After nearly a year of defeats and humiliations, that metastasizing contempt had manifested in a voice. An appalling, secret wish came hissing from a dark corner of his mind: that she would just get it over with herself. That she might follow the lead of their shriveled-up, empty-eyed neighbors and either run away, or just up and OD already.

Today, Henry didn’t think twice about opening a beer. The first gulp put half the can in his belly and his ass on the stool next to Junior. Now that the checking account had been temporarily replenished, he dug the checkbook and a flurry of overdue bills out of the junk drawer. The papers wouldn’t lie flat, each sheet warped by palm sweat, every envelope tattered like a trout gutted by fangs rather than a filet blade. The second was a more measured sip. He flipped past the onion-peel carbons to the first blank check, then paused. Peered up to the white container on the topmost shelf. Set down the ballpoint. He asked what the boy was working on and tussled his hair.

“Dad!” The boy yanked away. His Forest Green Crayola resumed coloring in rectangles on a worksheet.

“Hey. Your pa asked you a question.”

The crayon stilled. The boy turned a sneer to him. “Mom calls you dad. Everyone at school calls their dads dad. Why do you want to be so, so …”

“So what?”

“So different.”

The beer was gone.

“Well?” The boy’s sneer crimped into a familiar smirk. His mother’s. “Your son asked you a question.”

Henry didn’t have much of an answer. Whereas Papa had a direct tie to his fatherland and a genuine, culture-reinforcing motive for his insistence on being called Papa, Henry was far removed from this half of his heritage, its bonds dissolved by geography, its traits diluted by Mom’s genetics. It’d been even further washed out of Junior by a second coating of Caucasian from Michelle. All Henry knew of Tagalog was mahal kita (I love you), putangina (son of a bitch), and how to count to five, maybe ten if he chanted out loud and let the sequence’s rhythm swing him all the way through anim, pito, walo, siyam—but what did it matter? He crushed the can’s sides.

“Because papas are different,” Henry said.

“How?”

“Because papas do what they have to.”

“What?” the boy said. “So you’re saying regular dads don’t?”

“Nope.” Henry flattened the can into a medallion, then rose for a second. “Not like papas do. One day you’ll see, ah.”