Three Word Wendesday XLI

Welcome to Three Word Wednesday. Each week, I will post three (or more) random words. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to write something using all of those words. It can be a few lines, a story, a poem, anything. I'll also attempt to write something using the same three words.

Leave a comment if you participate. Many fun and interesting people might visit your blog.

This week's words are:
Reach
Heavily
Cheek

When I was ten or eleven, or maybe nine, sometime in that blissful stage of life after you've learned to ride a bike without training wheels but before you begin to like girls, I went home from school one afternoon with Jimmy Hardin. Jimmy and I were not especially good friends, but back then friends were often chosen simply by who was in your class that particular year.

We spent the early part of the afternooon doing normal things, tossing the football around, making paper airplanes and setting them on fire just before we threw them. Well, normal for us anyway.

His mother had called us in to get ready for supper, and I was in the bathroom washing my hands when Jimmy's dad came thru the front door, yelling.

"Jimmy!! Where you at? Why ain't this yard been cut?"

I quickly turned off the water and peeked around the edge of the doorway to see a large man in a dirty-looking flannel shirt lumbering thru the living room. He walked heavily, taking long, deliberate steps which could be felt across every inch of the small wood frame house.

"Leave him be, Ray. The boy's got company," Jimmy's mother spoke in defense of her son, but I bet she wished she hadn't. Before she had time to shut her mouth, the man brought his right arm around and delivered a crushing blow to her cheek with the back of his hand.

"Don't back talk me, woman!" It was the first time I had ever seen a man strike a woman. I was too scared to breathe.

"Stop it, Daddy!" Jimmy came out of his room nearly crying and ran towards the man with his fists balled tightly. Before he could reach his destination, however, he was easily swatted aside by the man's huge arm. It sent Jimmy about eight feet across the room sprawling to the floor. He appeared unhurt, at least physically.

"Don't you hit him!" Jimmy's mother yelled as she grabbed the boy under his shoulders and pulled him to his feet. "Dammit, Ray, you've been drinking again. Get out of here!" She then came towards the bathroom where I was now crouching and trembling. "Get your things together, son. I'm gonna drive you home." I expected her to be crying, but she wasn't.

"You ain't going nowhere till I get my supper!" the man yelled. He was stumbling badly now and luckily was in no shape to stop anyone from going anywhere.

In the car on the way home, Jimmy didn't say a word, except to tell me bye when we got to my house. I think he was embarrassed. His mother apologized several times for her husband's behavior and asked that I not mention what had happened to my parents. She was nice to me, so I did as she asked.

Over the next year or two, word got around at school that Jimmy tried to run away from home a couple of times. Most of the kids joked about it and made fun of him. But I never did.

"Sticks and stones didnt break any bones, bet we never left well enough alone. Then one day he ran away from home, you see..."