1.

Before my mother, there had been another woman, Britannia, whom my father had loved and married when they were both in their twenties. After a brief courthouse ceremony with three friends as witnesses (“I don’t keep in contact with them,” my father told me. “Shows what friends they were”), my father and his new bride moved into a mobile home, in a trailer park called Fox Meadows. Right away, my father and Britannia began planning their future. Seated on the floor at their coffee table (their dining table), they laid out their goals in a gnarled Mead notebook: one, my father would get a job within the year; two, they would have a baby; three, while he worked (once he found work), Britannia would take on the responsibility of household chores and child-rearing. The plan amounted to only a few sentences on wide rule, but in short order, all was underway. Within the year, my father started work at Ryan Milk, my half-brother Jared was born, and Britannia, well into her roles as wife and homemaker, assumed the role of mother. She fed everyone, cleaned house, changed diapers, and dealt with both her son’s and her husband’s unruly timetables, since in addition to baby Jared’s tantrums—worst were his colicky nighttime spells, when he couldn’t sleep, which was often—Britannia also had my father’s erratic hours to contend with. My father worked the second shift on the assembly line, three to eleven PM, but that was the least of the problem, because he had mandatory overtime, which meant he had to work an extra four hours, sometimes tacked on before his normal shift, sometimes after. Sometimes he wouldn’t get home until three in the morning, and sometimes he had to work an extra day on weekends. To make matters worse, he didn’t receive notice of the next week’s hours until the current week’s end. The ever-changing schedule contributed to the chaos of family life. Britannia wanted help, needed it in fact. She needed my father to bear some of the child-rearing burdens. “All I’m asking,” she said, “is for you to sit with Jared some mornings, give him his bottle, rub his back, change him if he needs changing.”

“Sounds like you’re trying to change me,” my father said.

“Bruce, I mean it.”

“That’s the problem.” He interpreted Britannia’s plea for help as a breach of contract. “We agreed,” he said. “I work, you do this. Division of labor.”

One night, he got home from work and called out hello from the front door. Britannia stood at the kitchen sink, her back to him. “Where’s Jared?”

“In his pen,” she said.

He went to the bedroom and checked, and spotted Jared, asleep in the playpen at the side of their bed, one hand curled into a partial fist. He bent and stopped. If he kissed his son, he would wake him. From the kitchen, he heard the harsh clank of porcelain. Returning to the living room, he saw Britannia knocking around the dishes. He grunted. She didn’t turn to face him. “Are we playing games?” he said. She shook her head. “I know it’s not nothing, otherwise you wouldn’t make the racket.”

“You’d be mad if I spoke.”

“Aren’t I standing here, wanting to talk?”

Britannia removed the pink rubber dish gloves, popping them off at the middle finger. They fell into the sink with a faint slap. She turned around. “This isn’t fun.”

“What isn’t?”

“This,” she said. “Life.”

“Has life ever been fun?” he scoffed.

“Don’t pretend you don’t remember. In high school people thought you were a wild man, into hotrods. They thought you were so crazy you’d do anything.”

“I’d like to know what we’re talking about.”

“Why are you raising your voice? I don’t want to argue.”

“Are you saying I’m not fun anymore?”

“Just I want some of the old life.”

“Here’s what I know. I’m standing in the living room of a house not big enough for a bachelor, let alone a family, my shirt sticking to my back because I work at a milk plant with no windows, no ventilation, my body pouring sweat, all day, all night—” While speaking, he was unbuttoning his shirt in histrionic show, but the uncooperative buttons impeded his effort to punctuate his words with action. By the time he’d pulled the shirt off, its fall felt anticlimactic. “I can’t believe it,” he said. “I have to come home to this?” She moved to hug him, but he stepped back against the coffee table. “Not now,” he said. Had he gone for a walk, he might have realized his stubbornness.

“I love you,” she said, as he pressed the coffee table’s edge further into his calves. She lunged at him with the next hug. His body bent like an air dancer, one of those tube-shaped men on the side of the road, flapping in the wind to attract customers with their breezy antics. She gave up. She sat down on the sofa, head in hands, a mask of bent fingers.

If he remained where he was, legs pressed against the coffee table, feigning stoicism behind a muted face, what kind of person would he be? He clicked his tongue. She didn’t notice his sitting down beside her, but in his trying to wrap an arm around her, she flinched and sidled away.

“You don’t get it,” she said to the wall. “I just want time to relax. A few free hours some mornings would be a major weight off my shoulders.” She continued talking. He only half-listened.

