The Daily Write: A bottle. (July 28, 2012, 12 minutes and then some)

He smashed the bottle into the middle of out midnight birthday cake. Jealous I guess. It's true that he never seemed to like me, although I was only 9, and not yet the adult who would have got in his face about the drinking and aggressiveness toward my mother.

For her part, she took a stance of stone faced nonchalance. Always one to downplay the difficult, she didn't seem to notice or care about his constant, drunken yelling. And she bailed him out of detox more times than you can imagine.

I don't know what finally broke them up. Him with his fortified wine and malt liquor in crumbled brown paper bags. Her with her brood of children, none of them his. But this was long before that, and long before we kept our address a secret so he wouldn't find us and pound on the door drunkenly demanding to come in while I huddled over the phone in my attic room, mom and brothers by me, begging the cops to hurry.

He never seemed to regret ruining my life. Imagine that for a minute. A girl who only sees her mother a couple times a year comes to visit for the summer. She is with her brother, a year and a half younger, and their twin baby brothers. Mother sleeps on a bed in the living room with him. The kids sleep four in the tiny bedroom at the back of the apartment - two bigger kids on bunks, the babies first in their own drawers and then a shared crib. They cry a lot - at least to the girl's sensitive ears. They scream and wail and make rapid fire baby decisions about whose attention they need most and how soon.

He doesn't notice or he doesn't care. He loves the babies when he's in the mood for them. Calls them his guys. Smiles at them. But most of the time, he's more focused on the mother and her hairy armpits, "Cut that fucking arm hair!" he bellows at her as she tries to feed one baby, change the other and deal with her oversensitive daughter. Her middle son, who really isn't old enough to be out on his own, has opted to trek by himself down the long train tracks on a solo adventure that fills his older sister with worry and panic.

Maybe he hated the girl because she and her mother were so much alike. Maybe he hated being observed by both of them.Whatever it was, he made sure their special mother/daughter midnight cake which straddled both birthdays, was ruined. By a beer bottle.