At school, kids told his children that worms would soon be eating their father. the cruelty shook him, as if he hadn't examined the dark side of human nature before. "Can you imagine? They get it from their parents.
"People hate me," he said. I told him that some people hated me too. "No," he said. "They dislike you. They hate me. I don't know why."
I asked Rob if he'd ever heard of a Rorschach test. He hadn't. People look at ink blots and see different things, I explained. What they see says more about them than about the splotches on the paper. "You're like the ink blots."
"I see what you mean," he said.