Then he told her what free time he had had to be used productively. He wouldn’t even call it free time. His so-called free mornings away from the plant weren’t all sitting around shooting the bull at the donut shop. No sir. He was trying to get a car-dealing business off the ground with Uncle James. Didn’t she understand? A second job would be extra income. “We don’t want to live in a trailer forever, do we?” He appealed to Britannia’s empathy. He said when he occupied his table at Sammon’s bakery in the morning, talking with his friends and his uncle, their talk was, admittedly, not all about planning for the car-dealing business, not one hundred percent. That said, he was blowing off some much-needed steam. Every shift, his supervisor rode him, egging him to pick up the line, threatening him with pink slips, and so on and so forth. Every night, he went to bed feeling stressed about his job, stressed he would lose it. And to think, they had a child to feed. This worry did a number on his sleep. Or hadn’t she noticed? So he needed his mornings to sleep in a little or else to see his friends, but most importantly to relax, because he was stressed, and the stress was likely to wear him down if he weren’t careful.

After he made this appeal, the two of them momentarily warmed to each other. Britannia sat closer and turned toward him. She eventually laid her head against his chest, wept, apologized. The world got quiet. All seemed resolved. My father smiled at the wall’s wood paneling. Then just as suddenly, Britannia raised her head and said what about her parents. They could take care of Jared in the mornings. They were retired. They would want to. This got my father angry again in a way he didn’t know he could be angry. He started raising his voice and in so many words put the kibosh on her idea, saying letting her parents look after Jared would send the wrong message. It would seem like he and Britannia couldn’t raise their own, and anyway her parents already looked down their noses at him. “Need I remind you of your mom’s attitude toward me? When we were first dating? What did she say? ‘Why don’t you find a man with a little money to his name? Why take up with some hellion from Dexter?’” Rather than address any of Britannia’s concerns, my father’s strategy was, as it would be with my mother, to browbeat with his own sorrows. However reluctant Britannia may have been to bend to my father’s desire, she nonetheless did, said all right, she agreed with him, he worked hard, she wanted him to keep doing what he was doing and to get the car-dealing business going.

2.

Days passed. Sunday morning. Jared had slept through the night. My father and Britannia had both been able to sleep in late. Britannia rolled over in bed, put her arm around my father, exhaled, smeared his chest hair, and said things had been going well lately, hadn’t they? He said yes, things had been going very well, they weren’t arguing or anything. She said there was a reason. She would tell him if he promised not to get angry. Then she confessed her secret arrangement. She had begun having her parents watch Jared some mornings so she could get some rest. Her parents’ house was just off Whiskville, on Catalina—incidentally, the same road my father’s future bride, my mother, grew up on. Catalina was a ten-minute walk at most from my father and Britannia’s mobile home at Fox Meadows. Despite the short walk, Britannia said she always strapped Jared into the car seat and drove over anyway, for safety. This news made my father irate. He started shouting and swearing, his head and chest grew hot, his body temperature rising to the point where he couldn’t think or talk sensibly. Instead of tackling the issue directly, he found himself complaining of wasted gas, Jimmy Carter, Aramco, the extra mileage she was putting on their second car. His shouting woke Jared. Outraged by Jared’s crying, he got dressed, packed personal items, got in the Camaro, and drove to his mother’s in Dexter, where he stayed for the next few days. During this period, he cooled down. He and Britannia exchanged calls. She apologized and said, “Bruce, come back.” He did.

Only Britannia’s drinking became bad. Before, she had drunk some spirits on special occasions, but this was different. My father got home from his shift, stripped, and carried his weary body into bed, bending toward Britannia, giving her a peck on the cheek. She reeked of beer. Though bothered, he feared confrontation. He wanted calm. But one morning, he broached the subject. She was shuffling off to the bathroom. He called out to her, which woke Jared. He asked her why she was getting drunk every night and waking up like this. She waved her arm and closed the door.

Instead of becoming angry at her, he grew fearful. She had a private world, and he didn’t belong to it. The thought was terrifying. Still, he needed to put his foot down. The closeted drinking had gone on long enough, he decided. He didn’t wait for a day off. While Britannia showered, he called into work and said he needed to use a sick day because of his boy. The foreman got on the phone after the secretary. He said my father had every right to use a day, but some advance notice would have been nice. My father asked how he ought to know in advance his son would be sick. Even though he was lying, he was indignant.

The foreman got him heated, so he went to Sammon’s bakery that morning and complained to his uncle. He complained about his wife’s drinking, too. His friends all nodded like they were listening to a sermon. Then my father went home.

