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“Esau.” He didn’t answer. I heard him breathing; we were only a few inches apart. I held my arm up with my other hand because it was getting tired, and knocked as I fell asleep, feeling the knocks grow further and further apart, rousing myself to keep knocking, drifting off.
    And then I was half awake, my father picking me up from the floor. It was dark, I was cold. I snuggled into my father’s chest, and he brushed my hair away from my face with big, clumsy hands and put me into my bed and sat beside it, breathing whiskey breath in the dark.
     
     
     
    My father was huge and irretrievable, like an era.
    He was inseparable from the size of his hands and his belly laugh, and the worried wood of the bar at Frank’s where he sat for hours and days, shouting with the men; he was the sound of the front door slamming and the shuffle of slippers on the floor on mornings white and blinding with winter light. He was the same as his profound, useless, oppressive love of his wife, and his desperate love for his son. He was the amorphous shape of need, a need that grasped at whatever was left: a small girl, easily picked up, of manageable size and always at hand.
    My mother loved us in a way that was both fierce and abstracted, like an animal. We were something that had happened to her, and she lived with it, loving each according to our need and without frills. My father couldn’t forgive her for it and called her cold. He meant it as an insult, of course. I think she may have taken it as a simple statement of fact.
    I sometimes think I see my mother. She is always disappearing around a corner ahead of me, her long camel-hair coat swinging behind her like a door swinging closed.
    I say, when asked, that I hardly remember my father. I remember that sometime that year, he started to fade. And then without warning he was gone, leaving me to wonder if he’d ever been there at all.
     
     
     
    It was late October. No snow that stayed yet, only frost that bit the tips of the tall grass by the lake. I snapped them off as if they were heads. Winter was coming. I could feel it around the corner, lurking like a thing in the closet. Esau only sometimes went to school. Most days I left the house alone in the blue early light and walked to Davey’s house, and together we headed down Main Street, crushing patches of frost-covered grass with our shoes. My father didn’t come home sometimes, or he was always home, heavily home, holding down his La-ZBoy and breathing through his mouth.
    One evening, I went down to Frank’s with my mother after dinner to pay the bill. She pushed open the door of the bar and I blinked in the smoky haze. The bar was full of men whose heads swung up and nodded slightly to us. I followed her to the bar and climbed up on a stool.
    My mother slapped her gloves down on the counter and pulled out her pocketbook. “How much do I owe you?” she asked.
    Frank shook his head. “Let’s call it good,” he said. He smiled at her.
    “Frank, no.”
    “I mean it.” He gave my mother a look and she sighed. He tapped my nose and asked me if I wanted a soda. He glanced at my mother. “On me.”
    I drank a bottle of orange soda through a straw, studying the gleaming rows and rows of bottles behind the bar.
    “What time did he come in here?” my mother asked.
    “Opening.” Frank poured her a drink.
    She looked at it. “How long did he stay?”
    “Mosta the day. Ate something.”
    My mother nodded. I leaned against her shoulder, and she sipped her drink.
    “How you been, carrottop?” he asked me.
    I shrugged, suddenly shy. It felt funny to be here with my mother.
    “Getting prettier all the time. Look just like your momma.”
    I smiled and blew bubbles in my orange soda and got them up my nose. They laughed, and my mother cleaned me up with a napkin.
    We walked home together slowly, looking up at a yellow moon.
     
     
     
    I sat in the La-Z-Boy after school, keeping my father company while he lay on the couch,