As it turned out, we sold it at a fairly small loss and went to stay with my parents for a month. My mother was valiantly cheerful and supportive and made a dress for me and a sweater for Frank. Her smiling intentions, however, were outweighed by my father, who looked as if he were on trial. His eyes seemed larger, liquefied, unable to focus—not on what he saw but on something within him. He was quiet most of the time, but it was a restrained silence. It broke the night he got drunk and cried in front of me at the kitchen table. He said I should never have married Frank, he had a feeling from the beginning something was wrong, it was Frank’s fault the way Regina turned out, and my life was ruined, our marriage now only a charade. I didn’t bother defending Frank against the insult, because I knew it was the only handle available to my father for expressing his long-term disappointment in me. And although I decided there and then it was time for us to leave, I resolved to wait a few days so my father wouldn’t think he had driven me away. Two days later, Barry came up from Texas with his wife and kids for a week’s visit. Assuming the role of brotherly protector, Barry spent his first night home making a blatant gesture of avoiding Frank. Later in the evening, Karen, Barry’s five-year-old, crawled onto Frank’s lap and asked him to help her with her puzzle. Under Barry’s watchful eyes, Frank’s hands shook in an obvious effort not to touch her in any way. She sat there smiling and babbling to him while he resisted her by quickly assembling the puzzle. When he finished, he told her to take it and show the others, then got up and played bartender to avoid sitting down again.

We left the next morning. We drove south, then west. Six days later, we arrived in Los Angeles. Gloria and Pat helped us find a furnished apartment in Santa Monica, but after two months we felt hemmed in. We decided to rent a small house and found one here in Long Beach soon after Frank got his bartending job. It was easy enough for him to get because he wanted to work the day shift.