That evening, we had a quiet dinner of pizza and salad, Noah’s favorites. I had even bought Coke to go with it, though the Cantrell boys were not soda drinkers if only because we couldn’t afford to waste money on food-like products that were high in calories but had no nutritional value to speak of. On KUDZU, Elvis sang about cold Kentucky rains.
Dinner did little to cheer Noah, and when pizza fails to bring a smile of pleasure to my little boy’s face, I know the weather inside his mind is dark and stormy.
Your food is getting cold, I said.
“Why, Daddy?” he asked plaintively. It came out sounding like “ai dah eeeeee?” He had spent countless hours in speech class just to learn those three sounds, which he could only approximate but not yet master. He spent many evenings with a straw stuc
