My mom and dad met at college right here in Boston. He was a business major from a small town in Texas with a lust for cowboy hats that no amount of ridicule could kill. She was city born and a groupie for Karl Marx. They hated each other from the very beginning.

I was born before either managed their Bachelor's degree. To my dad's Christian family, I was something of a bastard; being born out of wedlock made me a permanent blind spot to them. I've gotten a few Christmas and birthday cards from them over the years, but I've never seen their faces outside of photographs.

My mom's side didn't care much for the coupling, either. Her parents were devoutly liberal and atheist, and I'm pretty sure they looked at my fetus as some sort of prenatal hijacker, as if my mother's body were a vehicle that I had taken control of violently with the intent of driving her toward a life of obligation and unfulfillment. Nothing she said could convince them that my dad wasn't forcing her to keep me. They eventually wrote her a check to have "it taken care of." My mom deposited the check and put the money toward an apartment in Cambridge.

Her parents didn't speak to her again until she released her memoir four years later (all of this I learned from reading that same memoir, which enjoyed top placement on Ivory Tower Bookshelves as well as a darling of a review from The New Yorker). They were proud, they said, "to have helped shape her literary development." They bought me a Moleskine notebook in the hopes I might follow in her footsteps, which to them were their footsteps, and being four at the time I used the blank pages for some exemplary doodles that my mother tacked to the refrigerator. I haven't tapped into my creative side once in the three decades since. Unless you count what you're reading now. But I'm not writing this for fun. I'm writing this to stay sane.

Dad got his first real paycheck for something related to home security systems when I was six. He and my mother bought a house in Savin Hill, a cute seaside community in Dorchester that earned the colorful nickname Stab 'N Kill, for no apparent reason other than it was catchy. We moved out of the one bedroom, and on our first night in our new home, my dad did the cheesiest thing of his short and unsentimental life.

He bought a diamond ring, tied the ring to my head using my hair, and sent me to my mother wearing one of his cowboy hats, knowing she could not stand the sight of me taking after his filthy western ways. She plucked off the hat as expected and turned about ten years younger in one wonderful moment that I will never forget. I may never have had the chance to really get to know my dad, but he made me a part of making my mother happier than I have ever seen anyone since, and that counts for a lot, I guess. One month before their wedding he went down to the basement in the middle of the night to fetch some logs for the fire, and a bad circuit blew in his brain. My mom woke up as their bed cooled, and she spent nearly half an hour wandering the dark house before she found him dead by the woodpile. She saw a few men after that (and a woman or two, I suspect), but nothing serious ever came out of the affairs. In her heart she was still engaged to my father.

Coming back from work under winter's early sunset, I walked through the noise of the overpass into the sudden and always alarming quiet of Savin Hill. Swings dangled limp in the empty playground. Waves lapped gently near the boardwalk where I used to skateboard (and before that, to my great shame, scooter). Sleepy Victorians looked over the street, each one a slightly different color than the last. Since I was a kid, the houses in this community have reminded me of people—all unique but essentially the same. I miss them now. I wish I could see them, but they are not there anymore.

My mother's home is one of the few that was built with space to breathe. It has a backyard with trees and a vegetable garden, a picket fence, and a paved comma of driveway that separates the front lawn into tidy green portions my mom named Clause One and Clause Two. At least, it used to have all these things, and that evening I walked up the cobblestones to the front door not knowing what a privilege it was to be able to do that.

I knocked. My house key was on a chain around my neck, and I did not have the motivation to take it off. Also, I'm right handed, and my right hand wasn't feeling too hot. Or more accurately it was feeling too hot. The index finger had begun to swell, filling its sleeve of the glove like a sausage cooked inside the casing. I didn't want to bend it, and I didn't want to think about it either.

