Tom Junod

And it wasn't like that was simply for show.

My father had an affair with my first friend's mother when I was three years old.

And I knew it.

You knew it?

I knew it.

Somehow?

Somehow.

I knew that something was wrong, something was off, something that made my mom unhappy.

That was always sort of the compass needle.

I talked to you before about always crying around my dad and that I felt sort of powerless around my dad.

the way that I tried to deal with that was to try to like figure out my dad.

And so, you know, I never stopped sort of spying on him, snooping around.

And then when I was 16,

My father came home with something that he had never had.

So my father was not like an organized guy.

And he kept all his work stuff in like a manila envelope.

The handwriting scrawled all over it.

One day he comes home and all of a sudden he looks like every other guy on the Long Island Railroad.

He comes home with a Samsonite briefcase.

And the minute I saw the Samsonite briefcase, I did not think, oh, my dad's like a normal guy now.