Never Broken: Songs Are Only Half the Story Read Online Free Page B

this new phase of our lives. For instance, the Disneyland effect meant one parent might spoil the children to gain their favor. I didn’t think there would be any risk of that here. Onstage, my brothers and I were learning the nuanced art of performing, while offstage we were receiving an adult-level education about divorce before we’d ever had a chance to learn about love or marriage.
    I have no idea why it was my mom who stayed in the big house by herself, with all our empty rooms collecting dust, while my dad moved my brothers and me into a single spare room at a friend’s house for a short stint. We lived like this until the contract for the dinner show was up at the Hilton in Anchorage.
    The night I realized our family was to be forever broken is permanently emblazoned in my mind. It was around 11 at night. We had just completed our last set as a family at the hotel and were loaded up in our station wagon, which was packed full of all our belongings. My brothers and I sat in the very back, on blankets my dad had spread out with pillows to serve as a makeshift bed while he drove us six hours through the mountains to Homer, where we relocated that night. I remember a new strong emotion nearly suffocating me as I watched my mom through the rear window. She was still in her show clothes. Ruffled maroon shirt. A thick denim skirt. A long, curved rooster tail feather in her hair, lit by a single streetlamp that cast a sickly green hue. Her hand waving goodbye until she was out of sight.
    My throat ached as I choked back tears. Shane mercifully told a joke, a dumb one, but we all used it as an excuse to laugh while tears ran down our faces. All of us laughing, grief masked by twisted smiles in the back, while my dad drove. I will always love Shane for giving us permission to cry the only way he knew how.
    My dad suddenly found himself a single father of three. No wife to help. We moved into a one-room house behind my uncle Otto’s machine shop. I remember the smell of spark and metal and grease. My room was a narrow hallway closet. Dad built a narrow loft bed, complete with a ladder for me to climb, and my few clothes hung from the coat bar beneath it. I left the sliding accordion doors open when I slept, but enjoyed closing them during the day, making a neat fort of my closet-room. Dad built oddly shaped bunk beds in the triangular water closet for my brothers, with holes strategically placed so the water pipes could grow through the beds like metal trees. The first time my dad hit me was in this house. It felt like suddenly my whole life was submerged and I was living underwater. All his values seemed to change overnight. His actions ran in stark contrast to the sober Mormon family man I knew, and went against every tenet of our faith. We went from being a happy churchgoing Mormon family to being the estranged kids of an absent mother and a dad who was a drinking, smoking ladies’ man.
    Dad began dating another woman, and when she became pregnant, the church excommunicated him for having a child out of wedlock. They were on-again-off-again, but when they were on, we often stayed in her two-room trailer. I got the couch. They tried to make a go of it, and made it through the pregnancy. My dad was most nervous about how I would accept my new little brother, but he didn’t need to be. I loved him instantly. He was like my own baby. I held him, dressed him, and loved him dearly. My dad sent me to a therapist again at this point to help me deal with any feelings I might have about it. I felt he should be in therapy, notme. I remember sitting on a brightly colored pillow across from the brightly dressed therapist with the brightly painted smile and telling her so. I said, “My dad is doing this to our life. I’m not. Why am I here?” Soon after Nikos’s birth there was a bitter breakup, and I only got to see him rarely. I was able to maintain some contact with him for a few years and babysat him several times, but he