"Once I tried to argue, and my argument (which I’d repeated time and time again for the past year) was this: So what. So what if you’re miserable. What does that have to do with anything? I’ve been miserable, too. I didn’t even want to get married. But I did. Just deal with it. I go to work every day, I hate my job, and we don’t have a great marriage. So what. Every day I do my job as father; I support and keep this family together. Every marriage has ups and downs—years-long ups and downs. You have to be patient, you have to wait it out, things will get better. I’ve waded through for this long, now it’s your turn. So just do it."

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"And now arrives the true evening, the dusk deeply settling. The mothers have washed and packed the dishes into the cabinets, and now stand outside on the front steps wiping wet hands on their jeans. The fathers have come out, too. One of them—your father—lights a campfire in the large pit that sits central to all the cabins. The flames glow brighter with each moment against the failing sky. One by one the other families wander over with their lawn chairs and coolers of beers. Your brother is here, too; your sisters are here, too. The night settles in: the creek lapping against the bank, the frogs’ low belching, the cicadas, crickets, katydids with their trice and quad calls, all washing into one background whirr, the laughter of a family three cabins away who arrived late and just finished eating dinner, the dishes clanking from their window, their radio playing."

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"But then one spring, after a particularly painful winter, while running through the streets of the neighboring subdivisions, which was something I tried to do now and then to keep my anxiety levels low, I struck upon an idea. Running had always improved my outlook, and I decided that what I needed to cheer myself up, to move back towards the man I used to be, was a running goal. I needed something difficult, something that would really challenge me, where I’d have to go all out, train hard, really commit, feel good about myself. I decided I’d run a five-minute mile."

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"Before my father became a band instrument repairman, he spent 20 years working the graveyard shift at Alexander Typesetting. He was a union man—International Typographical Union Local #1—who once spent three weeks straight at the shop, sleeping at his desk during his breaks, to hit the deadline for proofreading the phone book. For that miserable task he received a bonus that covered the back payments on the mortgage and kept our family in a home. Every night he packed a lunch and dragged himself to work. He helped to raise kids, he worked hard, he paid bills, his parents died, he had more babies. If he would have taken that DBT pretest, he would have scored higher than me. Or, more likely, he would have stopped circling answers way before me. He would have sucked it up way before me, walked out, and gone back to work, or to his family, or whatever job needed to be done that day. He accepted his narrowed path. He made his choices."

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"Several years ago, my wife and I had an awful fight. I say awful, not because she barricaded herself in our bedroom with a coffee table, or because I finally forced my way in with a blunt-force kick that left a foot-sized hole in the door, or even because afterward she screamed that I was an asshole, slammed the screen door on her way out of the house, and walked barefooted in pajamas for miles alone along the dark muddy shoulder of the road—those types of activities for us are routine—but because in the course of the argument she yanked off her wedding ring and in a display of stubborn independence flung it across the yard, losing it in the tall summer grass, and I haven’t had the money to replace it; for the past year she’s been walking around to the world no longer married but simply engaged, and barely that, as the emerald on her engagement ring is clouded over from years of lotion, hardly noticeable against the olive tones of her finger."

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"You wake with her crying. Wait for a moment—she’s only three; maybe she’s having a nightmare, maybe just a cough, she’ll fall back asleep. You’re tired, you don’t want to get up. You have a meeting in just a few hours. But then she cries again, louder. Stumble out of bed, down the darkened hallway and into her room. Immediately smell it, the vomit. Lift her up and tell her, It’s okay, It’s okay. See the relief on her face now that you’re here. The cries already soften. She rests her head on your shoulder, and her hair settles into your open mouth. Taste it. The vomit in her hair. She’s been rolling in it."

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"When he’s come back to the room and his eyes are dark like oil and he’s peed all over
himself, when you’re sitting there on the edge of his bed wondering how anyone,
especially someone as young as him, could make it through all of these months of pain
and sickness without giving up—and you expect him to wake up crying and begging for
you to make it stop, but instead the first thing he asks you in his half-awake voice is if
you are taller than Dracula—Jesus, don’t start crying then."

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