What many people don’t realize is that parenting does not come with a manual. What a parent does have is a set of guidelines mostly gleaned from how he or she was raised. These are not necessarily good guidelines and parents remain responsible for those parenting errors long after the child has ceased to be a child. In this case, Malarkey realizes all the patently stupid things he did as a parent while his child, in this case, Andrea, was growing up and he further realizes that he can never alter that. What results long after the child ceases to be a child is an unfettered case of guilt that Malarkey takes with him everywhere he goes and which happens on a daily basis since, like Proust’s madeleine, there are occasions, unsuspected occasions, that memories appear and those memories elicit joy or sorrow or, in Malarkey’s case, guilt. Unlike Proust’s madeleine, Malarkey can’t eat them. The memories. Malarkey carries a lot of guilt about his daughter’s childhood since he recalls those days when in the heat of an argument over one thing or another—arguments over one thing or another, often money—he can’t remember over what exactly, but he does remember the devastating effect it had on his daughter. The circumstances surrounding those arguments have disappeared, have been long forgotten, exist only as fragmented memories if they exist at all, but the effects of those arguments still remain, linger, like etchings engraved in the stones of history and Andrea often reminds him of that.