Fast, purposeful footsteps moved through the house, and I heard the rattle of Cassie's key. Both the front and back door have double-keyed locks out of necessity. My mother had wandered outside once and walked almost all the way to Milton on the trails that run by Quincy Bay. Two high school kids saw her strolling in her slippers and nightgown, called the cops, and shared their cigarettes with her to pass the time. Thank God it had been July and comfortable out, not January.

Cassie opened the door, and I had to fight the urge to take a step back, as I always do when I see her. It's not that she's beautiful, which she is, or that I'm in love with her, which has been the case since I interviewed her for the job last spring in a coffee shop by the Common. It's that she's big. I don't mean heavy. I mean big as in she fills up wherever she is whenever she's there, and that goes especially for the house where we live together happily, even now, in the place I've built for us inside me. Her skin is dark, but she is bright, my Cassie—she makes me want to write bad poetry about candle flames that go on burning in the rain or wind.

"Hi Mike," she said, stepping back to let me inside. I both worried and hoped that I would brush her, and when I didn't, I felt disappointed as well as relieved. She was wearing black jeans and a faded blue chambray shirt that I wanted to lay my head as I fell asleep. Ripping it off wouldn't have been so bad either, as long as we're on the subject of conflicting emotions.

"Sorry I'm late. How is she?"

"She's a lovely old gal, and right now she's taking a lovely old nap." Cassie gave me a look that was like a touch on the shoulder. "How are you?"

"I'm okay."

"Then take off that raincloud you're wearing. It doesn't look good on you." She gave me a real touch now, a thump on the back. "Show. Me. Your. Smile."

I thought of the girl in the dentist chair, of the tiny lump hiding behind her perfect front teeth, and managed to move one corner of my lips.

"Better. But not much." Cassie crossed her arms. On most people the gesture closes them off, but Cassie wears it at an ironic, amused angle, as if she's holding onto a good joke. "You know what you need? You need to draw yourself a nice motherfucking bubble bath, and never mind that you're a big strong boy. I'm serious. Go do it now, and don't come out until you're pruned. I'll stick around. I won't even charge you extra."

"I already owe you extra," I said, remembering the bills in my pocket. I peeled off my gloves and thumbed a few out blind. "Here."

"You think I'm going to take that you're a fool. Good lord, get yourself a cab once in a while."

"But—"

"None of that. I know why you're still riding the train, and it's not because you like the company."

She was right. Cassie Llynch may have been five younger than me at thirty-four, but she had an MS in nursing with a background in degenerative brain diseases that made my own specialization look like a high school diploma. To live up to her salary, I'd been been forced to cut a few conveniences from my life.

I lowered my hand. She grabbed it. "What in the hell happened to your finger?"

The skin around the Band-Aid was puffy and red, and the nail looked as if it had gotten caught in a car door.

"Nicked it," I said. Then I added, "the other day."

"You'd better get it checked. That looks ugly."

"I will tomorrow if it's not better."

"Promise?"

"Yeah. I'll reschedule a few afternoon appointments if I have to." I wasn't lying to make her feel better. If given the choice right then I'd have taken a penicillin shot to the heart, only I was worried what I really needed was anti-venom. Infections didn't set in this fast, and that tooth . . . that black tooth . . . it had almost looked like a fang.

Cassie was still holding onto my hand, but no longer looking at it. "I wasn't joking earlier, Mike," she said, staring right at me. "You need to give yourself a break. Take a night off. You'll wear yourself down if you don't, and you'll do no good for anyone then. Not her, and not you. Tomorrow I've got my class to teach, but the day after tomorrow, I'm free all night. You say the word, and I'm here with Chinese and a pair of earplugs. You'll go to bed fat, I promise you, and you won't have to get up again all night."

"That's really sweet, Cassie. I'll think about it."

She let go of my hand at last, and still far too soon, and patted me on the cheek. "It's nothing to think about. Don't be a dumb man, Mike. Nobody's got time for that. Especially you."

"All right," I said finally. "Wednesday."

Cassie kissed me on the cheek, something she had done once or twice before, but never so softly. "Good boy."