I handed the mail to him and he said, "OK."

I knew he had had a fight with my mother and I could tell he was agitated, but since he didn't say anything about it, I didn't either. My mother walked in, sat down and suddenly blurted, "I'm leaving you."

My father and my mother began discussing the fight. When my father tried to justify his actions, I walked over to my mother (who was wearing a shirt with a high collar), pulled down the collar and showed the big bruise to my father, who had caused the bruise by biting her. I pulled the collar farther down, showed him the mark on top of her breast, and acerbically remarked, "She has marks all over her body where you have beaten her. Regardless of what she might have done, there is no excuse for your having done this."

My father proceeded to say he had beaten my mother because she had left him the night before and had gone to a bar with another man. Now I was baffled – I had thought the pommelling had occurred that day, not the day before. Confused about the actual time of the beating, I questioned my mother about the sequence of events. I thought one of them wasn't telling the truth.