“I think I’ve caught a spring cold. I never know how to dress this time of year.” But he did leave the factory early; he couldn’t get home fast enough. To their surprise, he dragged Gregory and Iris out into the threadbare, muddy yard to play a little softball. Their puzzled efforts to please him, to find the ball with their wild swings, broke his heart. Without their understanding it they were trying to work an exoneration for the sinner turned back into a father. He would have liked to stay in the yard on and on, enclosed in the bubble of family life, never telling Phyllis and never answering the phone, but the afternoon grew dark and cold, and they all went into the warm house, where Phyllis was making the dinner, putting the meatloaf into the oven and fluttering her nearly invisible pale lashes to rid herself of the tears from, he guessed, having chopped onions. She was not quite herself; there was something stale and studied about her cheerfulness as she chatted at the table with the children and fed little Eve, in the high chair, her applesauce and creamed carrots.

When, that evening, with the four children at last in their beds, he began to confess, she cut him off. “I know. Jock came over this afternoon and told me. Well, do you want a divorce?”

“No.” The softball game with the two older children, taking their determined stances at the imaginary plate, imitating the gestures of ballplayers on television, cocking the bat so it pointed straight up at the fleecy, tossing April sky, and then so touchingly striking out, had erased his recurrent dream, a kind of fever dream, of a life with Faye.

“Well, you better tell them that, before they go ahead and get one.”

Of the subsequent agitated palavers—the four of them at one grim, eventually drunken conference in their house, where he had more than once been an illicit guest, and then in scattered tête-à-têtes, as the increasingly public aftermath unfolded, between Jock and Phyllis, Jock and him, Phyllis and him, Faye and Phyllis, every pairing except the one it was all about—Owen had the defective memory of the severely embarrassed. He didn’t want to remember it. Moments continued to stick in his mind as contexts melted into forgetfulness: Jock asking him, across the booth in the old-fashioned aluminum roadside diner toward Lower Falls, “Did she have climaxes with you?”