At the Carousel Bar at the Monteleone. By the duck pond at the Peabody in Memphis. Ed Manny. Rex Best. Dee Walker were these men’s names. They traveled for Nabisco and General Mills and P&G, or for his “competitors,” Argo and Niagara. It was collegial, more or less.

There certainly wasn’t reading. There wasn’t television, only the car radio. There wasn’t air-conditioning for the car or the rooms. Only ceiling fans and the window if there was a screen. There were movies, which my mother liked, but he didn’t care about. They ate in supper clubs and bars and roadside joints, had breakfasts in hotel coffee shops and diners. For my father, behavior and awareness ran on a single track. There wasn’t much looking to the side of things. It made for a present he liked.

For Faultless he was regularly the low man in gas consumption and the thriftiest in expenses charged back. He drove a steady 60 mph—the most economical way to drive. There was no hurry. He didn’t wish to lose his job when jobs were scarce. They were together everywhere, all the time. Each Sunday morning, wherever they were—in some hotel—he wrote out his expense reports in the room or at the little escritoire in the lobby, his tiny, barely decipherable ink-pen scratchings filling the forms the company provided. Then he walked to the post office and mailed off a fat envelope to Kansas City. Special delivery.

All along they wanted children. It was the normal thing. But that simply hadn’t happened. They weren’t sure why. Though it only made them closer—walled out the past and the future both. A suicide for a father and a severe Irish mother can close off a lot. Plus, my mother had had anything but an easy life before going to the nuns. The past for them wasn’t an accommodating site. As for the future and intimacy, they would be each other’s givens.