I was glad my father never hit my mother. I knew his heart was full of a pain, but it would have hurt us more in the long run. Anyway, you can’t fight pain like that. Like a boxer. Pain like that plants you in the ground, so it knows where you are, and you have to wait for it to get bored of you. That’s when it gets easier. You have to wait for it to go up the hill looking for someone else to ravage and you lose sight of it in the blinding sun for a while. That’s when it stops hurting.