His life might have been different. If his mother hadn’t killed herself, Owen probably would have married, produced, and reproduced. Instead he labors alone.

It’s not a bad life. He shrugs his shoulders when asked if he’s happy, twists his lips before speaking, and says like any fifty-four year old that it’s good enough as long as he doesn’t expect too much.

His home is a plain one-bedroom apartment near the campus where he studies philosophy. Its only ornament is a bronze bust of Newman. He gets by on student loans and teaching assistant stipends, so he doesn’t spend much money. His old friends claim he lives like a monk.

Owen rises from his twin bed at six every morning. He brushes his teeth and washes his face and then he makes his coffee, sweetened with a teaspoon of sugar and tanned with a plop of half-and-half, which he sips while he reads his Bible. He makes such a ritual of the procedure that it’s like a morning prayer.

At 6:45 he showers and shaves. He breakfasts on cheese and bread and he’s usually out of his place by 7:30, to his small office on campus or his spot in the library. He contemplates categorical imperatives and tries to develop new Christian ethics. He reads the same material again and again.

He tries to exercise but his knees are too worn for the jogging he used to do; most days he doesn’t get more than the walks to campus and back.

He’s usually home by 3:00. He resists the urge to nap then; he tries to correct papers or work on his dissertation till evening Mass. After that he makes his big meal: meat and starch and vegetables. He rarely goes out nights or weekends. He’s friendly but doesn’t have friends where he lives. He’s busy enough, though, and he sleeps okay.

His vacations are trips north to see his father and sisters, or backpacking alone in the mountains. He does the former out of obligation and the latter for his own punishing satisfaction. He doesn’t mind being alone but he still has a hard time around his dad.

You might say Owen’s doing all right. Things could be much worse. That’s what most people claim. Some even maintain that he’s doing exactly what he wants to do. They’re wrong. He didn’t choose all this. Things could be much better.

Owen grew up thinking his family was normal. He knew his parents fought a lot, especially when they drank, but his father was smart enough and his mother was pretty enough, and the Learys fit rather well into their integrated Bay Area neighborhood.

He was a rambunctious kid. Mischievous and very active. Owen was his parents’ first child and only boy, and his energy intimidated them. His two younger sisters were more agreeable and easy. Sharon and Sheila were a year apart, looked alike and shared a room; often they were treated like twins. They had their father’s wavy dark hair and stocky build. Owen stuck out in that family: lanky and impulsive, solo in his bedroom, flame-haired and potential as a match.

His gender permitted him to ignore much of the bickering. He tuned out and wandered away, usually to the fields beyond the houses and into investigations concerning caves and trees and rodent traps. It was left to Sharon and Sheila to watch their mother, gimlet in one hand and Chesterfield in the other, peel their father’s satisfaction away with her list of little bitters. Then they saw their father turn his attention inward, hunching, or else he straightened up, hissed “bitch” with nasty eyes, and stomped out of the room.

And drank. Often while their mother slammed kitchen cabinets and finished her gin their father continued sipping Jack Daniels, in his study. He worked for a newspaper, and he imagined he was like Hemingway, or Steinbeck. Or Salinger. Not J.D: Pierre. Owen’s father once worked for a man who assisted Pierre Salinger, and sometimes he tried to derive some status from it. He often emerged from his study petulant and sentimental. But Owen was usually away then, outside or in his room.

Owen grew up in that family, with his mother getting progressively sadder and his father responding with ever cooler concern and a self-protective hesitation, and he didn’t mark his parents’ degeneration any more than he noticed the aging of the family’s golden retriever or the fading in the color of the house’s exterior. He was devastated when the marriage ended.