You schedule the U-Haul for a weekend when your husband plans to be in the woods. You do not repeat your argument that camping isn’t medication or therapy. That it cannot, in other words, fix him. You make him a sandwich for the drive to Mendocino. As his car pulls away, you know it’s the last time you’ll see him.
On the front porch he lit a cigarette, thinking he’d quit when the baby was born. His neighborhood of Newport appeared peaceful at night, the yards neatly aligned, illuminated by dim streetlights. A slight hum filled the air, its source indistinct, as if all the houses emanated the sussuration of comfortable life.
Perhaps what’s closer to the truth is that single adoptive fathers are a parental rarity, and the social stigma around them displaying overt, touch-based affection is not an issue for mothers or more traditional fathers.
They had never seen these neighbors. Whoever lived on the far side of the wooded area were strangers to them. There was no occasion for the husband and the wife to drive on West Crescent Drive, which wasn’t easily accessible from the cul-de-sac at the end of East Crescent Drive, where they lived: This would involve a circuitous twisting route to Juniper Road, which traversed the rural-suburban “gated community” called Crescent Lake Farms, an approximate half mile north on that road, and then a turn into the interior of the development and, by way of smaller, curving roads, onto West Crescent Drive.
Editor’s note: Writer Dad is a series of interviews with professional writers who are also fathers, discussing how they balance the two, what the real challenges are, and how it affects both their writing and parenting. You can read more about how [...]
In 1917 she met the rancher and entrepreneur Sebastian Mendiluce, twenty years her senior. Everyone was surprised when they announced their engagement, after only a few months. According to people who knew him at the time, Mendiluce thought little of literature in general and poetry in particular, had no artistic sensibility (although he did occasionally go to the opera), and his conversation was on a par with that of his farmhands and factory workers. He was tall and energetic, but not handsome by any standard. There was, however, no disputing his inexhaustible wealth.
She was very young then. It had to be 1974 because she was in second grade at Buhr Elementary School, which was the faded-red-brick building set back from the busy street; she has forgotten the name of the street and much of her life at that time, but she remembers the school, she remembers a teacher who was kind to her, she remembers Rock Basin Park, where the child was smothered.
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