past neighbors’ houses, he walked barefoot down Route 22. He walked past the supermarket: empty parking lot and an eerie glow. He walked past the Korean Baptist church and the Saks-anchored mall into the dreams of late-night drivers who took home the image of some addled derelict in a cotton robe menacing the soft shoulder. He looked down at his legs. It was like watching footage of legs walking from the point of view of the walker. That was the helplessness, this was the terror: the brakes are gone, the steering wheel has locked, I am at the mercy of this wayward machine. It circled him around to the south entrance of the forest preserve. Five, six miles on foot after a fourteen-hour day, he came to a clearing and crashed. The sleep went as quickly as a cut in a film. Now he was standing again, in the cricket racket, forehead moist with sweat, knees rickety, feet cramped, legs aching with lactic acid. And how do you walk home in a robe with any dignity?
The doctor appointments started up again. He wasn’t well that time for thirteen months.
On the night Jane picked him up at African Hair Weaving, he knocked on Becka’s door. “Can I come in?” he asked. No response usually meant her begrudging acquiescence, so he turned the knob and eyed her for permission to enter. She sat up against the headboard.
“What do you want?”
“To apologize.”
“For what?”
He sat down on the bed. “For ignoring you.”
She drew her legs up to her chest and hugged her knees. Her thighs expanded in their black sweatpants.
“Let me try to explain,” he said. “I’ve always felt a strong sense of duty to provide for you and your mom. I’ve worked hard so that you would never have to want for anything.”
She looked at him skeptically. “I don’t really think that’s why you worked hard.”
“And that meant,” he said, “that I had to put certain opportunities aside.”
“Like what?” she asked. “Like did you want to become a painter on the Left Bank?”
“I mean opportunities with you.”
“Or an astronaut? Did I keep you from becoming an astronaut?”
“I would have liked to spend more time with you,” he said. “And your mother would have liked me around more.”
“So she could have somebody else to bitch at besides me?”
“Becka,” he said. He put a hand up. “Give me a second here, okay?”
She frowned and grew quiet.
“But the last couple of years,” he said, “the last couple of years have been different.”
He stared into the dead aquarium in front of him, a quarter full of rock-and-roll buttons and Mardi Gras beads and CDs and cigarette papers.
“Different how?” she asked.
“The last couple of years,” he said, “I haven’t really wanted to be around you.”
He turned on the bed to look at her, making a small vortex of the sheets below him. She didn’t move. They were never still anymore in each other’s presence. There was always some context for movement, some unspoken vectoring away. Now they stared as if startled by each other, years after having forgotten what the other looked like.
“I love you more than anyone in the world,” he said, “but I didn’t give a damn if I saw you or not. I didn’t understand the phase you’re in. The duct-taped sneakers, the dreadlocks. The music.”
“Right. It’s so hard. The Beatles.”
“You don’t just listen to the Beatles,” he said.
“Ew,” she said, “the Ramones.”
“Point is,” he said, “I hid behind my duty. I used work as my excuse to avoid you.”
He said he was sorry. He didn’t anticipate her saying anything in response and didn’t expect it or need to be absolved or even understood. He needed only to come clean. She said nothing as he left the room.
She found him sitting at the kitchen counter slouched over an uneaten orange, looking morose and inward. It had been only a few minutes, five at the most, since he’d left her, but in that time the kitchen had filled entirely with the weight of his self-pity. When he got like this, bundled up in his coat and carrying around his backpack, she wanted nothing more than to beat a retreat the hell away from him. It was like he was dying or something, when he wasn’t dying. He was just worried that he couldn’t go in to work anymore. It made him grumpy. He wasn’t even sick really.
“You think I care?” she asked.
He turned on the stool. She stood on the runner in her torn flannel and