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Sam is three when mom comes home broken, drinking and distant, with a squalling and needy baby who won't shut up — but at least he gets picked up and held while he's being fed. By the time Sam turns five both he and baby Jimmy have learned that squalling doesn't help, and neither of them gets held anymore.
Sam is eight when mom starts bringing Frank home, and already prone to sliding quietly out the back door and spending time alone in the fields or the barn. He knows the man plays mean pranks when he's drunk but Frank makes mom giggle and shine when they keep pouring around the kitchen table, so Sam tries to get along with him.
He's ten when they marry, and by then he and Jimmy have learned the danger signs of drunkenness and temper. By eleven mom's off in space again and Sam takes refuge with friends after school; Jimmy's too young for that, and doesn't make friends anyway. But Jimmy and Frank make an unfair truce — they ignore each other completely, so when he's home it's always Sam who draws Frank's hard hand and has to get patched up after, while Jimmy watches silently from the corner.
By the time he's twelve Sam spends more time off the farm than on it, hating every member of his family and most of the rest of the world. Three times he tries to leave Riverside, but his haphazard ideas don't get him very far and having the cops dump him back on Frank's porch is a nightmare.
Sam is fifteen, maladjusted and withdrawn, when he plans to leave the farm behind for good. He gives away almost everything he owns and burns the rest in a pile behind the barn, and the smoke smells like freedom at last. He has hitched halfway into the next county when the news starts chattering about the crazy kid who drove a Corvette into a quarry.
There's only one Corvette in Iowa.
He rides another ten kilometers, staring out the window, before he asks to be dropped off. Sam makes his way back to the farmhouse alone and, in a dark corner of the mudroom, finds his delinquent twelve-year old brother healing his own broken hands with Frank's medkit. He understands in a blinding flash that the comparatively soft life for which he's resented Jimmy is a lie, that every time he's run away to safety he's left Jimmy to be Frank's only target.
Destroying a car is a lot flashier than taking a fistful of sleeping pills, but then, Sam always has preferred a quiet exit.