The following spring they were married a month before commencement and three months before Bethany was born. Lester got a job with a custodial company cleaning restaurants from midnight to dawn, spending the mornings sleeping and the afternoons caring for Bethany while Carol took a photography course at the community college. Some days he’d tuck the baby into her carrier and go too, staying in the vocational guidance office to peruse graduate school manuals while Bethany slept or cried and he’d hold her and walk around the small office humming his daughter a tune, glancing at the announcements and posters on the walls. One afternoon a new one caught his eye, a huge color photograph of a young cop, barely thirty, a handsome Latino, standing between a man and woman, one hand pressed gently against the man’s chest, the fingers of the cop’s other hand just barely touching the woman’s wrist. Her red hair was tousled and her eyes were wet from crying. The man’s hands hung at his sides in loose fists, and he was looking down at the ground listening to or enduring what the cop had to say. Beneath this photo was WORLD PEACE BEGINS AT HOME, the phone number of the local police department, and a hotline number for the victims of domestic abuse. And there was something about the young cop’s face—the strong jut of his jaw that seemed to keep the man in line that Lester had seen always on other men, and standing there holding his baby daughter to his chest, it felt like the time had come to finally try and take on that look himself. Soon he was at the academy, then out on patrol as a trainee, and when he became a deputy sheriff they bought the small house in the Eureka Fields complex in Millbrae. Carol got work as a part-time stringer for two local newspapers, and she covered town meetings, dog shows, and land dispute hearings. She was paid twenty-five dollars a story, and even though they weren’t the kind of muckraking exposés she was still interested in, she told Lester she was content to be working at a job that challenged her, yet also gave her the time and flexibility to be a mother and a wife.

And there was the trouble; once the university life was behind them, once Carol’s intellectual fires and righteous indignation had died down, Lester began to feel something wasn’t quite there between the two of them, something as essential as this: that despite her loving company, her dry wit and erudite conversation, her good south-of-the-border cooking, even the warm timbre of her voice, Lester was no longer drawn to touch her, to hold her, kiss her, taste her, or smell her. And when he did, it never felt quite right. It was as if he was gearing himself to make love with a close relative, someone from his own family. It saddened and nearly disgusted him that this was all that seemed to separate him from Carol. It made him feel shallow and immature, almost scatological. Over the years, out on the street or on patrol, Lester saw women he could imagine loving, and sometimes he would take their image home with him—the bounce of one’s hair, the sway of another’s hips beneath her skirt, or the dark eyes of another that held the promise of something more sensual than intellectual. And while his wife and two small children were downstairs or outside, sometimes he’d lock himself in the bathroom, turn on the faucets, and like a teenage boy masturbate into the sink. And Regret grew only more insistent. She didn’t just wait on his stoop any longer, she began to rap her icy knuckles against the door.

Lester began to feel as inauthentic a man as was possible, living in a marriage he no longer felt, working as a law enforcer when he’d never been able to face any man down on his own, to serve or protect anyone without the San Mateo County Sheriff’s Department behind him. He began to imagine leaving Carol, just packing up and renting an apartment on the other side of town. But then he would think immediately of Bethany and Nate, their small round faces looking up at him in mute disbelief just before they cried, and cried. Also, he would be responsible for supporting two households. There would be child support, maybe even alimony, and the mortgage payments too, none of which, combined, he would ever be able to handle with his salary.

But this was not the whole story of why he stayed, and he knew it. Sometimes, while out on overnight patrol, driving down the dark empty streets or back roads at three or four in the morning, his dispatch radio turned low, sipping a cool coffee, he knew what it was, and he would allow himself to acknowledge that bright Saturday morning in his boyhood in June, the used white station wagon their father had bought for his move to Brownsville, Texas, parked in front of their house on Natoma Street. It was the trunk and two suitcases on top. It was the way the late-morning sun made everything almost too bright to look at, the white wagon and its whitewall tires, his father’s white button-down shirt, the way his gut always pushed his belt buckle out, which was bright too. It was Lester’s twelve-year-old brother’s T-shirt as he helped their father tie the canvas to the shining chrome rack. It was the smell of coffee and biscuits coming from the house, the way his mother had made everyone breakfast as though this was a normal Saturday morning. It was the way she’d served them plates of eggs, pouring the boys juice and milk, their father coffee, all the while asking her husband sincere-sounding questions about his new job with the border patrol in Brownsville, as if he didn’t already have a job in Chula Vista, as if he was moving to Texas for them. But mostly it was the way she stayed in the house when it was time for their father to leave, the way he patted her shoulder once on his way out the door, like she’d just gotten some bad news he had nothing to do with. Lester sat on the porch steps and he could feel the whole quiet house at his back. And his father just stood there on the bright sidewalk, his hands on his hips, a package of Tareyton’s straining against his heart pocket, and he looked at sixteen-year-old Lester sitting on the steps like he was waiting for his firstborn son to do the polite thing and stand and see him off. His father glanced at the house behind Lester, then looked at him again, nodding once, as if to say, “Okay, if that’s the way you want to play it.” Then he shook his youngest son’s hand. Lester’s brother began to cry, and their father turned as quickly away as if it was something private he wasn’t supposed to see. It was hearing the wagon’s engine start up, watching the car pull away from the curb and move past the adobe row houses in the open sunlight for the stop sign at the corner of Las Lomas. It was seeing just the side of his crying brother’s face as he watched the car grow smaller, his thin shoulders jerking up and down, his hands hanging loose at his sides. It was looking back at the corner and seeing no car at all. It was how hot it got that day, the way you could smell the old paint in the trim boards, the dog shit in the adjoining yard, the dry concrete of the sidewalk, the lumber from the building supply warehouse across the street.

For almost a decade with Carol, all the heat and light of that one day was enough to keep the cool regret of his own marital decision at bay. But everything changed when he walked into that little house on the hill in Corona with a suit from the civil division, Kathy Nicolo Lazaro appearing in her terry-cloth bathrobe, her toenails painted pink, her hair wild, her small dark face all incredulous but brave about the news they delivered. Lester had felt a wanting rise in him so deep and immediate his throat flushed, but still he couldn’t look away from this Mrs. Lazaro as he watched her take in the bad news about her house, as he stood there in his uniform and gun belt, his desire so fierce it could almost be a noise in the room. And that changed too, his feeling there was no room to move. With his hunger for Kathy came the new belief that maybe it wasn’t too late. And this feeling only grew when on a hard wide bed at the Eureka Motor Lodge she actually took him inside her, took in his hunger with a hunger of her own that was dark and slick and more heated than any day in Chula Vista. Regret seemed to slide away from his stoop, and with her absence came a picture in his head of having a place of his own, a house where his children would have their own rooms. Maybe a house on a hill in Corona. Kathy had hinted at this scenario, the fact her house had three bedrooms. Then Lester would only have to deal with child support payments and maybe half the mortgage on the house in Millbrae that wouldn’t be his anymore. He could manage that. Maybe it was time he did take Captain Baldini up on one of his memos and go for his sergeant’s stripes and the raise in salary that went with it. And with a sudden heat in his face Lester thought again of shirking off Alvarez; that wasn’t smart. Maybe he should drive down there now and slip a note under Alvarez’s door, offer his apologies and explain that circumstances beyond his control had kept him from reporting in. And that would be accurate, wouldn’t it? But that would take too long, and Kathy might show up while he was gone.