I was seven years old, maybe eight. We lived in the one story house in Encino on Babbitt Avenue, which I always thought was the funniest name, the street right next to Louise where I got in the car accident and broke my femur on the way to school one morning. The Encino house was the first house my parents owned in California. I remember during the earthquake, most of the houses in my neighborhood were destroyed, but ours was almost untouched, the foundation barely bruised. The only thing that broke in any way was my dad's Peruvian clay sculptures of ancient Indian adobes that tumbled from their shelves and crumbled, as if they were a city in themselves and took the brunt of destruction away from us. 

The kitchen was big enough for a square table my dad had built in Philadelphia, the orange wood stained and sanded by hand, the four chairs forever a reminder of dinner time punishments when I wouldn't finish my plate and be forced to sit for at least an hour on the uncomfortable seat until my mom didn't care anymore that I had wasted the corn and let me go. That night, my mom sat across from my brother and me. It was dinner time, which meant eight or nine, usually nine. My mom worked until six like most working mothers did, went home after work and cooked her family food, but in our case, it was always Persian food, which takes an exhausting amount of time to make. So it was probably nine. My dad wasn't home yet. I can't remember if that's what was really the problem that night, if they had gotten into a fight, and my mom naturally snowballed her emotions into one final reaction that fell on my brother, like it usually did. My brother was a difficult kid, especially when he was younger. He must've provoked it, but before I knew it, my mom was crying and screaming and pounding on her earlobes, smacking her face, her ears. She wore gold stud earrings with long backs, and the backs dug into her neck with every smack, until a thin drip of blood came down the left side. Her tears dripped down her face and the blood dripped down her neck, and my brother and I sat there in shock and silence watching our mother unravel. 

That was a usual night for us.