was as difficult to discern, predict, or prepare for as the weather, and if he’d be able to take his Tonka trucks down to the vacant area two houses down in the alley, where he could dig imaginary foundations for imaginary houses that would become his imaginary city.

Sometimes, Like This was an unseen cacaphony that would grow louder when, awakened by it, he would pad downstairs, one stair at a time, stopping to peer through the balusters like an inmate in a more literal prison, and from around the corner could hear the crash-bang of pots and pans; the THWACK! of cheaply-made laminated kitchen cabinet doors being slammed shut; on rarer occasions — rarer, not by much — the crash of a plate hitting some harder object, followed invariably by a curse whose spectrum on the scale between “muttered” and “shrieked”.  This was his least favorite permutation of Like This.  With it came words hurled downward at him — “LITTLE….JUST LIKE…FATHER…SHIT” — or sentences spoken in Adult Language; cloaked in irony that he could not understand, except by the tone that carried them, or, sometimes, words without actual words: a glance, a glare, a look that made  him shiver inside, a look that he sometimes saw her direct at Daddy (rarely to his face).

Other times, Like This meant her being nowhere to be found.  He generally knew where she actually was at these times; if it wasn’t her and Daddy’s bedroom

but it’s not her and daddy’s bedroom any more, there is no more her and daddy’s bedroom or ‘her and daddy’ for that matter, and surprise, there’s no more Your Bedroom either, you little shit

it was the living room couch, where the curtains would be found shut even when the sun was streaming comfortingly and invitingly through his own sole bedroom window.

Today’s Like This was different.  She had been sitting at the wheel of the car, holding it without motion, without starting the engine.  He saw that the large silver ring she always wore on her right hand, the one with the turquoise stone that looked like half an egg, was right above the crack in the vinyl of the steering wheel of the aging car.  She had been sitting that way, sitting Like This, for what he guessed was five minutes, an accurate guess, as it happened; they had just learned telling time in kindergarten, and Mrs. Kaufmann had pasted a gold star on the “Good Job Board” that hung in the classroom for all to see.  It had been his first gold star, and he had been waiting for the moment to tell Mommy or Daddy, and he was angry to have thought of it now, when the car sat inert in front of what he was coming to see was and never would again be their house, and when Mommy was deep into this new, scary chapter of Like This, where the closed door was absent except in her straight-ahead stare.