KENNETH LOWELL: Sam had turned four. My brother and I are four years apart, so I suppose that started it. Also around that time, my brother’s wife gave birth to number two, and several of my coworkers became fathers for the first or second time. All I know is that when I turned onto our street and saw kids playing stickball, I wasn’t just picturing Sam anymore.

It must have been a Saturday night, because Lil was not in the darkroom. Sam was asleep, and Lil was getting herself ready to come to bed when I reached for her arm. Let’s get married, I said. I had not been planning to say it, but it felt like the perfect thing at that moment, as if Lil and I were standing at a vista overlooking our future. Lil was unbuttoning an old shirt of mine that she had worn over her blouse to wash the dishes, and I remember the way her long hands poked out from the ends of the rolled-up sleeves. I remember the book beside my bed: I was halfway through Molloy and was using a bookmark Sam had colored so thickly with crayon that it was leaving flakes of colored wax on the pages. But mostly I remember the startled look on Lil’s face. I want to be Sam’s real father, I told her, and the father to all her brothers and sisters to come.