Sins of the father

The car screeched to a stop. A small boy, frozen in his tracks, began to cry. And wet himself.
The ball he'd once been chasing rolled on down the street.
It's amazing how fate steps in to those life-defining moments. When they work out, it's good fortune; when they don't, the Gods are out to get you.
The youth's mother, still white with the terror she saw in shit-your-pants slow motion, ran to the boy.
"Are you all right?"she asked. "Oh, my God, Jared. How many times do I have to tell you not to play near the street. You wait until your father hears about this."
The driver, equally aghast and whiter than mom, climbed out of his car and asked if everything was OK.
"No thanks to you," the protective hen shot. "You kids scream up and down this street without regards to anything or anyone. One of these days you're going to kill someone."
The kid, a 20-something really, slunk back into his car knowing the woman was lashing out in fear and irrationality. He had not been in the wrong; actually driving the posted 25 miles per hour speed limit.
The boy, Jared the 4-year-old, actually was at fault; as much at fault as a 4-year-old can be.
But now he was wet and knowing his father, prone to fits of rage, was going to "talk to him" when he got home from work.
Even at 4, Jared knew to duck first and wait for the bullets to stop falling.
He had been accustomed to waiting at the top of the steps when his dad, John, came home from the insurance office where he worked.
Good-mood daddy meant sliding down the steps into his arms; bad-mood dad meant slinking back into his blue Thomas the Tank Engine plastered room.
Today, surprisingly, was good-mood dad. John had closed on a deal he'd been working at for months.
But Jared did not slide down the steps, even at the sight of his father's smile. The thought of his mother's threat burned in his brain, a scar he would carry for a long time; that no matter who he surrounded himself with that he was "this close" to anger, disappointment and rage.