June 1973

How do I describe the following three and a half years? Words don’t…can’t…make you understand what life was like for my mother and I. My father’s murder was covered up by the neighborhood and my mother, despite the crippling pain it must have brought her. When the police eventually came to investigate, on request from his job, a story had already been carefully collaborated by the families.

They told the police that my father had been cheating on my mother and she had found out and then kicked him out. Lies about arguments heard were told, along with a few scenarios where the neighbors “saw my father sneaking out late at night.”

It was enough to get the police off our street. They saw the pain in my mother’s eyes, but misinterpreted the source. Everyone was petrified of Tommy Taffy, the lies told in order to assure safety of themselves and their families.

An example had been given, a lesson learned. Listen to Tommy Taffy. Do what he wants. And pray that one day he’d go away and leave our broken community.

My father wasn’t the only one who had been punished. I noticed a couple of the neighbors sporting broken limbs or bruised faces. I can’t even imagine the lies they told the outside world to cover up the truth.

Tommy was a haunting nightmare in our lives and we could find no way to get rid of him. The nightly lessons resumed, just my mother and I now, sitting on the couch listening to our captor explain how to be good people. I was ten then and it made me sick, age slowly clarifying just how dismal our situation was.

But I kept my mouth shut. I kept it shut for my mother. The memory of my father’s execution burned bright in my skull every day.

The years that followed my father’s death marked a change in Tommy’s habits. He now slept with my mother, every night leading her to bed after I was tucked in and told one last lesson about life. I would lay awake for hours, listening to her cry from her room.