For the first time that morning he faced me. A fresh dotted line of scabs trailed down from the left corner of his lips, the tracks of the schmoof that had spent the previous night snoozing inside his stomach: Sluuuurp. Sluuuurp. Sluuuurp. Sluuuurp. It was my fault that Dad had been subjected to that. I felt on my back the full weight of what I knew.

“I want you to be great in that play, Jimmy. I want you to be great at something. Or, heck, if that’s too much pressure, I just want you to have fun.” His smile faltered, but he tried to make it work. “Don’t stay out too late. I mean, no later than you need to. I won’t give you grief about it. Not this week. Maybe not next. What I’m saying, Jimmy, is that I’m trying. All right? I am beginning to try.”

I looked into the sun, hoping my fresh tears would tip back into my eyes rather than streak down my cheeks. Posed in that way, I managed a nod. From my peripheral vision, I saw Dad’s hand raise as though he was going to pat my back. Part of me prayed that he wouldn’t—the tears would roll from my eyes as easily as marbles. Part of me wished that he would.

He stood, taking the gloves from his back pocket and slapping them across his thighs to knock free the adhered grass. He adjusted his glasses and I thought, in its own way, the Band-Aid around the temple had a sort of courage—it clung to the glasses with the same tenacity that Dad clung to his responsibilities in the face of a lifetime of fear.

A minute later he was pulling out of the driveway in the San Bernardino Electronics van. He gave me a toot of the horn as he backed into the street. It was only as he pulled away, observing the posted speed limit, of course, that the screen door behind me opened with a crow squawk.

Tub clomped down the steps as if he had been sewn together from corpse parts. He staggered past me, stood in a wide stance upon the lawn, and stretched his arms in a yawn. The pink-smeared shirt pulled taut across his wide back.

“You—ow. You have a nice—ow. A nice talk with your—so sore! Talk with your dad?”

I shrugged. He looked from me to the step I sat on, but seemed dubious that his leg muscles could take the pressure of lowering his bulk. Instead he just stood in place like an overstuffed scarecrow, teetering in the mild breeze. I waited for the spill of expletives that would mirror my own feelings: we needed to screw irons bars to the floor beneath my bed, whatever it took to stop the trollhunters from returning.

Instead, his puffy, pillow-scarred face cracked into a lopsided grin.