When I was seven, I watched my father get crushed by the weight of a failed tenure bid. I of course didn’t understand what was going on at the time, but I remembered a change in his posture, how he went from saying, I thought proudly, that he was a professor at the University of Chicago to uttering, almost under his breath, that he was an adjunct professor at Roosevelt. I didn’t know until years later how he had struggled to piece together a life for us, that the unfinished book on Ralph Ellison that had been a passion, that lost him tenure, was now an unfinished book that meant nothing good to him. He took other jobs on occasion, among them driving a taxi, and fell hopelessly into himself. When I was just fourteen, I was the one who found him in the basement with only most of his head intact. My mother and I were not close after that, but I never felt a sense of loss, something I always chalked up to a failure in my character. She took a job at a travel agency after my father’s failed tenure bid and never seemed too happy about it. I always imagined that she left for exotic places every morning, sunny places with palm trees that somehow also failed to make her happy. I left her to join the Marines and she hated that. She died of stomach cancer gone undetected when I was in college. I held her hand while she died, and it felt strangely emotionless, I think for both of us. I was, in fact, quite sad, but she seemed so thankful for her end that I had to respect it. I had been an only child, and with her death I was completely without family. I never felt that aloneness, or at least acknowledged it, until I learned I would lose my Sarah.

I never told my daughter stories about my parents, my childhood. She was surrounded with stories, very good ones, of Meg’s parents, Meg’s siblings, Meg’s childhood. But I never shared much, my belief being that I didn’t have much to share, that I didn’t remember much, which was true enough. In my mind, in my heart, I had not come into full existence until the birth of my daughter.

I had taken to working in my office late, or at least starting out there before finding myself at a near-campus tavern. I was in my office at ten one evening when Hilary Gill stopped at my open door.

“I want to thank you,” she said. “Again.”

“Why? You did the work.”

“You know what I mean.”

I nodded.

“Why are you so prickly with me?” she asked.

I was impressed with her directness. I liked it. “Am I?”

“Yes.”

I didn’t say anything but closed the folder on my desk.

“You don’t think you are?”