One night I got to the bar and they’d scheduled two of us by mistake. Maggie, a girl from the Philippines who was into astronomy, was already pouring. She told me that Mars was supposed to be out that night and how to look for it. She told me it had a radius of 2,110 miles and that it took 687 days to go around the sun. Once I got home, I stood outside our building and found it, a tiny red flickering light in the sky. It made me wonder how many other stars and planets were out there just beyond that I couldn’t see, and how that didn’t make them any less real.

I climbed the fire escape and found the window locked and the lights out in our apartment. I started banging on the frame, and just when I thought I was going to have to go back down, I saw the door at the end of the apartment open, and the light from the hall showed a man leaving.

My wife came to the window in a bathrobe. Her smile was weak as she turned the lock. She opened the sash and said, Aren’t you going to come in, and I reached out and touched her cheek and then slammed her head into the windowsill, and that is the first time I hurt her that night. I pushed her back into the room and she fell on the floor and knocked over a table and a lamp and that was the second time I hurt her. The third time was when I grabbed her by the hair and dragged her down the hallway to the kitchen. The fourth happened when I kicked her. The fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth, and ninth came as I slapped her, my palm itching. I thought of a knife, but I took the blender sitting on the counter instead and I threw it, and that was the last time I hurt her. It knocked her out. Her nose was broken and there was blood seeping into the terry cloth. I leaned against the wall to catch my breath. Leigh Ann was crying in the bedroom.

I sat down at our kitchen table—the table where we ate English muffins and spread jelly—looked at my trembling fingers, and realized that I was happy. Later, after the bruises were gone and she left me, I sat in the same place and touched my skin, my muscles aching as if my body had been pulled into pieces and hastily patched back together, but in that moment I knew that I had touched something raw and wonderful that resonated in my bones, and it wasn’t until I heard the cries of my daughter that I came back to that apartment, that room, and that life which was before me and I told myself, You have a child, you have to take care.