Two weeks after my tenth birthday, a man named Richard Cashton walked into the park across the street from my house and shot himself. My mother was still at work, and my father was asleep on the living room couch, full of beer and pain and the insufficiencies of a man six months into a new job at the age of forty-two. I had just gotten home from school and was standing by the front window watching three ibis walk along the edge of our front yard, pecking at the ground with their long, curved beaks when I first spotted Mr. Cashton.

He walked down to the edge of the park, a thirty-yard spread of rye grass that led to Lake Ivanhoe, and then leaned against an oak tree, looking out into the water. I didn’t see the gun at first, only his right hand as he raised it to his face. There was a pop, then his head jerked back and he fell. It wasn’t as dramatic as you’d expect.

After the shot, my father sat up for a moment, then settled back into his world of alcohol and sleep. Out the window, I couldn’t see Mr. Cashton, only the swaying cattails that lined the shore of the lake. For a second, I wondered if the man had been there at all, if I’d only imagined seeing him and the sound I’d heard was Mr. Bird’s old Ford backfiring again. But when I looked at the ground below the oak tree, I saw his body, the tips of his black shoes pointing straight up at the sky.

I half-expected him to stand up, brush off his dress pants and white button-up shirt, and walk out of the park. Then I heard a scream and our neighbor, Mrs. Bird, was running across the street toward the body. As she got close to him, she slowed down and tip-toed across the grass, as if she was afraid of disturbing any evidence or maybe waking the man from his sleep. When she turned to my house, our eyes locked for a second before I stepped away from the window.

I considered running out to take a look at Mr. Cashton before the police and ambulance arrived. Maybe running past him out into the water, which I’d been warned not to enter because of alligators and water moccasins, and swimming across the lake. Something told me on a day where I’d seen a man shoot himself I could make it across that water without incident.

My father woke again when he heard the sirens. He sat up and wiped his eyes, climbed off the couch and stood by the window, studying the flashing lights outside. “Stay here,” he said, then walked out of the house as unsteady as I’d ever seen him and exchanged a few words with Mrs. Bird and one of the policemen.

That night over dinner my parents didn’t speak to each other. It had been more than a year since my father closed his bar because of “some sort of financial difficulties,” as my mother put it, and had gone through a handful of jobs before settling in as a night shift press operator for the St. Petersburg Times. He didn’t look up at my mother or me, but drank slowly from his can of Busch Light between bites of ham and corn. When my mother asked if I had any questions about what had happened, I shook my head.

My father coughed and scratched his dark beard. He smiled at me and ran his rough hands through my hair. I glanced up and saw my mother staring at him with something close to hate in her eyes. As soon as he left for work, she put out her cigarette and walked into the bathroom. A couple minutes later, I heard water running.

Ever since the ambulance and police drove away, I had been trying to figure out why the man would pick our park to kill himself in. And it was only then, sitting alone in the living room while my mother took a bath behind a closed door, that I remembered a summer day, a few years back, when I had seen Mr. Cashton and his son, Dennis, standing in the park, tossing a bright, green Frisbee around for over an hour. I assumed the park, while nothing more than a square of grass to me, held that memory for him.

After her bath, my mother announced it was time for bed. Tucking me in, she asked, “Are you sure you’re all right?” I nodded, told her that I was. “How would you like to go away, just the two of us?”

“I think Dad should come,” I said.

“Being alone isn’t such a bad thing.” She kissed me on the forehead and said, “Do me a favor, sweetie, don’t tell your father we talked about this.”

“I won’t,” I said.

The next morning I expected to find a grief counselor at school, talking to us about what happened to Mr. Cashton. Ten months earlier, when Dennis and his mother were killed in a car accident, the counselor had been a short red-headed man. He told us how he was available if anyone needed, or wanted, to talk. He said it was normal to feel weird, or sad, even angry when someone you know dies. But this time there was no grief counselor, no mention of the dead man, and I wondered if the teachers at school had even heard about what had happened.

While we were in the same grade and played on the same baseball team, Dennis and I weren’t really friends. He was a small, thin, blond boy with big ears and a large dimple in the center of his chin. He played right field and was well known for his ability to strike out in the last inning of a clutch game. Mr. Cashton worked downtown as a salesman for Reynolds Appliance Outlet and he’d come to the games straight from work, standing up in the faded brown bleachers and clapping every time his boy walked out of the dugout.

