Hillbilly Elegy

never learned how a man should treat a
woman. Chip may have taught me how to
tie a fishing hook, but I learned little else
about what masculinity required of me
other than drinking beer and screaming
at a woman when she screamed at you.
In the end, the only lesson that took was
that you can’t depend on people. “I
learned that men will disappear at the
drop of a hat,” Lindsay once said. “They
don’t care about their kids; they don’t
provide; they just disappear, and it’s not
that hard to make them go.”
Mom perhaps sensed that Bob was
regretting his decision to take on an
additional child, because one day she
called me into the living room to speak