Hillbilly Elegy

stand on the porch and stare at him,
unblinking, clutching a hidden weapon.
When he spoke to the court’s child
psychiatrist, he learned that I had begun
acting out at school and was showing
signs of emotional problems. (This I
know to be true. After a few weeks in
kindergarten, I was held back for a year.
Two decades later, I ran into the teacher
who had endured my first foray into
kindergarten. She told me that I’d
behaved so badly that she had nearly
quit the profession—three weeks into
her first year of teaching. That she
remembered me twenty years later says
a lot about my misbehavior.)
Eventually, Dad told me, he asked