STORIES ABOUT TERRY MAKE HIM seem like some sort of tough but loving drill instructor. He was that, but he was also a deeply strange man whose life baffled him as much as anyone.

One time he took me to an A.A. convention in Palm Springs. He was speaking at the banquet, and I think he told me about it ten minutes before we drove away in his Cadillac. He knew I didn’t have anything better to do. After we’d been in the hotel for about a half a day, moving from room to room listening to charismatic A.A. speakers, sitting before good-natured A.A. panels, I’d had enough. I couldn’t handle the volume of the place. Everyone was vibrating at a frequency that made me want jump from my skin. I went back to our room, took a long shower, and then lay on the bed in my shorts planning to hitchhike home.

Terry returned in crisply pressed linen pants and a blue Hawaiian shirt that didn’t have any wrinkles, either. He leaned against the wall beside the bathroom. “You want to get away from here at any cost,” he said. “Failing that, you want to kill yourself. You’re thinking about stealing my car right now.”

I just stared at him. Yes, yes, yes, I thought. So fucking what?

“If I were you”—he stood up straight—“that’s exactly what I’d do. Go ahead and steal my car. Get the fuck out while you can.”

He smiled. And then he left the room.

When I took Crash home, there was a full-tilt autobahn-eating Mercedes in my ex-wife’s driveway, the G-series, the expensive kind. Jean’s date wasn’t over yet. I’d get the chance to talk with John Sewell sooner than I’d thought. When I took off my seat belt, Crash gave me a wide-eyed look: it was rare that I wanted to see my ex-wife.

I walked in with Crash, armed only with the vague cover story of speaking with my ex-wife about starting a college fund, an idea that had suggested itself after this morning’s abrasion with the very uncollegiate Troy Padilla. I sometimes dreamed up these arbitrary conversations with Jean, hoping that if I distracted her from our custody battle, maybe it would go away.

Jean and “her guy,” John Sewell, were on the patio, drinking the same expensive ginger ales that I stocked myself. Crash wisely ducked into her bedroom.

As he stretched out his hand, I remembered how much I had wanted to like John Sewell that time when we invited him fishing with us off Dana Point; I was guardedly encouraged when Crash brought his name home one weekend. He was about my size and shape, maybe five years older, going gray, and he had a jaw that belonged in a shaving commercial. He wore a navy suit without a tie, but I knew the tie was around here somewhere. He was the kind of man who held your hand for exactly the right amount of time as he looked squarely into your eyes.

I gave Jean an awkward kiss on the cheek, which is what people like us do to pretend we’re not people like us. It had been years since we’d screamed at each other, but that didn’t mean we were friends. Jean was wearing a tailored jeans jacket over a salmon-colored shirt and a butt-framing pair of slacks. She was a compact but lovely woman, and she should have married the kind of country-club geek she went to USC with, the kind her father always pushed her toward. The kind of guy who grew up to look exactly like John Sewell.

“We shouldn’t be talking,” Jean Trask said. “You’re suing me.”

“I’d be happy not to sue you,” I said, “if you’d agree to share custody of our daughter.”

“It’s a good thing, then,” she said, “that it’s not my job to make you happy.”

Her response was so sharp that I almost laughed. “This is ridiculous, Jean. If I lost your trust eight years ago, I’ve more than—”

“You gave away your rights in this situation,” she said. “It would be easier on everyone if you would just accept that.”

I looked at Sewell, wondering how far ahead of me he was. The conversation had gone to shit almost immediately, and yet his expression seemed remote, maybe even bemused.

“This is not unreasonable, Jean. I’ve consented to drug tests. I’ve consented to home visits. For the past eight years, I’ve lived an exemplary life. What do you want me to do that I haven’t done?”

“I want you to drop the lawsuit. You have everything you need. I don’t deny you access to Alison; she even has a room at your house. What we’re arguing over is a technicality.”

“You think it’s a technicality,” I said, “that I have no legal status in her life? You could move her to another state without even telling me.”

“You should have thought of that, Randy, when you destroyed our reputation on the front page of every paper in Southern California.”

Jean Trask had shed my last name as quickly as a prisoner sheds his orange jumpsuit. Her maiden name had always sounded like military discipline to me. I couldn’t remember what it felt like to love her.

Sewell cut us both off at the pass, which I suspected was his specialty. He did it in an interesting way, too: he cleared his throat, looked at the room around us, and then launched into something entirely different. It wasn’t denial so much as a weird dominance. He’d decided that the conversation should be over, so he declared it over.

“Randy,” he began, “Alison says that project in Capistrano is something to see. How did she put it—Frank Lloyd Wright in skateboard shoes? I’m not sure what that means, but I was impressed by her enthusiasm.” Sewell’s default mode was to conciliate. I remembered that about him. Or rather, I remembered what Terry had said about him: Guy can’t even take a bathroom break until he’s sure everything’s in order.

