Things were going on in Little Rock. They had all four been drawn to there from their own private nowheres.

What my father, a big, courteous stand-offish young husband, felt about Essie and Bennie, I don’t know. He may have gotten swept up a bit. The world was slightly new to him and always would be. Certainly it was odd to have your in-laws be these people: on the one hand, your contemporaries; on the other, a sensation that they were in charge. They liked him without much knowing him. She stood between him and them and buffered things. His having married Edna, taken her away and made her happy was a convenience—especially to her mother. There was a bawdy, amiable, loose-limbed ruthlessness to the parents, a rough-trade aura affiliated with ambition. They were big personalities. They had scrapped beyond life in the boondocks, while my father was a traveling salesman from sixty miles up the road.

And it was all much more than I’m saying. You can be sure. What I don’t know can’t rightly be called a feature of who he was. My father. Incomplete understanding of our parents’ lives is not a condition of their lives. Only ours. If anything, to realize you know less than all is respectful, since children narrow the frame of everything they’re a part of. Whereas being ignorant or only able to speculate about another’s life frees that life to be more what it truly was.

My father was almost, but not completely, a kind of man by then. Not a boy. Yet not a full-scale adult. A husband, a wage-earner certainly, a son, a brother, an uncle. But among the four of them, as a son-in-law, he was 4th. He didn’t recede as much as settle into a role within their small hierarchy. He may have realized it. His large size and politeness, which made people like him—these may also have bottled him up. As if mannerliness was a measure of not being prepared for life. It would be the pattern around the three of them—his being 4th. Though it could also have been that for all he was—reticent, not quite gainly, smiling, forward-leaning, newly married, loved and in love—it might’ve been the most exquisite time of his life.

BEING BOTH A LATE CHILD and an only child is a luxury, no matter what else it might be, since both invite you to speculate alone about all the time that went before—the parents’ long life you had no part in. It fascinates me to think of the route their life could’ve followed that would’ve precluded me: divorce, even earlier death, estrangement. But also greater closeness, intimacy, being together in a way that defies category.