spot on the living room wall. Then came German World War II posters, a large black and white shot of Hitler at Nuremberg, helmets, crossed sabers.
    One Saturday night when a drinking buddy saw Brad's apartment for the first time, he asked him bluntly, " What the hell are you, Meyers? A Nazi?"
    Brad smiled. "No. I hate Nazis. I like their uniforms.”
    “What about that picture of Hitler?"
    "I like his moustache."
    "And that big