MILLICENT BELL
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Ethan is on his way home after a concert with his wife and two chil–
dren the night of the accident when little Emma begs for a toilet-stop.
They pull up to a lonely gas station on a curve. Outside, Josh waits with
his father, then wanders into the road and is killed before Ethan gets more
than a glimpse of the driver of the speeding car. The driver, Dwight, is run–
ning late returning his own son to his divorced wife, Ruth, after a Red Sox
game that ran into extra innings. Though he has had a good time wi th Sam
at the ball park, he also has had more than the usual measure of a divorced
parent's insecurity. Always unreferred to between father and son is an occa–
sion both remember when he hit the boy so hard that he broke his jaw; he
had gone wild when his wife told him about her affair with another man,
and wheeling at her wi th a roundhouse swing, he caught the boy.
Like Ethan's Josh, Dwight's Sam is ten years old. The coincidence is
deliberately meaningful. The separate stories of Ethan and Dwight are sto–
ries of difficult fatherhood, the separation of adult and half-grown child
which seems particularly of our times. In the back seat of Dwight's car, half
asleep when it jolts against Josh's body, Sam slightly bruises his head-and,
as they ride on, Dwight tells him they hit a dog. The self-protecting lie is
representative of the kind of parental bad faith for which both fathers are
responsible. The novel opens with Ethan's unsuccessful attempt to connect
with his son at the concert. Josh, musically talented, intensely reserved and
intelligent, is a child who distrusts his father's blandness and repels his efforts
to make light conversation. Out of his own unease, Ethan has often created
mistrust; once, when Ethan tells him to swing without fear from a rope
attached to a high tree-branch, Josh falls to the ground and feels deceived.
Ethan is, superficially, a very different man from Dwight. He is a gen–
tle, reflective college professor married to an apparently contented wife
who is a landscape designer. "Well don't y'all make just the perfect family
of four," an envious college classmate says to Grace when she visits the
Learners in their home, set in Ruth's arrangement of trees and flowers in
a cushy Connecticut suburb. Dwight already belongs to the more disor–
dered world of changing relationships and jobs. He is a lawyer suspended
from practice after the beat-up of his wife and child; he has had to find
employment at an old friend's small-town law office, and when we meet
him he is living in an anonymous rented ranch, in a town appropriately
named "Box Corner." Wi thout any really satisfying new attachments, he
clings desperately to his precarious fatherhood, enduring abrasive contacts
with Ruth for the sake of Sam's visits.
Josh's death works its changes. Not only the stranger who runs him
down but his own family feels guilt for his death-Ethan and Grace for not
having watched him before he strayed into the road, and Emma for mak–
ing them stop at the gas station in the first place. Guilt and anger make the