Britannia said she was surprised to see him home, and so soon. Didn’t he have to work? A day off, he said. He watched TV, Columbo. He waited to talk to her, waited long—until after Britannia had run errands to pick up groceries, after she had made lunch and they had eaten together, after she had vacuumed and bathed Jared and put him to bed. Then he staged his intervention. It was still early evening, Jared asleep in his playpen in the middle of the living room. He and Britannia were seated on the sofa watching the TV. He gathered his gumption and turned to her and said that regarding the drinking he wanted to know what was going on and what was going on now. She admitted she had been doing a lot of solo drinking when he wasn’t around. He wasn’t around very much, she said. She felt lonely. He ignored the remark and said if she weren’t careful, she’d pass out drunk with their son in the bathtub. She might drown their son. Did she think about it at all? She said sorry. He asked about the contraband, the booze. While she went to the grocery store, he had gone through the cabinets and found a bottle of Ballantine’s someone at work had given him, but no beer, and it was beer he had smelled on her, he was sure of it. He had lifted the lid to the trash, found nothing. Where were all the spent bottles? Not bottles, she sighed, she didn’t drink from bottles. Cans. There was a system, she said, she had planned out long ago. In almost two years, didn’t he realize? There were lots of things he didn’t understand. As soon as he left the house, she had a girlfriend bring her over a six-pack, she said. My father asked what kind of beer she drank. She said Keystone. He asked what girlfriends she had who would bring her beer. She said an old girlfriend from high school, Theresa. He thought about it. He seemed to remember a Theresa. She said before he got home, she’d throw the cans in the communal dumpsters at the trailer park.

“Do you mean to tell me,” he asked, “if I were to go and look in there, I’d find your beer cans?”

“Good luck knowing mine from anyone else’s,” she said.

Jared stirred in his playpen, but neither of them worried, he would get back to sleep eventually. He had become a good sleeper, my father thought.

“There are lots of things about me you don’t understand,” Britannia said.

“Like what?” my father said.

“Like that I used to be a fun girl.”

He thought he had to smirk at that one.

Jared said da-da from his playpen.

Britannia stood up and towered over my father. “I was a wild one, too. I used to go out.”

“Is that so?”

She plucked at her T-shirt. “I used to get dressed up. Men liked me.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Yeah. Do you think I didn’t have boyfriends before you?”

My father pulled her close. “Tell me about that.” He noticed she had gotten a permanent. He liked it. He had known her since their high-school homeroom. Back then, she wore her reading glasses on a string around her neck, but there in the living room, he saw her in a new light, alluring and strong-willed, a wife and mother who had already lived a richer life than most, not twenty-four and married with a child, a rarity more and more in the seventies, he thought (he was wrong about this; I looked it up: 1970s Americans’ median age for marriage was twenty-three). Apprised she had had this past life, he found her more attractive. The revelation of her drinking and the brief exchange that followed helped their relationship, at least as far as he was concerned. A fire that had been simmering had suddenly flamed up. He took to bragging to his friends and my great uncle, referring to Britannia as his “rowdy wife.” He said to Uncle James and company he had told her that while he didn’t like the drinking, she could drink two or three beers if she wanted to, but only a couple times a week. Only he had better not catch signs of her neglecting Jared or else the deal was off. His friends asked how she responded to the news. My father said she liked his assertiveness. How did she let him know that? Uncle James asked. “Let’s just put it this way,” my father said. “After I laid down the law, she took to me like flies at a picnic. About every night, we nearly shake the bed off its posts.”

3.

How long could the truth remain hidden?

One morning at the donut shop, he heard from his friends that Britannia had been spotted at Spider’s. My father knew the bar Spider’s, a glorified warehouse, really, out past the state line, where people went to drink and dance and rub against one another. My father’s friends said when he was working, his wife was going there and drinking and meeting men.

As much as possible, my father liked to think Britannia’s social life ended out of his range of vision. He didn’t want to think about her at a hole like Spider’s. Yes, he knew Spider’s, all right. He and Uncle James had gone there once after a car auction. No blacktop outside, only loose gravel, people parked wherever they wanted. Big red door bearing the name in white cursive, a logo of boxy dice beneath the cursive. The gilded doorknob rattled. Inside, no standing walls partitioned one section from the next. Bar flowed into dance hall flowed into billiard hall. Low spooky bulbs over the tables. Sawdust on the floor. The smell of old beer. That was where Britannia chose to spend her time.

