Chapter 5
Chapter 5
Late in October of my seventeenth year, Daddy caught a terrible case of the flu. He was throwing up, had diarrhea, and could barely even keep water down. Momma kept making him drink some of her home-canned tomato juice mixed with a little cool water, or she would feed him her chicken and vegetable soup.
“I don’t want that!” he snarled at her.
“I don’t care if you don’t want it, Paul, you need to drink it,” she returned. One of the few times Momma ever stood up to him was when he was sick or when one of us was sick. At those times, Momma’s word was law.
Daddy would drink it, throw it up, and exclaim, “I don’t want no more! It will just make me puke.”
Momma was relentless. “Paul, if we don’t try to keep some fluids down you, then you are going to dehydrate, and then
