Never say goodbye

We never said goodbyes in my house. Not when we were leaving for work, or school or to just hang-out. Goodbyes were final. Goodbyes were scary and, as a kid, I had enough scary things going on without having to worry about a simple goodbye.

The day my oldest brother, Joe, left our family to join the Witness Protection Program started off like any other day only instead of my mother leaving for work and my father ushering the rest of us off to school so he could drink his way to oblivion, my parents left together with Joe.