The year Jimmy turned twenty-four he stopped sleeping. Maturity had come on like gang busters, which seemed unfair. He pretended for a while not to notice, to toss and turn instead, then started getting up quietly, hoping not to wake Christine. He stood around the bathroom or sat on the edge of the tub jerking off. There weren’t many options in their tiny 65th Street apartment, and Chistine needed total silence. Jimmy often wondered who she thought she was. The Queen of Ireland?

She always wanted to know, “How am I going to run twenty miles tomorrow with you prowling the flat, Jimmy?” Jimmy’s point was that the New York City Marathon was eleven months away. An eternity. What’s the point of running anyway? Jimmy wondered. Still she made him turn the TV off, lower the music—couldn’t he tell it was late?—so Jimmy started going out. He wandered dangerous neighborhoods, strolled darkened alleyways, invariably ending up at his studio, where he drank beer and stared at a blank canvas until he had to go downstairs to the pub for a real drink.

Jimmy blamed Christine, just as he knew his father had blamed his mother. He couldn’t help history repeating. It wasn’t his fault that women as much as callled to him from street corners and cafe tables: “Psst, Jimmy! Over here!” They were subtle with their perfumes and bright colored lips so no one could accuse them later. “Kiss me, I’m yours.” That was the hell of it.

In particular, there was Frances, who worked in advertising, or maybe promotion. She looked like one of those characters on a sitcom, her cute heart-shaped face twisted into a smirk. She was a slapstick girl, always telling foul jokes. In bed she jumped on him, talking dirty. “C’mon and fuck me, Jimmy Boy. Fuck me blind.”

What he really wanted, though, was to marry her.

And there it was: the past showing up again as the present.

Once he’d seen an exercise on daytime talk show, in which you recalled the significant scenes of your life, gave an approximate date, including month and year, and named if possible the meaning of each event. According to the guest psychologist, the exercise provided “ego grounding.” It turned out to be harder than it looked. The things Jimmy could name during the three-through-six-a.m. of his quiet desperation told the story of his life.

i.
Once, Jimmy’s sister Benét had brought home a stray. His father had been on one of his weekly trips to Chicago for business. This was when they lived in Silver Spring, so the dog was not exactly what you’d call mangy.

“Look at its beautiful coat.” Benét was still in tomboy coveralls and sneakers, easily excitable. “Let’s call him Virgil.”

They brushed and powdered him with things they found under the vanity. Jimmy was up for anything back then. They tied ribbons in his ears. Still when his mother came home from the school library, where she worked part-time, even in summer, she wasn’t impressed.

“Down,” she said calmly to the dog. Then she got on the phone.

Every night for a week, Jimmy and Benét made sheet tents in their beds, trying to lure the dog to sleep with one of them. Virgil merely cocked his eyebrows innocently and headed for the master bedroom.

“Down,” Jimmy heard his mother say, but it was no use. Virgil was a peculiar companion, sleeping in a complete human stretch on Jimmy’s father’s side of the bed.

A week after Benét had brought the dog home, a very handsome family in a green and brown paneled station wagon showed up to take the dog. “We’ll treat him well,” said Mr. Collins heartily. “Long walks and dog treats.” Jimmy’s mother seemed satisfied with the strength of his handshake. A beautiful woman and a beautiful baby smiled from the passenger side. Jimmy’s mother smiled back.

After Mr. Collins packed Virgil into the wagon along with the shiny new accoutrements (silver bowl, wire-tooth brush, shiny-coat pills, food and leash), two things happened. Jimmy’s father pulled into the driveway, and Mr. Collins drove off in the wrong direction, happy wife and child at his side in front, Virgil draped mopily in back. Jimmy’s father wheeled his travel tote—a gift from Jimmy’s mother—onto the driveway, kissing his entire family, who stood in a loose constellation fresh with the new absence.

“What’s going on at my favorite address?”

Before Jimmy’s mother had time to answer, the green and brown paneled station wagon rounded the cul-de-sac a second time, Collins’s slowing to offer a charming self-deprecating chuckle at their directional mistake.

