“I was too drunk to notice.” He pulled on his shirt, then stepped up on the porch to hold and kiss me. He tasted like coffee, but smelled like the river, like mud and moss. “I had a great time last night,” he said, but he looked kind of down when he said it, like it had happened a long time ago.

“Go for a swim?”

“Just my head.”

I followed him into the house and he poured me some coffee, then refilled his cup and we sat down across from each other at the small table beneath the window, a sunbeam lying across the tabletop. Les looked outside, his face in shadow. I started to reach across the table to touch his hand but something made me stop. “You okay?”

He looked right at me. “Sometimes I feel guilty because I get paid to roam the countryside and think about things. You know how your mind can just drift off? And next thing I know I’m thinking about Carol, and how much I’d love to see her married to someone who loved her the way she loved him.” He looked out the window. I wanted a cigarette, but was afraid if I got up for one he would stop talking.

“Once, outside El Granada, I drove up to a 7-Eleven right before they closed. Some boy had just pulled a Stop and Rob, but I didn’t know it yet, and I was getting out of my cruiser just as he came out the front door, this real skinny Filipino kid, no older than sixteen or seventeen, holding a bunch of bills and a silver revolver pointed straight up at the sky from pushing the door open with that hand. And neither one of us moved, we just looked at each other.

“I wasn’t calm, but I wasn’t scared either. There was only my blood and my breath, and his too. I could feel it. Like we were the same body. Then I asked him if he wanted to talk, and he nodded his head, still holding that hogleg up in the air. I had both my hands on the top of the door where he could see them, but he seemed stuck where he was—he couldn’t go back and he couldn’t go forward. I could hear the cashier moving around inside the store, so I told the boy to bring his gun over if he wanted to, but he didn’t have to give it to me, he didn’t have to do anything he didn’t want to do.

“And then he started to cry, Kathy. I don’t remember leaving my patrol car but next thing I knew I was standing in front of him, and he was younger than I’d guessed—twelve or thirteen—and I was unloading his pistol and he was crying so hard I put my arm around him. His back felt so thin to me and I just held him, telling him he did the right thing. Everything would be all right. The store clerk came out yelling something, but I wasn’t listening; my hands felt oily. My voice sounded strange to me. I kept saying comforting things to this boy, but it was as much for me as for him.”

“Jesus, Les.” I reached over to put my hand on his, but he stood and took his cup to the stove and poured himself the last of the coffee.

“And I kept thinking of my own son, of Nate, and I vowed for the hundredth time I would take such good care of him he’d never have to get that desperate. Get that turned around.” Lester looked out the screen door, standing there tall and barefoot, his shirt hanging out of his jeans, his shoulders hunched slightly. There was something about him I’d never seen before, only felt, a goodness behind all the sadness in his eyes, maybe an acceptance for all we could never quite be, him included.

“I need to go home for a while today.”

I nodded, but something dark and hollow opened up inside me.

“I need to explain things to Carol better. And Nate and Bethany. I should be home when they come back from school.” He looked down at his hands and I was thinking how he’d just used the word “home” twice in a few seconds.

“It’s okay, Lester. I’ll go catch a movie or something and catch you when you get back.”

“I don’t deserve you.”

“Yes you do.” And I put on a smile, went over and kissed him, opening my mouth against his, but he cut it short and climbed up to the loft to get his shoes and all I wanted to know was this: was he telling himself he didn’t deserve me so he could leave me? Was he leaving me? But the question was so ugly inside me I was afraid if I asked it out loud it would come to life between us with claws and fangs.

We were quiet as we walked through the woods to the cars. I was sweating, and I was sure I must smell bad. At his station wagon, Les turned to me, then both his hands were holding my face and he kissed me hard and dry, said he’d see me later, and he got into his car and I backed mine out so he could leave.

I sat on the porch in the morning shade and smoked my last cigarette. My mouth and throat felt like one long ash, and my fingers were shaking a little, though I didn’t know if that was from last night’s drinking, today’s coffee and nicotine, or thinking now that Lester’s pain about his kids was so bad he really wouldn’t be coming back at all.

I drove the Bonneville to a mini-grocery gas station off the Cabrillo Highway and bought two Diet Cokes and three packs of cigarettes. It was still morning, but the sun was so bright off the white facade of the small building it hurt my brain just looking at it. I watched the sunlit cars and jeeps and vans go by, the people inside them young and cheerful-looking, and I pictured driving straight into them all. But no car was moving fast enough to do the job, to do more than just ruin the gift Frank had given me and Nick, my only asset now; no one was going fast enough to obliterate me. And that’s what I wanted: obliteration. Decimation. Just an instant smear of me right out of all this rising and falling and nothing changing that feels like living.

My hangover had settled deep and black into me. I started to feel afraid of everything that moved: the traffic in front of me, the gas station attendant pumping gas into a jeep, a lone kite hovering so tiny above the ocean, my own hand as I raised another cigarette to my lips.

I put the car in gear and made my way onto the beach highway heading north. I turned on the radio, but a DJ was hawking a free trip to Cancún, his voice full of good cheer, and I switched him off, the air-conditioning too. I rolled down the window and let the beach wind blow into my face. I drove through Half Moon Bay for El Granada and thought of Lester’s story of the Filipino boy, then I pictured him hugging his own two kids, his small son and daughter, and remorse moved through me so hot and thick my stomach felt queasy. I hadn’t thought about any of this the way the kids would. I only pictured them at my house laughing and playing, eating meals I cooked for them, sleeping in Nick’s old practice room. Now I imagined them crying themselves to sleep at night, and I stubbed out my cigarette and lit another. I drank from my Diet Coke, but it was just sweet empty chemicals down my throat, and I felt myself get shaky knowing that I’d been too weak to keep my situation in my own lap, and now I was letting myself have a huge part in destroying someone else’s family. As I drove through Montara, heading north for Point San Pedro and Corona, I tried to do what they used to encourage in Group: ask yourself the questions in life that scare you the most. But I already knew the answer; I knew why I had gotten drunk last night, was smoking so much again, and why I was sleeping with Lester Burdon: losing my father’s house had been the final shove in a long drift to the edge, and I thought about calling Connie Walsh again, just tell her to sue the county for as much as she could get. But that would take months, maybe years, and still my father’s only heirloom to Frank and me would be gone and even though it was just a little place in a low-rent beach town, I refused to be the one in the family who had let it slip away.

I started driving faster and kept seeing my mother’s face, a different look of hers this time, one she’d sometimes give me after Nick and I were married and rationally recovered, both working, when at a family gathering—a christening or a birthday, or Sunday dinner—I’d catch her watching me; I would just glance over and see her taking me in, her lips parted but slightly bunched, like she wasn’t quite sure what to think. Had she been wrong about me? Was I actually going to turn out all right? And somehow her watching me, looking like she was holding her breath doing it, was also me watching myself. I was her and she was me, and I couldn’t stand not tolerating my own company, not tolerating the very center of me.