Educated

“Well, the last time I saw your brother,” he would say, emphasizing this
last word as if he were spitting on it, “he had both hands wrapped around my
cousin’s neck, and he was smashing her head into a brick wall. He would
have killed her, if it weren’t for my grandfather.”
And there it was. A witness. An impartial account. But by the time I heard
it, I no longer needed to hear it. The fever of self-doubt had broken long ago.
That’s not to say I trusted my memory absolutely, but I trusted it as much as I
trusted anybody else’s, and more than some people’s.
But that was years away.