That image alone had been enough to make the inside of my father’s mouth dry out, but his friend Shirrel had to open his big mouth. He said he had some news, then took a bite of a donut and let raspberry jelly plop down on wax paper. My father waited, tight-lipped, breathing through his nose, his hands shuffling, a pretense at looking loose, while beneath the table, he twisted one Reebok over the other. Shirrel said he had gotten a call from Dan Miller asking if he had heard what Bruce’s wife was up to and Shirrel had told him he hadn’t and Dan said he’d seen Bruce’s wife leave Spider’s with some man who wasn’t Bruce. My father turned dead-eyed.

He had to go to work that afternoon and do his overtime hours. As he grouped milk gallons and boxed them and pushed the boxes on to Loading, his mind wandered. The fantasy had gone bust. He had imagined his wife at home, suckling Jared at her breast, as dutiful as Mary to the messiah, afterward putting him in his mechanical swing so he could rock himself into a nap. Then she would make meals, eat, and wrap the remaining pots and dishes in tinfoil, including a plate for him. He knew some of this must have really been the case. The food, for instance. For nights he worked into the next morning, she had talked to him about preparing sack dinners he could carry with him. No, he’d said. For lunch, he might eat his meals with friends or take his meals alone, but for dinner, no matter how late he was, he wanted to be able to eat her homecooked meals. It was important to him. He thought it made her very happy. Now he guessed it made no difference.

Without thinking, he turned to his line partner and said, “Things are slow enough, cover my shift, family emergency,” and left.

Driving back, he thought he might catch Britannia in the act, that she might be at home with another man. He cut off the headlights and rolled into the gravel drive. He stepped in the front door. A chill hit him, like there hadn’t been heat on. The lights were off. From the bedroom, he heard a wail, Jared’s. He hurried to the back, half-expecting to find the house empty except for the baby, but there was Britannia, in bed, face up, mouth open, jeans, a sweater, and her sneakers still on, the playpen beside her, in which Jared bawled in the dark. My father picked him up. The baby needed changing. He carried Jared to the bathroom, removed his diaper, and cleaned him with the wet wipes, then he ran the bathwater until it was warm and roughly the height of a baby’s knee, and sat Jared down into the water and washed and shampooed him. This was the first time he had cleaned the baby, who, partially consoled, took breaks between bouts of crying. After a good towel-drying, my father carried Jared back to the bedroom where he fitted the baby into a diaper and some thick, warm pajamas that covered his body. Jared put his head against his father’s shoulder. Britannia was still asleep.

Even though my father had never called Britannia’s parents, despite their reservations toward him before the marriage, he knew they were good people at heart, though it pained him to think it so. He had no one else to contact. His own mother in Dexter would never answer the telephone past seven. Besides, they lived only a stone’s throw away on Catalina, in the better neighborhood, the suburban sprawl behind the trailer park. My father called. At nearly two in the morning, his father-in-law answered the phone. He didn’t ask questions when my father said he and Jared needed to come over.

His in-laws met him at the door. His mother-in-law took Jared. She got some baby food from the refrigerator—of course she had it on hand, Britannia had been dropping Jared off there some days, probably some nights, too—and fed him at the breakfast nook. My father sat down at the dining table. At the same time, on the corner of Catalina and Ridgewood, in a red brick house, my mother, a teenager unfamiliar with Bruce Pritchett, slept soundly in her bedroom. My father ate reheated leftovers.

The next morning, Britannia called and found out where they were. She came over. She sat down beside him at the dining table. He could have been there at the table all night. Britannia’s father had been eating scrambled eggs at the table. He took his plate into the living room. Britannia’s mother carried Jared to the den. My father bounced one caged hand against another, as though shuffling cards, and spoke low. “Jared had diarrhea down his leg. I can smell it on my shirt.”

“I don’t smell much better,” Britannia said.

“The smoking’s news to me.”

“Bruce—”

“Don’t Bruce me.”

“Can’t I go out?”

“And neglect our son?”

“You’re one to talk. Always at the donut shop.”

“Don’t turn this around on me. Where were you last night?”

“In bed.”

“Before.”

“What do you want to hear? If you know, why ask?”

Then and there, he knew they were finished. He wouldn’t ask if there were other men. He wouldn’t ask if any had come home with her or if she had gone home with them. Good God, he only hoped she never left Jared alone. He would have his future life to think about these matters. For now, he needed a new plan. He needed to move in with his mother. He figured that although Britannia would keep the trailer, she wouldn’t keep it for long and would eventually move back in with her parents, but fine, that was her decision. More immediately, he needed to contact his foreman. Britannia surprised my father by telling him his foreman had called and said my father was fired. He couldn’t just walk off on a shift like that, was what the foreman said. My father nodded. Britannia removed her Noah’s ark earrings and put them down on the dining table. They scraped against the lacquer. My father took her hand and held it, the softest he had ever felt.