One day, toward the end of the last season he would ever play, Dennis stepped up to the plate—he’d struck out twice already that game—and swung at the first pitch, something Coach told us not to do, sending the ball deep into right field for a triple. As Dennis rounded second, I looked up at the bleachers and saw Mr. Cashton standing there, not saying a word, his mouth open so big you could stick an apple in it.

During the four years he owned the bar, my father would come home for a couple of hours in the evening, eat dinner with us, maybe work out with his barbells while he watched the news on TV, then go back to the bar to finish out the night. A couple times a week we’d even play catch while Mom finished making dinner. Occasionally he would sneak up behind her while she was cooking and pinch her softly on the butt. She’d jump and spill some spaghetti or green beans across the floor, and the two of them would run upstairs for a little while and come back holding hands and laughing. More than once, I had walked up the stairs and listened to their moans and comfortable laughter.

But after he lost the bar, my father became a different man. It wasn’t a subtle, slow descent into sadness and bitterness, but as if a light switch had been shut off and he decided to stop trying. While he never said so, I felt he blamed my mother and me for his failures as a bar owner. And though I know we must have done some things together as a family that one year, all I can remember is him sleeping and drinking, going out of his way to avoid any real contact with us.

The weekend after Mr. Cashton shot himself, I heard my parents fighting in their bedroom. “What were you doing?” she asked.

“We were sitting there, watching TV.”

“No, you weren’t. You were probably drunk. Goddamn it, Jerry, that man had a gun. He could have killed Wes.”

“He wasn’t shooting toward the house.”

“That’s not the point. I’ve got to know that I can trust you with him when I’m at work.”

“You can.”

“I don’t know anymore,” she said.

I walked downstairs and turned the TV on. The Red Sox were playing the Yankees at Fenway Park. The summer I turned seven my father and I had gone to a Red Sox game while visiting my grandparents. Jim Rice hit a third-inning home run over the Green Monster in left field, and I had wondered that day if I would ever hit a baseball so far and high that people would have to strain their necks to watch it sail through the air. In the bottom of the ninth, on a 2-2 hit and run, Carl Yastremsky hit a line drive deep into center field and Jerry Remy ran across home plate to win the game. As the crowd cheered all around us, my father had put his arm around me, squeezing me tight against his chest.

For my tenth birthday, my favorite gift was an aluminum baseball bat. In the days after Mr. Cashton’s suicide, I came home from school and walked past my father asleep on the couch. I tried to make noise—slamming the front door and dropping my books on the coffee table—but nothing could wake him. I’d grab the baseball bat and walk across the street, into the park, and stand where Mr. Cashton had stood. I looked around for blood or any evidence that it had happened in this spot but never found any. I thought about Dennis sometimes and how hard he had swung the bat that day he’d hit a triple while the rest of us boys sat in the dugout with cheeks full of Double-Bubble, sure that he would strike out and how Coach talked about that hit for the rest of the season. And I thought about the fact that although Dennis and his father were both dead I was still jealous of the way Mr. Cashton had stood in the stands, game after game, proud of his son. I couldn’t remember the last time my father had even been to one of my games.

I swung the bat as hard as I could against the oak tree and hoped the sound would reach my father and wake him, snap him out of his stupor. My hands stung and Spanish moss and leaves fell all around me each time the bat connected with the tree. But my father didn’t come outside and offer to play catch or throw a ball around. I wondered what he dreamed about asleep there on the couch. If he dreamed of my mother or me, or if his dreams were all about what he once had and the way things can slip away from you so quickly.

One night, about three months after Mr. Cashton killed himself, my mother came home from working a ten-hour shift at the hospital and made a dinner—Salisbury steak, mashed potatoes, and carrots—that my father ate in silence. Afterward, he smiled blurry-eyed at her and said, “What do you say, Angela, why don’t we go upstairs?”

They walked up the stairs and I started doing the dishes. A couple minutes later, she ran back down, wearing her white bathrobe, smoking a cigarette. My father came down a few seconds later. His face was red and he wasn’t wearing a shirt. His stomach had grown since he’d lost the bar and the hairs on his chest were dark and curly just like the hair on his head. In the living room, my mother called him a bastard and a bum and a good-for-nothing son of a bitch. He didn’t say anything for a long time but stared at her, his chest rising and falling, as if he were slowly understanding every word she said or trying to decide just what to do next. Then he slapped her across the face, hard, and she fell to the ground.

I ran over and sat on the floor next to her. My father stood there looking at his hand and then at us on the ground below him, as if he couldn’t quite decipher what had happened, as if he had somehow just come across this scene and not been the instrument of its outcome. He grabbed his blue work shirt from the couch and walked out of the house without a word. I started to cry and my mother held my face in her lap, said, “It’s okay, Wes, it’s all going to be okay.”

