We huddled there laughing. All it took was for one of us to offer a fake belch and lift a pinkie in the air. Lying there between them, the room was so dark I could barely trace the lines of my mother’s dresser and the rack where my father hung his coat, Gladys Fitzhue down the hall, snoring and burping away, with no knowledge of all we had whispered about her, my father’s arm curled up and over his pillow, my mother’s warm backside safely tucking me in, their breath in the rhythm of sleep. I had no idea how hard life could be. I lay there safe and pretending we were on a boat far out at sea—my father’s snores, the ocean, my mother’s sighs, the wind.

She said, “Good night, Lilliput,” using the pet name she had called me as long as I remember. When I was in high school and had to read “Gulliver’s Travels,” I was shocked to find my name there, a name I thought she had made up herself. She was not a reader, and so I suspect it was something my father had probably said first and then she’d claimed for her own; in fact, I’m sure of it, because later he told me how she should have called me “Lilliputian”: a person and not a place. Had they aged together, she would have grown to love the bits and pieces of knowledge he housed in his mind, the mechanics of which were not unlike the many watches he worked on there at Waltham Watch. He was precise and constant, and she was anything but; what brought me a great sense of security in life (his steady sameness) probably bored her. In fact, I sometimes have worried that my steady sameness bores your father.