If Mom had been here, would she have let Papa pull last night’s stunt? Seeing her face might help answer this question, and so Henry approached the wall of books. He tugged out the framed photo that had been taken in Manila during the only transpacific trip they’d all gone on together. In the photo, the three of them were leaning against a parked magenta jeepney. Papa was young and trim, a marshmallow grin eating up the bottom half of his brown face. He was holding both of Henry’s wrists up in a triumphant pose that stood in stark contrast to the toddler’s confused, helpless expression. Mom stood to the side, her skin as sunbrowned as Papa’s, her fluffy dandelion perm frozen midsway. A gentle, observant smirk. Wrists crossed behind her as if either holding back a surprise or just restraining herself. She’d always been so much more hands-off than Papa.

She’d had one go-to joke, something about how the only sane application of laissez-faire policies was reserved for parenting. The touch-a-hot-stove, learn-from-your-mistakes approach. Because children, unlike the market, had the potential for self-regulation, and thereby needed as much freedom as possible for autonomous development in order to mature and grow into healthy, self-regulating adults.

Papa never begged, but he sure as shit differed. Mom had been right to believe that Papa’s rigid, old-school expectations of obedience and classroom success would only push Henry away from intellectual curiosity, which they did, and far too early in life for him to naturally coast into an academic field of interest as she’d hoped. Instead, Henry liked Legos and professional wrestling. As he grew older, he fell into roughhousing with the other latchkey kids and building dirt-bike jumps in the woods, activities that let him be reckless with his body, as if the only research that could ever entice him was the study of his own physical thresholds.

These proclivities began emerging early, but ossified when he was in second grade. A worksheet had prompted him to describe his parents’ jobs. Under the skirt-wearing silhouette, he’d written My mother is a nakanamis, proud that he’d managed to spell out such a long, complicated word all on his own. However, when it came back graded, the teacher had circled his linguistic achievement in red and drawn a question mark. Back at home Mom chuckled, then corrected his attempt, sounding out e-con-o-mist as she drew each letter, then explained an irony he didn’t fully grasp about the word’s origin, Greek for household management.