“You all slept through, virtually from birth,” he told her, suspecting he was lying but unable to locate the truth of it. There had been a child whimpering about an earache and falling asleep with the hurting ear pressed against the heat of a fresh-ironed dish towel. But was this himself as a child? He could not remember Alissa with an iron in her hand. He did remember getting up from bed in the pit of night and bringing a squalling armful of protoplasm back to bed and handing it to its mother, who was already sitting up with her nightie straps lowered, her bare chest shining. He would go back to sleep to the sound of tiny lips sucking, little feet softly kicking. He had been the baby, it seemed. Yet no social workers came to the door to rescue his children from abuse, no neighbors complained to the authorities, the children waited for the school bus dressed like the others—like little clowns in the space-age outfits of synthetic fabrics decades removed from the dark woollens, always damp, that he himself had worn—and ascended more or less smoothly through the passages of school and, like smart bombs, found colleges and mates and jobs, so he must have been an adequate parent and householder. “It frightens me,” Don confessed to his daughter, “how little I remember.”

The Saturday afternoons of it all, the masculine feats of maintenance, the changing of the storm windows to screens, the cellar workbench where spiders built webs across the clutter of rusting tools. The heating, electricity, telephone, and water bills—he could not see himself writing a single check, but he must have written many, all cashed, cancelled, and stored in Alissa’s attic, along with the slides, the scrapbooks, the school reports and tinted school photographs that had accumulated over twenty-two years of days, each with its ups and downs, its mishaps, its sniffles, its excited tales told by children venturing toward adulthood, through a world that on every side was new to them. Don had lost the anatomy. He was like an astronomer before the Voyagers, before the Hubble telescope, working with blurs. He remembered being in love with one or another man’s wife, getting drunk after dinner, telling Alissa to go to bed, and playing over and over again “Born to Lose,” by Ray Charles, or maybe it was the Supremes’ “Stop! in the Name of Love!,” lifting the player arm from the LP repeatedly to regroove the band, and being told with a shy smile the next morning by his older son, “You sure listened to that song a lot last night.” The curtains for a moment parted; there was a second of shamed focus. His son’s bedroom was above the den where Don had sat mired in himself and the revolving grooves. He had kept the boy, who had to get up for school, awake.