Read 100 Days for Free Online Page A

prescription bottle sitting on the kitchen counter. “Just temporarily.”
    The pills actually seemed to help lighten her up. She didn’t seem to get so down about the money stuff when she was taking them. They probably would have helped even more if my dad hadn’t kept turning into somebody we recognized less and less.
    â€œIt’s hard for him to not be able to fully provide for us,” Mom told me when the two of us were alone. “He feels like he’s no longer the man he used to be.” She reminded me that his brain was going to need time to heal. Maybe she was reminding herself, too. I don’t know.
    What I did know was that my dad was noticeably different now. He’d never been an easy person before falling off that roof, but at least he was someone you could reason with. Now it was pretty clear that one of the side effects of his new personality change was that his already lightning-quick temper was even more intense than it used to be. The simplest thing, like misplacing his keys or a minor leak in the water tank, could set him off.
    By that point, my dad was doing what he could to bring in some money. He’d learned to shoe horses as a teenager, so he started doing some of that again, even though his coordination wasn’t what it used to be and bending over to trim the hooves and nail on the shoes killed his back. He’d bring me along to help when I wasn’t in school. Sometimes, on the weekends, he’d take me out on his rounds. Other weekends, when there were no horses to trim or shoe, he’d drag me along with him to the woods to help cut firewood that could later be sold by the cord. On every one of those trips, the misery and frustration of not being the man he used to be seemed to leak out of his pores.
    It shouldn’t have been a surprise when he started drinking on top of everything else. It was your standard downward spiral, the whoosh of a toilet being flushed as the life our family once knew swirled down the drain.
    After that, whenever things got heated between my parents, he’d stay and fight. Rather than going outside to clear his head like he used to, he’d follow Mom around the house and keep yelling. Sometimes he’d even give her shoulder a little shake or poke her in the chest to drive a point home. These were things he’d never done before his brain injury. Once, he tapped his finger in the middle of her forehead, and not too gently, either. I stood in a dim corner of the room, out of his way but keeping an eye on him, clenching my fists over and over.
    â€œStop it,” my mother said. It was clear she was trying to keep from crying.
    â€œWell, you don’t listen ,” he told her, tapping again. “What else am I supposed to do?” His voice was slurred. I’d already seen him at the bottle that morning, pouring some whiskey into his coffee cup when he thought I wasn’t watching.
    â€œCut it out,” I told him, my voice shaking.
    He rushed at me in silence as Mom screamed at him to stop. Grabbed me by the shoulders and threw me down onto the rug. “What did you say to me, boy? Don’t you ever talk that way to me again, you hear?”
    After that, we never knew what to expect, never knew how he might act on any given day or night.

 
    11
    AGNES
    DAY 90: MARCH 27
    My Easter basket is full of jelly beans, marshmallow chicks, and more chocolate than I’ll probably be able to eat for the rest of the year. I also got a fancy Victorian sugar egg, one with a peephole you can look through to see the little sculpted frosting rabbit mom with her two rabbit children opening their Easter baskets full of carrots. It’s a pretty impressive panorama, really.
    That afternoon, I log in to the online progeria community to wish everyone who celebrates it a happy Easter. The website isn’t a huge part of my life or anything. There are no more than a couple hundred of us progeria kids alive at