Read Early Spring 01 Broken Flower for Free Online

were far greater. For that reason as well, it was time to share our secret with Daddy.
"I don't want to take you to Dr. Dell'Acqua without your father being aware of it anyway," Mama said, and decided to tell him about me right after dinner.
Although my father was very different from his mother, he was like her when it came to spending time with his children and being involved in their everyday lives. I understood from what I could gamer from tidbits of my father's history that Grandmother Emma was always too busy with her charity events and social life to devote herself to motherly duties. Once, I heard Daddy tell Mama that he was sure he was an accident. At the time I had no idea what that meant. All I could think of were car crashes or falling off bikes.
For the most part, Daddy left our maintenance and needs up to Mama. Ian and I could count on the fingers of one hand how many times he had
accompanied her to our school to listen to our teachers talk about us. He was always too busy for this or too busy for that. Even Grandmother Emma complained about how he neglected us.
"I don't see how you could possibly be busier than your father was. Christopher, and yet he had so much more time for you than you have for your children. You shouldn't leave so much to your wife," she added, which was her main reason for
complaining. She wouldn't miss an opportunity to say, "Don't forget. As ye sow, so shall ye reap."
He always promised to do more and take more interest, yet when it came to disciplining us or following up on a complaint Grandmother Emma expressed about our behavior. Daddy would pass on the duty to Mama as if she had hatched us all on her own.
"Look after your kids and keep them from being so messy," he might say, which were words right out of Grandmother Emma's mouth.
"Your son was disrespectful to my mother again," he would tell her.
"My son? My daughter? My children, Christopher? Where were you when all this
happened?" she would shoot back at him.
"Obviously out of my mind," he might say.
Once I heard my mother mutter to herself right after one of these arguments, "Some people are just too selfish to have children or even get married to anyone or anything but their own shadow."
She often talked to herself or if she spoke to me, she didn't expect me to understand or remember, but I usually did, and there was never any question Ian understood. I would go to him to explain and he always did.
That night after dinner. Mama came to my room to wait for Daddy. He was groaning and moaning that he had things to do and might even have to return to the supermarket office.
"I need you, Christopher. Just come to Jordan's room," Mama insisted.
Daddy came walking quickly into my room. He paused just inside the doorway, looked at the two of us sitting on the chairs by my student desk, and put his hands on his hips. 'Okay. Caroline, what's going on now?" he asked. Whenever he was displeased, he called Mama "Caroline" rather than "Carol," which was what Grandmother Emma always called her.
He was in a white shirt opened at the collar and a pair of dark blue jeans with his light blue boat shoe loafers and no socks. Even though he was supposedly indoors most of the time, he had what Grandmother Emma called a Palm Beach tan. When she asked him about it, he confessed to going to a tanning salon regularly. On his right wrist, he wore a thick gold bracelet and on his left, his Rolex watch, a watch that had belonged to his father.
There was never a question in my mind that Daddy was one of the handsomest men in the whole city. He had Ian's black eyes and wavy dark brown hair he wore a little too long in the back and sides for Grandmother Emma's liking, but unlike her or even Mama for that matter, he did not care to dress appropriately and look his age. He liked it when people told him that although he was fortv-two, he could easily pass for a man in his late twenties.
"You'd better come in, close the door, and sit, Christopher," Mama told him,