Junk Food

The first thing the girl could remember about her parents is how, one night a few years ago, though her brother and she were kneeling, tears bucketing down their kindergarten cheeks, they would not stop fighting. The mother had whacked the father with the hook end of a wire clothes hanger, and so the father's lip was bleeding and he kept on going HIT ME BABY HIT ME BABY COME ON HIT ME. The mother was terribly scared of the father, so she called the police, and the cops came even though the only act of domestic abuse was on her own behalf. When the authorities got there, there wasn't much they could do but sit the misbehaving parents down at the kitchen table and attempt to mediate a bad marriage, since neither party wanted to deal with the bullshit that came along with pressing charges. The man cop took the father downstairs, the woman cop stayed with the mother at the kitchen table. The two children peered through the kitchen door.
"He's going to stay somewhere else tonight. I'm sure, once he cools down, everything will be fine. He's being very understanding, you know." The woman cop saw the kids and their tear stained cheeks, an older brown-haired girl with scarce teeth and a younger boy with cute curls of blonde hair. "You should probably take your kids out to dinner. Something greasy."
In the back seat of the car the little boy stayed quiet. Through oversized glasses, he looked out the window of the Subaru Outback, staring down the desolate, post-8-o'clock streets of a well-to-do Suburban Virginia. The girl asked the mother questions like, "Mom…are you okay?? Did Dad hit you?? Why was his lip like that? Why did the cops have to come? What happened?"
The mother answered the girl's questions like she always did when it came to personal matters she was ashamed of.
"It's none of your business, dear. Dad won't be home tonight, be quiet, everything's fine."
Though she ate nothing, the mother watched, satisfied, as her children's hands, greased over by calamari, brought big-bunned burgers to their tiny mouths, pleased she'd blessed them with a gift her husband, a healthy surgeon, never would have. The girl was the only one that talked, blabbing about figure skating and piano lessons and the kids at school, all things that seemed trivial and unimportant in the aftermath of a domestic crisis. She got chocolate cake for desert. The boy ordered a sundae.
Upon entering the driveway of the white two-story house, the cops were gone and the kids were put to bed. The mother stopped by the kitchen for a bottle, as she always had, and consumed its contents on her side of the bed with the company of a blaring TV screen, to wake up early, alone, and with a self-imposed obligation to hide the bottle (or two) of wine under the bathroom sink. The nanny would come up to the childrens' bedrooms, get them ready for school and make them breakfast, while the mother would drink coffee with milk before work, and that evening the father would come home late for dinner, and everyone would sit around the kitchen table together, not-speaking, and from that point on everything would go about as usual.