“My sister thinks I should call the police if I think he’s a danger to himself or others,” she said.

She put down her phone and sank deeper into the chair.

“Vic, you deserve better than this,” I said. “We all do.”

“It’s just exhausting,” she said. “Why is it so impossible to just relax and be a person?”

It still seemed to me, then, that it was wrong to relax, that it was better to fight against Mike’s drinking and Lisa’s inconstancy and Amanda’s whatever-it-was than to accept things for what they were. I’d already tried complacency with Lisa, I thought, and learned that it bred disaster. But this was before I understood that going through these problems again and again—and we would, for a few more years to come, be in a similar place, attempting to understand and control our children, failing to tame our wayward partners—was the worst kind of complacency, a refusal to take responsibility for our own happiness. It took me a long time.

Victoria got up from the chair and sat down on the couch next to me. I rubbed her back and mouthed empty clichés as she sat hunched over and watched Big on TV through her fingers. Eventually she lay down with her head in my lap and fell asleep almost immediately. I felt a flood of protectiveness toward her, and some concomitant, uncalculated desire. I registered the shifts Victoria made as she slept, felt the wistful texture of her fluff of hair. It scared me.

I put a blanket over her and gently shifted her head from my lap onto the couch cushion. She made an unconscious murmur of protest and settled back into sleep. I sat down to read in the armchair across the room, but mostly just watched Vic’s breath rise and fall. When I got to the point where I was hallucinating extra presences in the room from exhaustion, I went back into our room to lay awake next to Lisa.

Mike did come home, close to dawn. He and Vic had a fight that left a picture frame broken and the kids in tears. When I stepped out of our room he went out the front door and took off in his car. He got arrested outside Pittsburgh after crashing through a toll lane barrier with a .21 BAC. Victoria rented a car and drove up there to deal with him, so Lisa and I watched Patrick for the rest of the week. That old Davy Crockett song became his tune of choice (he had a CD of Disney classics stashed away somewhere), and when I think about those days, I hear “killed him a bear, when he was only three” in that goofball old-timey voice.