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little boy—but I flushed with shame about my crack. I was doing exactly what Cindy had counseled me not to do. If I teased him, I would go back to California with no more answers than I had when I got here.
    “Come on, Dad. Talk to me.”
    “About what?”
    “About the house. About the past week of telephone calls. About anything.”
    He sighed, then dropped his head and stared at his hands, his fingers interlocking and twisting.
    “There just doesn’t seem much point to it.”
    “It…”
    “The house. She’s gone. What’s the point?”
    “You’re not gone. You live here.”
    “Yeah.”
    I waited. I hoped he would say more, that he could give me something more to work with.
    “I don’t really know what to do with myself. I just sit around here, waiting. For what?”
    “Are you feeling depressed?”
    “I don’t want to talk about all that psycho bullshit. I’m just tired, that’s all.”
    “It’s not psycho bullshit. It’s real. And somebody can help, if that’s your problem.”
    “I said I’m just tired.”
    “OK.”
    We sat in silence. The Eagles kicked a couple of field goals to go ahead, and then, with just a few seconds left in the first half, the Redskins scored on a touchdown pass, and you would have thought we were both fans the way we jumped out of our seats.
    When I got up to go into the kitchen for another slice of pizza, Dad followed me.
    “I didn’t know how much I would miss her,” he said. “She was dying for a year, but I can’t believe she’s gone. I miss her.”
    I thought he was a real son of a bitch for saying that. I hadn’t made the trip so I could feel my heart break for him, yet that’s what happened. I wondered if I should feel guilt that his pain had brought us together. And then I discarded the thought. It was his pain or mine.
    I wrapped Dad in an awkward hug. He endured it stiffly, his open right hand patting me impatiently on the back until, finally, I let him go.

MILFORD | LATE JUNE 1979
     
    I DIDN’T NEED much time to figure out what Jerry had warned me about that first evening. Dad and Marie were fighting, a lot. They would try to hide it, but how much hiding can one do in a twenty-six-foot-long fifth wheel? I did what I could to stay away from it, pumping quarters into the pinball machines in the trailer park office, tearing around in the city park across the street, and when Jerry would let me, hanging out at his place.
    The problem was that Jerry protected his scant hours away from us. That summer reinforced the truth of just how separated my brother and I were, by years and by interests. We had nothing in common, save for a father we tried to please, to varying degrees of success, and a desire to not take on collateral damage when Dad and Marie clashed.
    Just as I easily deduced that Dad and Marie were fighting, it was similarly easy to figure out that the source of the quarrels was money, specifically Marie’s ability to make it disappear. While she sometimes accompanied us to the field—reading in a lawn chair, under an umbrella, and out of earshot of the loudest grind of the big machinery—Marie often took two-and three-day sojourns to Salt Lake City to visit friends and favored stores. When she came back, she carried bags of blouses and pantsuits and shoes and jewelry. Each unhappy return ratcheted Dad’s stress level up a notch or two. Jerry said he had begun to wonder how many notches Dad had left. Black dread filled my stomach when he said that. I knew that when Dad reached the end of his patience, pain would follow.
    The hours in the sagebrush and dust, while arduous, provided a respite for all of us. The days began early, at five a.m., when Dad convened a breakfast at the diner. If Jerry and Dad’s other hand, Toby Swint, were more than a few minutes late, Dad paced around outside the door, muttering under his breath that one more fuck-up—just one more—and he would by God find somebody who wanted to do work. When they finally arrived,