“Too much excitement, I guess,” exclaimed Mr. Collins out his open window.

Jimmy had never seen his mother move so fast. Hands held out like a traffic cop, she blocked the slow moving car with body. She flung open the back door and hauled Virgil out by his new red leather collar, stuffing his shiny new belongings under her arm.

“Sorry,” she said, “we’ve changed our minds.”

Benét waltzed around the lawn, Virgil excitedly bounding behind her, like a sloppy dance partner antsy to catch up. Jimmy’s mother crossed her arms over her chest and nodded.

August 1983: Everything is reversible.

ii.
Jimmy sat on the bed. It was Sunday afternoon, and there’d been a big fight, an unusual occurrence in Silver Spring. Jimmy’s mother had been crying all morning. She’d surfaced only once in the TV room to give Jimmy $10 to take Benét on his bike to the public swimming pool for lunch. They’d swum a little, eaten hot dogs, then moped a bit at a red cedar picnic table.

“Maybe she’s sick of him traveling all the time,” Benét said.

Jimmy tried to ignore the sound of happy kids his age jack-knifing into the pool. “I don’t know, Ben. She threw a plate.”

When they got home, Jimmy went directly from the garage to the master bedroom. His father was packing for his weekly Chicago trip. He could hear his mother in the kitchen, quietly moving around the pots and pans, like someone bruised, someone who hadn’t slept in weeks. Jimmy watched the ritual of his father’s careful selection: three day’s worth of suits from the closet. “Everything okay, Dad?”

In the middle of zipping a garment bag, his father turned in profile. “Jimmy.” His name sounded like a plea, a piece of bad news.

Jimmy’s mother appeared in the doorway, her gray eyes accusingly swollen from crying. “Tell him, Burt.”

Jimmy’s father looked down at the carpet. From Benét’s record player next door, they could hear the impressive rhythm of Michael Jackson’s “Beat it”

Jimmy’s mother stood wiping her fingers on a dishtowel, speaking like a woman at an airport counter. “Your father isn’t going to live with us any more, Jimmy. He just informed me that he has another family in Illinois. He lives with them Sunday through Wednesday, but has decided to stay on with them full time. We on the other hand are dismissed.”

“Be reasonable, Elaine,” Jimmy’s father said, “I’m not trying to dismiss anyone.”

“Reasonable?”

Jimmy’s father didn’t answer.

“Another family,” his mother whispered, in case Jimmy had missed it the first time. She was staring into the bathroom from where she was standing, still half in the hallway, across the room. Jimmy turned around to follow her gaze, then looked at his father, who shifted from one foot to the next.

“Dad?”

His father made a loud throat-clearing sound.

“Another son and another daughter, Jimmy,” his mother said, “their names are Paul and Bella.”

This was the only thing Jimmy ever learned about them.

“Another address. Even a stray dog.” She stood for another minute, letting Jimmy absorb the idea before she stumbled back to the kitchen blindly to bake another peach pie. “Don’t know what the wife’s name is.”

She turned to Jimmy with clear eyes. “Can you beat that?”

Jimmy’s father left the room without saying a word.

Jimmy sat on the bed, his mother’s final sentence still ringing in his ears: Can you beat that? Jimmy couldn’t.

April 1984: People are expendable.

iii.
Shortly after arriving in New York City from college, Jimmy bumped into his father at a pool place. The table was a disgrace, as if an idiot had performed the break. Jimmy took a closer look, observing the way he held a cue, fingers curled and arthritic, a cleaning woman’s grip. The bar was smoky and entirely too green, especially the scratched covers on empty tables. It was 2 a.m. on Tuesday, the week before Christmas. To Jimmy, who’d wandered in purely by chance, the place felt like a morgue, except for the juke box which was loud and a bartender spilling out of her blouse.

Jimmy slouched closer to the group of guys in rolled-up shirtsleeves; they were smoking cigars and drinking gin, the only hot spot in the place. He was thinking that maybe they needed a fourth, when halfway to the table he recognized one of them as his father, the one with the ridiculous grip, the one losing his shirt. Jimmy hung back in the shadows, blinking to get a better look, to make sure this really was really happening. One of the guys tossed out a couple of friendly jokes about bad pool playing. “Bet you could wipe us off the table.”