The next day when I came home from school, my father’s car wasn’t in the driveway and he wasn’t on the couch. I checked the garage, looking for things he may have taken, but his most prized possessions were still there: his golf clubs, his weight bench, and the small neon sign that had hung in the window of his bar announcing THE CORNER TAVERN. Even though he had not taken these things, I knew that he had left us.

When my mother pulled up, a little after six, I ran out to her car and hugged her. “He’s gone,” I said.

“I know,” she said, taking my hand and leading me back inside the house.

Later, while we ate macaroni and cheese for dinner, she said, “You know being alone isn’t all bad.”

“No?” I asked.

“No,” she said, “you’ll see. We’ll be okay.”

My father didn’t call or come by to see me for almost two months. My best friend, Roger Baldry’s parents were divorced, and Roger would tell me how he still saw his father every weekend. How in some ways it was better now because every time he saw him they would go to the batting cages, eat buckets of ice cream together, or take drives over to Madeira Beach. I asked my mother how come Dad didn’t do that kind of stuff with me. She said that he would one day. That he was having some troubles, but he’d get through them and when he did, I’d get to spend more time with him.

My mother started going out on Saturday nights with some of the other nurses from work. She told me they weren’t looking for men but were just dancing and talking, enjoying themselves, being girls. Donna Byrd, my sixteen-year-old neighbor, would babysit me and we’d watch CHiPs marathons. She said that though all her friends liked Ponch, she thought Larry was really the cute one.

One Saturday, around midnight, I heard my mother come in and say good night to Donna. Lying in bed, I expected my mother to climb the stairs and head for her bedroom, but instead music started to play. It was slow music, and I figured it was probably Van Morrison because since my father had been gone, she had taken up drinking red wine and listening to Van Morrison on the weekends.

As one song rolled into another, I got out of bed and walked down the stairs as quiet as I could. I stopped about halfway down and sat there watching her dance. She was barefoot and wearing her white dress, holding a glass of red wine in her right hand. The only light in the room came from three lit candles in a row on the coffee table behind her. She smiled as she moved across the floor with her eyes closed and her head rocking softly back and forth.

I wanted to tell her she was the most beautiful woman in the world, that I would do anything for her, would risk my life and fight an army of men to make her happy. It didn’t seem to matter though, because she was dancing and smiling all alone. She looked more content than I had ever seen her. And it occurred to me for the first time that maybe she didn’t need me or my father to be happy.

Two weeks later, on a Sunday afternoon, I heard someone knocking at the front door. When I opened it, my father was standing there, holding a dozen red roses. He’d shaved his beard, cut his hair, lost some of his belly, but his eyes still had a blur to them that spoke of uncertainty or desperation. When I hugged him, he smelled like soap. My mother walked up behind me and they stared at each other for a moment. He started to say, “I’m sorry,” but she hugged him before he could finish getting the words out.

With time, our lives seemed to move back to the way they were before he lost the bar. He started working days, and on warm Florida, November evenings, the three of us would stand in the park like the points of a triangle and play catch. We would go out for pizza on Friday nights and then to the grocery store. And while everything seemed as good as it had ever been, there were times I’d catch my mother looking at him in an odd way. It was as if she expected him to slowly slide back into the man he’d become that year and was preparing herself in the event that this happened.

A month or so after he came back, I woke in the night to go to the bathroom. On the way back to my bed, I heard muffled noises coming from my parents’ bedroom. I leaned against their door and could hear moans, springs engaged, and the word love being tossed around. I thought of that Saturday night when I had watched my mother dance by herself and couldn’t help but wonder why she had taken him back.

I wondered if she had thought of Mr. Cashton the day my father had stood at the door with flowers in his trembling hands and if she had seen something in his eyes she knew that only she could stop. I couldn’t be sure about it, and I told myself it didn’t matter, because on the other side of this door the two of them were making love again. I sat down and closed my eyes and listened to them moving together and held on to that for as long as I could while the sounds they made carried me off to sleep.

Steve Cushman’s debut novel, Portisville, was the winner of the 2004 Novello Literary Award. His short fiction has appeared in The North American Review, 100% Pure Florida Fiction, Lake Effect, Village Rambler, Rosebud, Hurricane Review and the Raleigh News & Observer. He currently works as an X-ray technologist in Greensboro, North Carolina.