At Searchlight, my supervisor, Frank Leary, is a seasoned veteran. He looks like Karl Malden from The Streets of San Francisco, with a bulb nose, enormous gray caterpillar eyebrows, and a slanted, sideways smile that’s nothing like Hap’s but often reminds me of him anyway. For thirty years, he’s been on the job, and it’s almost miraculous how sane he is.

He and his wife, Carole, live in North Beach, in the same neighborhood where Joe DiMaggio grew up. Theirs is a gently sagging Victorian with a wraparound back porch and a grill the size of a small car. On Sundays, Frank cooks for his three married daughters and eight grandchildren plus husbands and neighbors and anyone at all who happens to be hungry. I was there one Sunday just a few weeks after I started seeing Corolla.

“How’s therapy going?” he asked, clipping off the h so that the word came out more like “tare-apy.”

“Fine,” I said, opening another bottle of Heineken. “It’s not really my thing. How come you don’t see a therapist, Frank?”

He chuckled a little, and then used his grill tongs to point at the yard, his kingdom. The yellow roses and the big garage full of power tools. The sloping lawn where four of his granddaughters were playing on a massive blue tarp like a homemade Slip ’N Slide. The girls were all between five and seven, shrieking and tumbling in bright two-piece bathing suits as Carole squirted them with the fizzing end of a garden hose. “This is my therapy.”

I smiled, knowing he was completely serious. But it wasn’t an uncomplicated solution. In the yard, I watched one of the girls split from the herd to run back and forth on the lawn for some reason only she understood, her body a blur of color. The picture of innocence, of vulnerability. “You must worry about them a lot.”

He lowered the lid of the grill and faced me, hands on the hips of his Kiss the Cook apron. “Some days are tougher than others. I’ll work a case that gets in too deep, and then I want them all to move in, like a bunker. A bomb shelter. But they have their own lives, and that’s as it should be. I get this gripping feeling when they leave sometimes. Like an elephant is sitting on my goddamned chest.”

“And then?”

“And then the feeling passes and I clean my grill and put the toys away. I go to bed and kiss my wife good night, and when Monday morning comes, I go to work. When you love someone, there’s risk. You can’t avoid it.”