The Handcuffs My Stepfather Used On Me
What happened next took maybe fifteen seconds, though it has replayed in my head slower than that every night since. He wrenched my arm down, spun me half around toward one of the kitchen chairs, and from somewhere, a drawer, his belt, I still do not know, he produced a pair of handcuffs. Real ones. Not toys, not a gag gift. Actual steel, the kind he liked to tell people at the VFW hall he had earned the hard way, though the truth, which came out later, was that he had bought them at a military surplus store in Grand Island fifteen years earlier and never once used them for anything but intimidation.
The metal closed around my right wrist with a cold click that I will hear for the rest of my life.
My mother’s voice came from the doorway, thin and shaking. “Wayne, please. Please stop.”
He did not stop. He snatched the phone out of my cuffed hand and pressed it to his own ear.
“Whoever this is,” he said, “this woman is impersonating a federal officer in my house, and I want you to know I’ve got her restrained.”
There was a pause on the line. I could picture exactly what was happening on the other end, because I have sat in that office. Colonel Price does not raise his voice. He gets quieter when something is wrong, and the quieter he gets, the more careful the next person in the conversation needs to be.
“Identify yourself,” he said.
“Wayne Tolliver. I’m head of the Ashford VFW post and I sit on the town council, and I don’t know who you think you’re protecting, but this woman has been telling people she outranks half the Air Force for years.”
Another pause. Longer this time.
“Mr. Tolliver,” Colonel Price said, “you have just interfered with and attempted to terminate an official Department of the Air Force communication, and you have just told me, on a recorded line, that you have physically restrained a United States military officer against her will. I would strongly advise you to remove whatever you have put on Major Carver’s wrist in the next ten seconds.”
I watched something flicker across Wayne’s face. Not fear yet. Confusion. The specific confusion of a man who has spent so long being the loudest voice in a small room that he has forgotten there are bigger rooms where his voice means nothing at all.
“Major,” he repeated, like the word physically hurt him to say.
“That’s correct,” Colonel Price said. “And I am going to need you to put her back on this phone.”
Wayne did not hand the phone back right away. He stood there, my mother crying quietly by the stove, Darnell lowering his own phone for the first time all night, and I watched my stepfather do the math on his own face, watched him realize that whatever he thought this moment was going to be, it had already stopped being that.
He handed me the phone. He did not take the cuffs off.
“Sir,” I said. “I’m sorry for the interruption.”