Carter leapt up from his seat and grabbed the microphone from his father, 
staring out at the audience, whose gaze was now focused squarely on him. 
After such a dramatic gesture, he didn't know what to do next. He hadn't 
had a plan when he leapt from his seat, and he didn't have a plan now. He 
looked into the audience trying to figure out what to do.

He had done it because it was his mother's funeral, and his father was 
standing up above the casket on the stage saying nice things about her. 
The reasons why Carter found this so offensive were many: firstly, his 
mother was absolutely not a nice person (most of the mourners were there 
out of obeisant relief, not out of sadness, at her passing), and secondly, 
he knew his father did not even believe the nice things himself. He had, 
after all, gone through an extremely messy divorce with her several years 
ago, when Carter was ten.

He had sat in his bedroom and, out of curiosity, had listened to fight 
after fight through the wall. Carter didn't find these fights disturbing. 
He hadn't cringed as his father called his mother a bitch and his mother 
threw shoes at his father. After all, she was kind of a bitch, and the 
shoe-throwing seemed to him more comical than anything else. His parents 
had fought as long as Carter could remember, but these fights were more 
intense and interesting; they were the jabs of pugilists feeling each 
other out. The knockout blow came when his father left the house.

Carter was unhurt -- he had never thought of his parents as particularly 
stable or right for each other or even a united front of any sort -- but 
this feeling quickly turned to dismay when his mother claimed him in the 
divorce. According to Missouri law, because Carter's father was the one 
filing for divorce, his mother had first dibs on him and, for some reason, 
she chose to exercise those dibs. 

According to his father, there was nothing he could do about it, but he 
knew that his father also didn't particularly want him; he knew that he 
reminded his father of his mother, and that this made his father quite 
irrationally angry at him sometimes. So at age ten, Carter was stuck: the 
great theater of his parents' fight was gone, and he was left with his 
mother, a mean, selfish person who treated everyone, including Carter, 
with a gaze of manipulative appraisal. Carter sighed the first sigh of his 
life with this realization.

It was ten years later, and Carter had made it out of the house, when his 
mother was abruptly diagnosed with late-stage cancer and died within a 
matter of a few weeks. Carter was, again, relatively unmoved; she hadn't 
been a big part of his life. But here, at her funeral, he was bewildered; 
it was the first funeral he had been to, and he knew that people weren't 
supposed to speak poorly of the dead, but he assumed this just meant that 
her funeral would be short. But several people he knew didn't really like 
her had gone on for far too long about her winning smile and sparkling 
humor (it sounded like a horoscope), and then his father had gotten up, 
and, extremely composed, had told the story of how he had met her and what 
was important to her, without once mentioning the divorce.

It was too much for the incredulous Carter to take, and after a couple of 
minutes of being aghast, he had leapt up and taken the mic. He breathed a 
deep breath as he looked out at the hundred or so people who were there to 
mark his mother's passing, scanning their faces for a trace of a clue, not 
sure what to do. The gasps turned to silence and he stood on the stage, 
his stare turning from bewildered to defiant, his jaw clenching, his brown 
eyes seemingly growing in size as he locked eyes with every person in the 
first couple of rows. 

At last, his father tapped him on the shoulder and beckoned towards the 
microphone. Carter clenched it in his left fist tightly, and clenched his 
right fist to match. As his father laid a hand on the microphone, Carter 
readied his right fist to defend himself, and prepared to lash out against 
hypocrisy and abandonment. His father pulled the microphone from him and 
Carter closed his eyes and swung with all his might. When he opened his 
eyes, a few minutes later his father was on the floor, surrounded by a sea 
of people dressed in black. Carter took one last look at his mother's 
casket, felt nothing once again, and walked out into the night. He pulled 
his jacket around him as he crossed the street, took out his car keys, and 
drove off.