Everyone laughed. His father was racking them up again.

Jimmy approached resolutely.

“Dad?” he said plaintively. What he meant was: “You bastard.”

His father turned around. He had to lean on the cue stick to focus his eyes.

“Holy shit,” his father said. He was drunk. “It’s my number one son.”

The guys in his father’s company clapped, as if Jimmy’s appearance had been planned. A couple of the guys came over to introduce themselves. They were Jimmy’s father’s colleagues and business partners. One was a client.

“Hell of a guy, your old man,” the client said.

Jimmy’s father didn’t ask where he’d gone to college or how he expected to pay off his school loans. He didn’t ask about Benét or Jimmy’s mother, and in return, Jimmy didn’t ask about his father’s second family. Or were they his father’s first? Jimmy wondered how one decided on the ranking of such things: love or chronology? Instead, they talked about Illinois and New York City—differences in landscape and weather. One of his colleagues had lived in Hawaii, so they talked about that for a while, then about the business deals they were cooking up, which had brought them to Manhattan in the first place.

“Me and these apes,” his father had said, indicating his colleagues. They were planning to make a lot of money.

Jimmy didn’t ask where or how long his father was staying. Before he put on his coat and scarf, his father wrote a phone number on the back of a business card, as if Jimmy were a whore. Then he said, “I really should have bought you a drink tonight.”

December 1994: The past will kick your teeth in.

iv.
Things got a little hairy at home the year Jimmy went to college. According to Benét, who was dating a psychologist—her own psychologist, in fact—Jimmy’s leaving restimulated the family trauma. The difficulty was compounded by the fact that Virgil had died unexpectedly in his sleep. Jimmy’s mother had rolled over, and found the dog stiff and cold.

That had given her the idea, she explained.

“Mom,” Jimmy whispered into a hallway extension outside his dorm room, “The freezer is not suitable, not sanitary.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” she said, “I took out all the food from the spare in the garage. He’s the only thing in there, now.”

“You can’t just keep him in there, Mom.”

“It’s perfect,” she said. Things were worse than Benét’s letters had indicated. “I took out all the shelving, and he just fits, standing up.”

Jimmy watched a couple of guys meander through the dorm carrying shaving kits and towels. He nodded casually, waiting for them to pass

“I’m coming home tonight,” Jimmy continued calmly.

“Oh, don’t be so dramatic,” his mother said. “We’ll see you at Thanksgiving as planned.”

September 1990: Good-bye can be avoided.

v.
The little girl, a problem student, was hanging off the chalkboard. She didn’t seem to care about homework today, half asleep in the morning, wild as soon as the class was seated. She hadn’t completed her assignment.

By ten o’clock, Jimmy’s patience was all used up. He pulled her aside.

“Something wrong, Shaneequa,” he said.

“Nothing.”

She was heavy lidded and dark skinned. Her hair was pulled back so tightly in two fat braids that she reminded him of a skinned animal: scalp surprisingly shiny.

“Did you do your math?” he said.

She smiled. “I did.”

“Let’s see.”

She shrugged, but didn’t move from the chair by his desk, which he used for all important student teacher discussions. He found consistency helpful.

“I don’t believe you.”

“You don’t have to,” she said.

Jimmy straightened his tie. The bell rang. The other students lined up noisily behind the student teacher, who marched them down to the music room.

Shaneequa didn’t bat an eye.

“So what are we going to do?” he asked her.

“You want to listen to CD’s?”

“No,” he said.

“Do I get to skip Music today?”

“Put the CD case away,” he said.

She held up the vinyl case. “Boyz to Men.”

“Be real with me, Shaneequa,” he said. “Are you having a particular problem today?”

She sucked her teeth. “Real? With you?”

He couldn’t help smiling. Her face got tight.

“It’s a request,” he said, trying to keep a handle on his authority. “I’m asking you to tell me something.”

“I am real,” she said.

