"I saw him, eventually," Nelson says, "as a loser, who ugg boots on clearance never found his niche and floated along on Mom's money, which was money her father made. Mom-mom—my grandmother on my mother's side, the Springers—would always say how I resembled Fred, her husband. He was on the shortish side like me, and sharp at business stuff, and bouncy. But being a loser wasn't the way my father saw himself. He saw himself as a winner, and until I was twelve or so I saw him the same way."
     "I loved my father, too," says Annabelle, "the man I thought was my father. He could fix anything—you know how around a farm everything is always breaking down, he never ugg boots clearance let on he was flummoxed, just would sigh and settle down to it. He had this wonderful confident, calm touch—with my mother, too, when she'd let her temper fly. Whenever the excitable of my patients get to acting up, I try to think of him and act like he'd act."
     Nelson's inner ear tells him there is something wrong with this. He is being sold something. But it may be that his ear is jaded, hearing all day about families, dealing with all the variations of dependency and resentment, love and its opposite, all the sickly inturned can't-get-away-from-itness of close relations. If society is the prison, families chanel bags are the cells, with no time off for good behavior. Good behavior in fact tends to lengthen the sentence.
     "He sounds great," he grunts. "Every time my father tried to fix anything around the house, it got broken worse." He hears these words and wonders if they are fair. He remembers his father digging in a garden he had made in the back yard, even building a little wire fence to defend the vegetables against rabbits. He remembers his father on one of their car trips somewhere pleading with him not to get married, not to get himself trapped in marriage, even though Pru was pregnant and chanel bags the wedding day set: he shocked his son by suggesting an abortion and offering to pay her off. I just don't like seeing you caught, you're too much me.
     I'm not you! I'm not caught!
     Nellie, you 're caught. They've got you and you didn't even squeak.
     He had fought his father off, accused him of being jealous, denied the resemblance the old man was pushing. You don't necessarily have to lead my life, I guess is what I want to say. Well, he hadn't, exactly, and marrying Pru hadn't worked out, exactly, but what pains Nelson now is seeing that his father had been trying as far as chanel bags his narcissism allowed to step out of his selfish head and help his son, trying to shelter him from one of those disasters that most decisions entail. He had tried to be a better father than Nelson could give him credit for, even now. He says with an effort, "But he wasn't all bad. We used to have great games of catch in the back yard. And he'd take me to Blasts games out at the stadium. Once we even drove down to Philly for a Flyers game, somebody had given him tickets."