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weren’t always awful, but they were always off by enough that we had to wonder if Terry wanted what he said he wanted. He went out with fifty-year-old empty-nesters. He went out with psychotically driven career women—the kind who couldn’t stop long enough to fill a gas tank, let alone get pregnant. He went out with social-climbing party girls making their waythrough A.A. as though nothing needed to change about their shallow lives except their consumption of alcohol. Those girlfriends were the hardest for us to take. There was a certain kind of female narcissism that Terry was blind to. I don’t know how many times we tried to tell him:
She’s only using you, dude. She doesn’t even
see
you
. When that kind of girlfriend moved on for a nicer home and car, Terry was always surprised.
    He told me once that he and his wife tried to have children, pushing themselves through fertility treatments and in vitro right to the door of adoption, but his drug addiction destroyed the marriage before that could happen. All he ever told us about his ex-wife was that she’d been a psychiatric social worker when they met, and now she was a high school teacher somewhere in the Bay Area.
    If you knew anything about Terry, you knew he wanted to have kids. Wade and I, his real children, thought it was funny how hard he worked at it. It was the one area of his life where we could count on him being out to lunch, almost completely unconscious of the disconnect between his ambition and his actions. He tried Big Brothers for a while, but he got in trouble for spending too much money on the kids. He made himself available for babysitting whenever some single mother in A.A. needed it, but he wasn’t much good at that, either. It was like he was trying to be some twenty-first-century version of a 1950s father—a version of parenthood that somehow didn’t involve much parenting.
    I came to visit him one evening when he was looking after Claire Monaco’s four-year-old son, Alexander. This was before their difficulties. It was nine P.M. on a Wednesday, and they werewatching
Black Hawk Down
. Alexander’s eyes were glossy with the candy that had been opened all around the two of them: heroic quantities of Twizzlers and peanut-butter cups and foil-covered chocolate eggs. Terry waved and smiled at me as I entered the living room. Alexander never broke his gaze from the TV.
    “Have you guys eaten anything?” I asked.
    “Sure,” Terry said, his eyes returned to the screen.
    “I mean besides this crap. Something with protein in it?”
    Terry shook his head. A Somalian guerrilla died horribly on the wide screen, and Alexander pushed himself farther into Terry’s shoulder.
    I ordered pizza, and I began trying to be aware of whenever Terry was babysitting.
    He regarded me sometimes as an expert on children, but in that funny way of people who have no idea what your expertise is.
    “What if the kid doesn’t like you?” he asked once.
    “What the hell are you talking about?”
    We had been skin diving among the kelp forests off Emerald Cove, something that Terry had spent the whole morning outfitting himself for at Laguna Sea Sports, thanks to Wade’s employee discount, but which we never did again.
    We were climbing up the rocky shelf of the beach. I sat down and began idly popping the bulbs of washed-up kelp plants.
    “I mean …” he said. “You know what I mean.”
    “Like, the kid won’t be amused by you? What are we talking about? An infant or a teenager?”
    “I’m talking every age. I’m talking whatever age.”
    I tossed a big gross mess of kelp back toward the water. Why I’d even picked it up, I wasn’t sure. It felt good to be the one who was giving Terry advice.
    “It’s beside the point, I guess is all I can say. You spend a lot of time cleaning them up when they’re babies, making sure they stay alive, and they love you the way someone loves an airplane that’s keeping them in the sky. Mostly, you don’t have