He took a sip of the bourbon and shook his head with a laugh. “So then I leave for college, and everything is good. But when I come home for my first Christmas break, my mother tells me that she’s kicked my father out—finally. I remember how she said that word. As if it had been a long time coming. And I swear I didn’t have the first inkling that my parents were unhappy. I just thought my dad worked all the time, but I considered that to be the price of being a mathematical genius. I figured my mother had made peace with it long ago. I don’t remember exactly what I said to get her to explain the reason to me. Maybe I asked where he was living, but the upshot was that my father had a second family in the same town where we lived.”

Stuart stopped then to take another mouthful of bourbon. His eyes looked as sad to me as I imagine they must have when his mother first told him this truth.

“What do you mean, another family?” I asked.

“Like you hear sometimes about these guys who are traveling salesmen or truckers or whatnot, and they have one family—you know, kids, a wife, a dog, a house with a mortgage—and then in another town there’s the same thing. Just like that, except my father didn’t see the need to leave town to have both. He had literally married someone else—of course, not legally, but the other woman didn’t know that. They also had a little boy—my half brother, Stephen, six years younger than me. And a house, and, yes, a dog too. So there you have it. My father wasn’t this genius closed off from the actual world staring at a blackboard late into the night. He was a guy juggling two families.”

“Is he still alive?”

“No. He died four, maybe five, years ago. After my mother threw him out, he downsized to one family and that suited him just fine. I didn’t talk to him for the rest of the time I was in school, but a year or two after I got out, it occurred to me that everything I knew about the man was a lie. I wanted to know the truth. I didn’t tell him this, but the reason I sought him out back then was so that I could learn how to avoid becoming him.”

“And did you?”

“I sincerely hope so,” he said with a chuckle. “One of the things he said, which I remember quite vividly, was that he became a mathematician because it is the only discipline where utter perfection is achievable. He said that a great poem or piece of music could never be perfect because it was always subject to the eye, or ear, of the beholder.”

“And so you became an art teacher,” I said.