4.

But this, my father said, was all in the past, back before he realized he even wanted to be a father. In divorce court, the judge ruled favorably for Britannia. She got primary custody of Jared. My father kept Jared on weekends—which didn’t amount to much time with his son, especially since my father had begun traveling cross-country from auction to auction selling cars. He had finally really got the car-dealing business going with Uncle James. And by then, my father had met a new woman: my mother. She mostly took care of Jared on weekends while my father worked. I wasn’t born yet. Five years after I came into the world, I learned of Jared. My mother had me on her lap in our living room, turning through a photo album. I came across a Polaroid of my mother seated on the same floor holding another small child in her lap. The two of them faced the camera, all smiles. “Who’s that?” I asked. “That’s Jared,” my mother replied, “your daddy’s other boy.” By then, Britannia had prohibited Jared from seeing my mother and father. My father said it was jealousy. I hadn’t been informed of this, but if I had, it wouldn’t have mattered. I looked at the carpet and pouted my lip. My mother’s hands came to my face. “Don’t cry,” she begged. I gathered up courage and said through drool, staccato, “I’ma gonna get my zizzors and cut his head off.” And then my mother giggled.

Three years ago, I got a call from my friend Stephanie saying my brother had died. I told her she must be mistaken; I had just spoken to my younger brother Jesse a couple days prior. But since I live halfway around the world from him in Korea, I thought it best to Skype him to check on him. Waiting for him to answer, I was genuinely scared. Jesse took the video call. I saw his face, wide like our father’s, and the interior of the family home behind him, the wood-paneled walls, the mounted deer head. He looked fine, everything fine. I explained to him I had gotten a call from a friend telling me my brother had died.

Jesse nodded and said it was our half-brother. Jared had been out back at the restaurant where he’d worked for twenty years when a food truck backed into him. The driver hadn’t seen him taking garbage to the dumpsters. I’ve lived through death before—my father and my mother’s, their different cancers. However, upon Jared’s passing, some special connection had been severed, a direct line I had to him I didn’t know existed.

My father introduced me to Jared once. In the worst possible way. After several years of never knowing what my grown half-brother looked like, I, a high schooler, came home one Saturday afternoon from my shift at a restaurant washing dishes, and as I entered the front door of the family home, I saw someone seated by the door, a rale-thin bald man in a baseball cap with a gaunt pale jaw, smoothly shaven except for the narrow mustache above his lip, and he wore eyeglasses like me. “Do you know who that is?” my father said from the sofa. I shook my head. “That’s your brother Jared.” I feigned a smile and shook his hand, then excused myself, saying I had to change out of my damp work clothes. During my shower, I had a panic attack. I went to my bedroom and couldn’t go into the living room for upward of two hours for fear of seeing my father’s face in a stranger’s.

Hearing as a younger person of my father’s marriage to and divorce from Britannia, and their rearing of their son Jared, I thought it a fine story and my father a fine storyteller. Unlike me, my father didn’t get tongue-tied as soon as he opened his mouth. But like every storyteller, he was a liar. There was nothing exact about any of this. My father had had years to craft the tale he wanted to tell, years to practice the words on me in our drives on the outskirts of our little Kentucky town. By age eleven, I had grown familiar with his standard version, only he added a detail. He briefly introduced, and then just as promptly abandoned the topic of, another woman whom he had met and lived with during a period between his first wife and my mother. He had met this woman at the milk plant, he told me, as we crested the bend of Whiskville, off which stood the hill upon which sat the trailer park Fox Meadows, my father’s former mobile home nestled away somewhere up there on cinderblocks, amid the rows of sorrows. Kitana, he said, wore Dior. It had turned him on, he said. He finally understood the allure of perfume. Like some Arabian spice, he said. I didn’t doubt Kitana’s existence, but she didn’t fit into the pre-established timeline. My father supposedly had gotten fired and divorced virtually all in one go. When did he have time to live with, let alone date, another woman? There at age eleven, I asked my father if he’d gone out with Kitana while married to his first wife. His face lost the smirk of the upper hand, his perfume fetish evaporating from memory. He returned to facing the windshield with his natural, purse-lipped frown, his brown lips twisted, a dark knot on an old tree. A past life, he said.