“The truth, Shaneequa,” he said.

“Stop saying my name,” she said, raising her voice a little.

Her tone threw Jimmy off balance. “I’ll say your name as much as I please.”

“No, you will not.”

Jimmy leaned forward to get his face closer to hers. “Shaneequa, Shaneequa, Shaneequa,” he said quietly.

A bit surprised, she rose from her seat and flung her small body across the cluttered desk. Jimmy felt the force of her weight, the two small fists digging into his middle. CDs from Shaneequa’s case went flying in all directions, bouncing and rolling into the hall. Some of them cracked on the hard tiled floor. Catching his breath, Jimmy yanked down hard on her wrists. She twisted as much as she could at the elbow, until he picked her up off the floor by her wrists.

“Calm down, Shaneequa,” he said, realizing he ought to avoid saying her name. She thrashed all the more. “I said stop.”

When he got a better grip and yanked her around to face him, to shake the anger out of her, she kicked her legs furiously.

“I’m trying to help you.” He could not enforce stillness on her. Could not make her stop.

“Let go!” she screamed, suddenly bursting into tears.

When Jimmy realized she’d made her body into dead weight, he let her slump to the floor.

“Okay,” he said quietly, smoothing his hair, fixing his tie. He bent down over the small heap of her on the floor. “Sometimes when we are having a bad morning, we can politely ask to be excused to the nurse’s office.”

Shaneequa arched her back and whipped her neck forward so that what landed on Jimmy’s forehead was a large gob of yellowish spit with the savored sweet pulp of frozen orange juice from that morning’s breakfast. Jimmy picked her up by the arms and shook her hard, even harder than he meant to.

“You little nigger whore,” he said.

The district’s ethics committee believed Jimmy’s side of the story: he had said no such thing, not to Shaneequa, or any of his kids inside or outside of the classroom, black or white, male or female.

The entire story was an absurd fabrication of a child aching for attention.

This was a week ago last Thursday.

Friday brought several days of freedom, a holiday weekend. Columbus, thought Jimmy. Captain of his destiny. So was Jimmy. He was also thirsty and drunk. He could marry anyone he damn well pleased, marry her twice, marry as many women as would have him. He could assemble a whole damn harem if he pleased. There was some uncertainty about how he would make it home at this desperate hour in his desperate state, followed by absolute certainty that any attempt to get into bed would wake up his wife, Christine. He wasn’t sure what he’d done with the slip of paper with Frances’s number. If he found it, he could call and wake her up. She’d stumble over to his studio just to tuck him in. He decided to sleep in his studio alone; couldn’t find her number. Sometimes he was squeamish about the roaches, but tonight he was brave. He checked his watch and discovered it was already tomorrow. He stood in the doorway of the strange building dreaming up a plan. From here on out Jimmy would dedicate himself to present and future tenses only.

He will get some sleep.

Sleep is good.

At home his wife will be happy not to be disturbed.

She will get up in the morning to run.

Christine would have a glorious future of 10k races. The thought of her now made him nearly weep; he loved her unbearably. She was his own, his very own, wife, no one else’s. He reviewed the things he loved about her: muscles, long legs, long hair, drawer full of first-place ribbons, silly accent.

He loved her and only her. (Today, Reality is Jimmy’s to create.) He could sleep alone if he wanted.

It is Saturday at four a.m., he told himself. There is nothing confusing about that. It is simply tomorrow, right now.

Mary Beth Caschetta is a recipient of the prestigious Sherwood Anderson Foundation Fiction Award and the W.K. Rose Fellowship for Emerging Artists. Her award-winning stories have appeared in the Mississippi Review, Seattle Review, Bloom Magazine, The Harrington Review, Blithe House Quarterly, Altar Magazine, and Red Rock Review, among others. She is the author of a short story collection published by Alyson Books, which Ms. Magazine called "a spectacular collection of women and girls, fugitives and ghosts, invalids and activists... a sensitive and telling portrait of contemporary American life…." Mary Beth lives in Massachusetts with her partner, the writer Meryl Cohn, and their standard poodle puppy, Violette LeDuc.