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ever truly happy or if he was merely satisfied and drowsy, like after a good meal.
    Then I woke up one morning and the air was so spicy-sweet I thought it might singe off my nostril hairs.
    Mom said the change in our lives wasn’t that sudden, and that Dad’s break was a long time coming. She said maybe if we’d paid attention to the smaller things, the bigger thing wouldn’t have whacked us over the head the way it finally did. All I know is that I will always associate ruin with the sticky-sweet smell of cardamom bread.

    One morning last June I woke up at six and could smell the change in the air. I opened my window because inside had become close and airless.
    I wandered down to the kitchen where I found Mom and Dad. Mom was wearing her OSU Beavers T-shirt and boxer shorts. Her brown curly hair was winging out around her head, like clusters of purple-black grapes. Dad was in his favorite fleece robe and sitting at the table in the breakfast nook. His short blond hair was matted against his head as though he’d been running his fingers through it for hours. Most of him was pale, but the skin under his eyes was the color of coffee grounds.
    I watched from the doorway as Dad buried his head on his arms. “What have I done?” he mumbled. Mom stroked his back and shoved in front of him more cardamom bread, spread thick with honey butter. Then he’d start crying again and Mom would have to reapply her bread cure, like aspirin.
    “I don’t know why you’re taking it so hard,” Mom said. “You were just doing your job.”
    At this point I was tired of lurking in a doorway, so I came in stretching and rubbing my eyes as though I had just woken up.
    “Hey,” I said. “What’s going on?”
    The two of them looked up. “Nothing, honey.” Mom patted me on the arm and shot me her comforting celebrity-chef smile. “Have some cardamom bread.”
    Dad sat upright. “That’s not strictly correct,” he said. “It’s not nothing .”
    “Come on, Paul. Stop beating yourself up. This guy was no worse than some of the creeps you’ve defended.”
    Dad snorted. “Yeah, well, I wasn’t suckered by them .”
    Dad’s area of expertise at the public defender’s office was guys who were remiss in their child support. Deadbeat Dads, he called them. He said that most of them could hardly be called dads at all. He didn’t like any of them; wouldn’t invite one home for dinner—a big deal at our house. If he passed any of his ex-clients on the street, he didn’t even nod. All my father did was speed these losers through the courts as quickly as he could.
    “He acted perfectly normal,” Dad said, talking about his latest deadbeat. “He’d been an alcoholic but he’d seen the error of his ways, and with the help of his church he wanted to atone for all he’d done.” The oven timer went off. Mom pulled another braided loaf from the oven as Dad picked at the thick slab of bread on the plate in front of him, making tiny efficient crumbs that were perfect spheres, the air squished right out of them.
    “I wish you wouldn’t take it so hard, honey,” Mom said.
    Dad pounded his fists on the table like gavels. “Not take it so hard? I helped him get his kids back, Claire. And that guy doesn’t deserve to be a parent. You didn’t see all the crap they pulled out of that house. There was bleach and rat poison everywhere. Then this whole arsenal. An AK-47 assault rifle in his closet. Pistols, shotguns…” He waved his hands around in the air as if he was surrounded by the weapons he was describing, and his only option was surrender. Then he crumpled like a used tissue. “Jesus,” he muttered. “There were little kids in that house. Kids that I helped him get custody of.”
    There were a lot of things about his mini-rant that I didn’t understand. I got why firearms made him so uppity, but bleach? Rat poison? Was owning them really a prosecutable offense? What if the guy just had rats and hard-water stains?
    Mom