I wish I were better defended against this kind of compliment, but I’m not. Convince me that my daughter loves me a tenth as much as I love her, and I’m your bitch.

One of Jean’s former boyfriends had written me a poem about his “yearning” for us to be good friends. Another asked if I wanted to do a sweat lodge with him sometime. So I liked the idea of John Sewell. He was cordial, and he acted like a man. All I really wanted was a safe place for my daughter to live when she couldn’t live with me. An end to my alimony wouldn’t hurt, either.

John suggested to Jean that maybe I would like a ginger ale, too, and she left the room with such fury that you could hear the fabric of her slacks whipping against itself. In an instant, John and I were alone together.

“Can I ask you a question, John?”

“I don’t see why not.”

“You ever meet an electrician named after a dog? Maybe someone who worked for you?”

Sewell smiled kindly and shook his head. “I don’t think so, Randy. Why?”

“You don’t even want to know,” I said.

Sewell looked thoughtfully into my eyes. “I was sorry to hear about Terry. I missed the memorial. I was in Sacramento working on—”

I interrupted him. “We were good friends to him while he was alive, right?”

“That’s right,” Sewell said. “Although now I wish we had spent more time fishing. Was that a pretty regular outing for you guys?”

“For a while,” I said. “Then we got busy.”

“That’s too bad,” Sewell said. “I thought of you being out there every weekend, Terry planning everyone’s lives.”

“What was his plan for you, John? I can’t remember.”

“I was going to be a senator. And if I remember correctly, you were going to run a huge development corporation.”

“How’s that working out for us?”

Jean arrived with my ginger ale. “John’s got too much integrity to be a senator. He’s going to be a judge.”

“Should I be congratulating him now?” I asked her. “Did I miss an announcement?”

“Yes,” she said, “you should be congratulating him now.”

“It’s not official,” John interjected, “but it’s in the pipeline.”

“They’re going to give him Judge Fogarty’s bench,” Jean said. “Now that the old bastard has finally done the right thing.”

John looked down modestly. “It came at a good time,” he said. “I was looking for new challenges.” His statement of intent was flavorless, but I didn’t begrudge him: Jean had enough picante for both of them.

“Fogarty resigned?” I said.

“He should have resigned years ago,” Jean said.

“I think judge is better than senator,” I said. “Congratulations.”

“And I’m pretty sure,” Sewell said, “that being a builder who’s regularly featured in design magazines beats running a development company.”

“That may be true,” I said, “but you just came a lot closer to fulfilling Terry’s predictions than I have. You ready to give up lawyering?”

“Happily,” he said.

Although I didn’t necessarily want to end Jean’s discomfort with our mutual admiration, I decided to employ my collegefund conversational gambit. Things had already gone way south with Jean, but I figured maybe I could endear myself to the soon-to-be Honorable John Sewell.

As it happened, Crash walked back into the room in time to hear her mother laugh. “Who is this college fund for? You? That youngster you live with? Alison has less than four years until graduation. What did you think I would do, wait for someone to die and will it to me?”

Sewell smiled in a neutral way. A thought occurred to me that must have already occurred to a smart man like him: this was a discussion we should have been having in private.

“That’s great,” I said. “How much do you need from me?”

“You’re already contributing,” Jean said. “I’m putting in your alimony. It’s not like I need it.”

Humiliation from my ex-wife wasn’t anything new, but it was particularly painful in front of her boyfriend. I considered my options. With Crash standing beside her mother, I didn’t have any. I could have asked Jean for a steak knife in order to commit ritual suicide, I guess.

“Can I make a suggestion?” Sewell said.

For a second, we both looked at him as though we couldn’t imagine how he had materialized in our lives. I managed a nod. Jean barely moved.

“The way things are going with the market these days,” he said, “it makes sense for both of you to have college funds. One of you could have a 529, and the other could start a trust in Alison’s name. Listen, if you want to talk sometime, Randy, I can give you some suggestions. I do okay with this kind of thing.”

Jean wasn’t happy to watch Sewell pull me from the fire. She gathered up the empty bottles, and my own not-empty bottle, and took them to the kitchen. Crash followed her mother, probably to make sure she didn’t return with that steak knife.

“She hates you.” Sewell said it like he was telling me my truck needed new tires.

“I didn’t notice it while we were married,” I said, “because there was so much disgust, too.”

“I’m going to make her hate you less.” Sewell stood up, which I took as a signal that I should start heading to the door. “It’s no way to start our marriage. I’m good at this kind of thing, too.”

Leaving without saying goodbye to Jean was an excellent plan. I could call Crash from my truck. Shaking John Sewell’s hand, I felt grateful for his attempts to make my life easier. And that wasn’t even the worst mistake I made that night.