“Your mother thinks she’s doing me a favor looking for bargains,” his father said. “What she doesn’t understand is you buy good. Once. She should cut me a break, spend the extra dollar, save me the trouble.”

They were sitting in the Chevy Cavalier in an abandoned parking lot in Manhattan Beach. It was March, the year before Timothy left for college, the turbulent Atlantic the color of dishwater left overnight. Timothy’s mother had purchased a sponge at a 99-cent discount store, and the thing had disintegrated while his father was scouring meat loaf grease from a pan after dinner. So, at eight o’clock, Timothy’s dad decided to drive all over Brooklyn looking for a seven-and-a-half dollar Good Grips sponge, the kind that rations out dishwashing liquid from its clear dispenser handle. It was the kind of quest his father periodically indulged in, a form of domestic protest, the understanding that the time away from the house was good for his head, good for the marriage, and good for the kid. Only this time Timothy, knowing he’d be leaving for college in just a few months, and already longing for his father’s voice—the undulating, nearly musical way he had of telling a story—Timothy volunteered to go along. Before he knew it, the two of them were sitting in an empty parking lot, sipping Carvel vanilla thick shake floats, waiting out the rain.

“You’re too young to understand this, or you’ll think you understand it now because you’re a smart boy, but this living business is not for the weak of heart,” his father said, eyebrows working like fast-moving needles on the knotted, worried sweater of his forehead.

“I know, dad,” said Timothy, wondering how this man could possibly prepare him for the brilliance and perversity and complexity of the world. “I know the kind of pressure you’re under with work and mom and money and stuff.”

“No, Timothy, you don’t. That’s the thing. You can’t. You just see what happens on the outside. In the house, the fights with your mother over money, or nonsense about what we’re going to watch on television that night. But that’s only part of it. And not even the biggest part. It’s up here,” his father said, pointing a thick-knuckled finger to his cranium, “is where the living business is conducted. That’s where the action is. That’s where all the real transactions take place: reprisals, recriminations, accusations, embarrassments, mistakes, failures, fist-fights, insults, lost opportunities, things left unsaid, the shoulda-woulda-couldas, all there, jostling for pride of place on the official docket. It’s a goddamned bookkeeper and a tape recorder and a magic lantern, too.