Sterling

His mother named him Sterling out of bitterness. His father had given her a sterling silver wedding band along with a promise to replace it with a gold one when they had gotten a bit more settled and the money was there. But by the time he was born she was still wearing the old ring, and so he forever bore the mark of her bitterness in that moment. Of course Sterling didn't know the meaning behind his name until later. He was about sixteen, as he recalls, when his mother stopped protecting his father. It began slowly, her subtle slander, but quickly grew - as most things of that nature do - into a habitual and ferocious dialogue. Or actually, it was more of a monologue, for Sterling never had much to add to her diatribes. His memories of his father were sparse and hazy at best. He could remember a particular afternoon when he was about four; his mother had gone to the country to visit with her sister Constance, and his father's deep contempt for Aunt Constance compelled him to invent a reason to avoid the gathering. So it was just the two of them for a few hours, walking around town and lunching in the park. Sterling remembers the day in scattered snatches: his father swearing when he spilt strawberry ice cream on the front of his dark jacket, introducing a wide-eyed Sterling to his friends at the pub, the look in his eyes when he talked to the woman in the red dress. Just before his mother was due to return home, the man with a pink stain on his stomach marched up the stairs to their dark wooden door with a sticky-cheeked mite slung over his shoulder. But these memories were rare, mostly Sterling remembers a sense of longing when he thought of his father...