Walking alongside and a little behind his father, he remembered Tom’s rare bursts of unbridled anger. Once, as a child, Alex had found a new Pirates hat, tag still attached, sitting on the kitchen table. Assuming it was a gift for him, he’d put it on and spent the afternoon running around the yard wearing it while kicking a soccer ball with his sister. When he came in for dinner, he thanked his father for the gift, and was unsettled by the stony expression on his face. The hat had been meant as a gift for his cousin’s birthday. How many hats and shirts and everything else did he already have? Why would he take something without asking? And then ruin it? He’d handed the hat to his father and gone to his room crying, not coming down for dinner despite his mother’s coaxing. It was too much—the humiliation of having believed he deserved something he didn’t, the scowl in return for his good-kid gratitude. He didn’t want to live. When he finally crept downstairs, to the rest of the family watching television without him, his father silently got up and microwaved him a Hot Pocket. A Hot Pocket! Why didn’t he give him leftovers? Was it an apology? Further punishment? He loved Hot Pockets, but even he knew that they weren’t really dinner. Then they all watched Frasier like nothing had happened.

He wondered what he imagined all kids wondered about their parents—did they forget their cruelties, their accidental bursts of raw emotion? Or did they just try to cover them up in the hope that the kid, the sieve-headed nonentity, might be the one to forget? Probably, Alex knew now, nobody forgot, and life accumulated these misunderstandings until somebody died. Kate had said that his father wasn’t so bad, and maybe it was best to simply believe her, since it was possible that she was in a position to know. Her father had probably been a real shit. Then again, her kids were assholes. But then again, they were just kids. Then again and again.

“Really wonderful out here,” his father said as they overlooked a perfect stream trickling from a rocky outcropping. At this point it was all so much natural wallpaper to Alex, a late nineties screen saver.

“It’s nice to be somewhere you can think,” Alex said. They were competing for a place in the World Series of banality. Dad Sox versus the Alexander Cardinals. Dad in five.

“Don’t want too much of that!” his father said, picking his way closer to the water.