Reality

Standing in the unlit appartment doorway Jake imagined he must look like one of the old private detectives he used to read about except, instead of a rain coat, he wore a black and red felt jacket and instead of a fedora his Montreal Expos baseball cap. Indeed from a distance it may have looked like he was as well with the only light coming from his smouldering cigarette illuminating his face in a bright red glow.
It was three in the morning and he had nowhere to go. He was a runaway and had been running away since he was thirteen but it seemed at sixteen he may have finally succeeded. He had already on his own for a week and it seemed that nobody was looking for him this time. The problem was he didn't know for sure and remained hidden whenever he could.
A runaway in a small town, his town boasted a population of four thousand souls with four churches and four bars. One police cruiser and two officers who split twenty four hour shifts. One of the two officers was a far removed cousin of his if he was to believe his mother's stories. He believed she may have been saying that to frighten him, anyway he was adopted so if they were actually related to the police officer it still didn't mean he was.
He was adopted at two weeks old so didn't know any other way but instinctively knew his adopted family was disfunctional. His adopted parents hated each other and had six children of their own that they mistreated equally. His adopted father had gone off to the great war after having two boys and a girl and everything changed. He returned broken and violent lashing out mostly at his children because his wife would fight back viciously and he sooned learned not to challenge her, she was of hearty pioneer stock and was every bit as tough as her own father who had cleared the land of his farm by hand, with his kids helping.
Somehow they managed to keep it together long enough to have three more children, two more boys and another girl and it became evident that his mother had buried herself in the day to day raising six children but in a household of abuse children will leave at the earliest possible age and his mother found herself with an empty nest and a danaged husband. Post traumatic stress syndrome was something not to be discovered until decades after his death. They took to sleeping in seperate bedrooms in seperate parts of the house, growing to hate each other more every day, looking for reasons to annoy each other.
Mother took to watching other peoples children relying on something she knew and that she knew would occupy her mind and time. And then Jake came along.
While his adopted parents never hid the fact he was adopted their was always a stigma attached to him. He couldn't know what it was as a child but as he grew older he began to hear things that made him think of infidelity.