He watches her disappear down the hall, looking at her legs, the bruises on her thighs from where she’s banged them against the checkout counter at Safeway where she spends her days at the cash register.

He thinks about what it would be like if his wife didn’t have to work. His mom never had to work. Well, she worked plenty on the ranch, but she never had to go and take a job outside the house. Not till pop lost the ranch anyway.

Could have been different.

He stares into his coffee cup and thinks about what he could have done to make it different.

– Hell with that.

He walks to the front hall, sits on the little bench Cindy found at a yard sale and stripped and sanded and stained so it would look nice in the house. He sets his cup down, pulls on one of his scuffed steel toes and laces it up.

Things could have been different. Doesn’t mean they would have been better. Not for him. Not for Cindy. Not for the boys.

He stands and stretches and tries to remember how much gas is in the truck and whether he has any cash in his wallet to fill it up.

– Hey.

He looks at Cindy, coming toward him in her bikini pants and bra, running a brush through her hair, Andy’s cesarean scar across her stomach, a good looking woman.

She taps the brush against his arm.

– I’m just saying, you could tell George you want him to come with you. It doesn’t have to be a contest to see who says something first.

– It’s not a contest.

– Well you sure act like it is. Both of you.

– Cin, the boy is getting older. I’d like to see him making some decisions on his own that don’t involve riding his bike to the bowling alley or copping a few extra bucks so he can get someone to buy him a six pack.

She reaches up and loops her arm around his neck.

– Just because the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, that doesn’t mean it’ll grow the same way.

He pulls out from under her arm.

– What? Where the hell did that one come from? That a Hallmark card?

– You know what I mean. Even if he’s like you, you worked out just fine.

He looks at the wall, the series of pencil marks that rise up it, charting the growth of his sons.

– I got lucky.

He goes out the front door.

– Almost through with that?

Paul doesn’t look up, just folds the newspaper and places it on the table in front of his father’s chair.

Mr. Cheney pours himself a cup from the Mr. Coffee.

– Don’t have to give me the whole thing. Finish reading what you were reading.

Paul gets up and takes his cereal bowl and spoon to the sink and washes them and puts them on the dish rack. He picks up his own coffee cup from the table and starts for the kitchen door.

His dad is at the table, fingering the corner of the front page.

– You got in late last night.

Paul stops.

– Ya huh.

– Out with the guys?

– Ya huh.

– How are they?

– I’uh nuh.

Mr. Cheney takes a sip from his cup.

– What are you doing today?

Paul stands in the doorway, back to his father, shrugs.

– Summer almost over. Got any big plans?

Another shrug.

– Never see the guys anymore. Used to play over here all the time.

Paul walks.

– My head hurts. Goin’ to my room.

Mr. Cheney moves to the door.

– Need anything?

Paul keeps walking. His father watches him disappear down the hall, then sits at the table and waits.

He hears it when Paul slips past the kitchen and into the garage, hears the automatic door swing up, and knows his son has ridden off on the bike he bought him for his sixteenth birthday in lieu of the car he really wanted.

He gets up and goes to the cabinet next to the refrigerator and squats to reach behind the stack of newspapers Paul hasn’t taken to the curb for recycling in weeks, and takes out the jug of Delacort brandy hidden there. He holds it up and checks the level against the mark he made on the label last night. No change. He takes the bottle to the sink, pours half his coffee down the drain and replaces it with brandy, makes a fresh mark on the label and puts the bottle back behind the papers.

He swirls the coffee and brandy and takes a drink. Need to pick up a new bottle today. The Liquor Barn in Pleasanton this time. Haven’t been there in a few weeks. Not that he’s got anything to hide. Just nobody’s business how he lives his life.

Unfolding the paper, knuckling his glasses higher up on the bridge of his nose, he reads the story about Ramon Arroyo being shot in the leg by police and he and his brothers being busted on an assortment of charges: stolen goods, drugs, weapons, resisting arrest.

Good lord.

He thinks about Caesar Arroyo, the boys’ father. The squat bundle of calluses and muscle that he used to see swatting his boys’ ears at soccer games when they didn’t play up to his standards.

He’d tried to have a word with the man once. Walked over to him on the sideline and smiled and suggested to him that his boys might play better, have a better time if they didn’t feel quite so much pressure. Caesar had stared at him, then waved one of his boys over. Ramon? Fernando? How long ago was this? Could it have been the youngest one? The one Paul had that trouble with?

The boy had come over and, staring Kyle Cheney in the eye, Caesar had slapped the boy hard. And stood there waiting until Kyle walked away, back to the adjoining field where Paul and George’s team was playing.

Bob Whelan had been there. He’d seen what Caesar was doing and looked away. He could have done something about it. Whelan is the kind of man who could have said something to Arroyo and made him think twice about knocking his kids around like that. At least made him stop doing it out on the soccer fields where the other kids saw it and got freaked out. But he didn’t do anything. Just like most people. Most adults just don’t have the kids’ best interest at heart.

Any wonder the Arroyos have grown up like they have? A drug lab. Here. In his town. When do these things happen? How do they happen? Don’t people know they have to monitor their children? Care for them? Love them? Otherwise, things like this happen.

Tragedies. Family tragedies.

He gets up, tops off his cup again. Marks the bottle. Then goes down the hall to his son’s room.

He fingers the Master Lock Paul mounted there last year. He takes out the duplicate key he had made the afternoon he was doing laundry and found Paul’s key, forgotten in the pocket of his dirty jeans. He opens the lock and goes into his son’s room and sits on the bed.

He remembers the room as it was, before it became plastered with posters of Iron Maiden and Van Halen and Ozzy Osbourne and Ted Nugent and AC/DC and The Scorpions and Judas Priest and all the others dripping blood and wrapped in Spandex and surrounded by skulls. He remembers when the floor was littered with Legos and Lincoln Logs instead of microwave burrito wrappers and empty matchbooks and torn copies of Rolling Stone and crushed beer cans pushed under the bed and discarded cigarette pack cellophanes. He remembers this room before it smelled of spilled beer and smoke and the stale incense that’s meant to cover it all up.

He gets up, takes a long drink, sets his coffee cup on top of the dresser and starts to search the room, just as he does every day.

An empty half pint of Fleischmann’s vodka and the same old stash of Playboy back issues with Bob Whelan’s address label on the cover.

Booze and dirty magazines. Kyle Cheney knows there’s worse somewhere.

When Paul first started changing, when his mother took off and left them alone six years ago and he started talking back, that’s when he’d had to start this. She’d driven a wedge between him and his son. That’s what he couldn’t forgive her for. Not the stupid way she left them, but the things she’d said to the boy, the things she’d said about him. Things she’d screamed that scared Paul. Things Paul was just too young to understand.