It was equally worrisome when he quit talking altogether and got to slurping sweet suds and hoppy ones as the television channels ran through their schedules in front of him and the clock wound circles on the wall.

His mother’s vigilance had a whiff of warden about it. Something truly bad might’ve happened if she didn’t mind the fences of her husband’s moods.

She slept no more than three or four hours a night until she didn’t wake up at all one morning two days before she would have turned forty-six. Jonathan knew it was a sad thing. Tragic even. But she’d brought it on herself. No one made her everyone’s keeper or made her stand sentry until it killed her.

Jonathan had spent hours—months’ worth of hours probably—trotting along on the trail of his father’s obsession with the minutiae of secondhand sales. His dad was animated by abundance, sometimes the shabbier the better, and by the suspended animation of all that stuff just sitting there in between belonging to someone.

Flea markets, swap meets, and pawnshops were his father’s favorites, but the peripheral booths at gun shows and trade fairs would do, too. He wasn’t above enjoying a yard sale either, but his wife made him promise that the lawns of their neighbors, in whatever town they were living in, were off-limits.

Jonathan Spera the Elder was warm and happy and competent and just a touch holier-than-thou when he roamed the no-expectation zones of the world with a little cash in his pocket. In tow, Junior watched the traffic on the road, fantasizing where the long-haul truckers would end up when they pulled in and unhitched their trailers.

But the knowledge of the worth of things, and specifically of how a span of years magically transformed the worth of things, soaked into Junior and became reflexive.

After his mother died, Jonathan didn’t have the patience that she had for calibrating each day against his father’s ability to cope. So he’d introduced his father to marijuana and plain cigarettes just to keep him calm.

He smothered the embers of his father’s chemical swings with blankets of nicotine, caffeine, sugar, and THC, until his dad was up to slightly better than three packs of cigarettes a day and just under an ounce of weed every two weeks. A few cases of protein drink, a few economy-size tubs of instant coffee, an assortment of junk food, and all the root beer and Pabst his father could drink was the standing order. That and a paid cable bill kept the old man effectively paralyzed. Happy enough, as far as Jonathan could tell.