My mother was outlandishly pregnant, so she had no inclination to deal with my father’s stupidity. I was three at the time, and I remember being in the bathtub when I heard my mother whispering, “What did you do?” in harsh tones.
“Oh, I don’t know,” I heard my father say.
I was too busy eating wax candies to care what was happening in the front room. My mother suddenly came into the bathroom and said, “We need to go to the hospital.”
“Is it the baby?” I asked.
“No. It’s your father.” The man I referred to, lovingly, as “Not the Mama” was in trouble. Mother did not tell me the nature of the malfunction, only that there was one. We did not drive with my father, either. We followed his rusty, blue truck to the hospital.
“What happened?” I asked. In the waiting room, my father did not want to look at me. My mother sat next to me shaking her head. I had no idea what the issue was, and I had stopped caring by the time my father had gone into and out of surgery.
My mother looked at him indignantly. “Well?”
My father held up his right hand. I remember that it was wrapped in bandages. Strings were tied from his wrist to his fingertips.
I repeated what my mother had said while I was in the tub. “Not the Mama, what did you do?”
Again, he said he did not know. My mother played with my hair and said, “Your father cut his hand in half with a circular saw.”
“Brilliant,” I said. “Not the Mama, that was less than smart.”
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