I opened my eyes. The game was afoot. I gazed around the dark hotel room, immediately sensing a situation in progress. Deedie drowsed to my left, her chest softly rising and falling. Through the screen door that led to the balcony I could hear the ocean crashing on the beach.

A voice cut through the darkness. “What now?” it said. “What now!”

Through the murk I could just make out Zachary’s silhouette. He got up on his feet, and his head peeked over the edge of the portable playpen. I checked the clock. Four A.M.

Oh God please no, I thought. Sweet weeping Jesus.

One of Zach’s legs went up and over the rail, followed a moment later by the other. There was a clunk as he hit the floor. Then he stood again. “What now?” he asked. “What now!”

Then he began to run around the condo. The little feet pattered against the floor. As he ran, Zach shouted, “I’m awake! I’m awake! I’m awake!”

We were on vacation. Sanibel, Florida. Sean wiggled in his crib. He sat up, took a look around, and began to weep.

“Waah,” he said. “Waah. Waah. Waah.”

“I’m awake! I’m awake! I’m awake!”

Deedie opened one eye. I understood in a glance. “Go get ’em, Daddy. It’s your turn.”

“Waah, waah, waah.”

I PUSHED THE STROLLER down the beach. The sun had not yet risen. The breeze blew in off the ocean and whipped my hair around. I was wearing blue jeans and a white T-shirt, a battered sweatshirt that said WESLEYAN.

Zach sat in the front of the double stroller, holding a juice box. He pointed out a group of sleeping seagulls. “Birds are dreaming,” he said.

Sean had fallen asleep again, bottle in his mouth. I remembered what this was like. Something similar had happened to me a couple of times during my sophomore year of college.

At two years old, we no longer had to give Sean a syringe of digitalis twice a day. Although he was still a pale, thin thing, like an orphaned waif in Dickens, he was partial to a good bottle. He was one of those hair-of-the-dog boys.

The stroller wasn’t really made for the beach. The rubber wheels sank into the soft sand. In a compartment between the wheels was a backpack full of all the things I’d need in case of an emergency. Extra diapers. Wipes. Baby bibs. Vitamin D ointment. Band-Aids. Baby rice. Juice boxes. Crayons. Books by Eric Carle and Dr. Seuss. Cheese sticks. In the event of a nuclear emergency, the boys and I could probably hold out for days.

Zach and Sean and I rolled by the dark ocean, our wheels crushing the shards of clamshells and conches, slipping on slicks of seaweed and the egg sacs of sea creatures. There was no one else for miles, it seemed. The hotels and condos and beach houses to my right were virtually all dark, except for an occasional blue glow coming from a high room in which a television had been left on. I pictured a dad like me, passed out in a big chair, a child in his lap, the television screen crackling with snow. But then, the era when stations shut down for the night, after playing the national anthem, had come to an end right around the same time my sons were born, hadn’t it? Time was passing. I’d been a college student, then I was a married man, and now I was a father. I still didn’t quite feel lifelike though. The ocean roared all around.

“Wake up!” shouted Zach, and waved his arms. He was wearing a tiny blue jean jacket from OshKosh. “Wake up, birds!”

The seagulls, irritated by youth, spread their wings and rose. One remained behind, beak-first in the sand.

“Daddy,” said Zach. “Why isn’t that one waking up?”

The bird’s eyes were missing. “Oh,” I said. “Maybe his dreams are too wonderful to wake up from?”

I smiled inwardly. Well played, Daddy!

But Zachary looked at me sternly. “Daddy,” he said. “You tell me the truth.”

How was it, I wondered, that at age four, he could already tell the difference between the truth and a lie? Did he have some special sense that I’d either lost or never had to begin with?

“The truth,” I said mournfully. I looked at Sean, still clutching his bottle. There was milk on his chin. What is it that children dream about, before they know what the world is? Are they remembering the place they came from?

“Okay, Zach. The truth is that bird is dead. I think he can’t wake up, as much as he’d like to.”

Zach thought about this. “We should bury him,” he said.

I looked at my watch, as if I were in a hurry to get somewhere. But where was it I was so certain I needed to go at four thirty in the morning?

“Okay,” I said.

Zach raised his arms, and I lifted him out of the stroller. He reached into the storage compartment between its front wheels and extracted a plastic shovel. Then he looked up at me. “It’s the right thing to do,” he said. He began to dig a hole.

I watched as my son dug the grave. In addition to his jean jacket he was wearing a pair of overalls and a red T-shirt and a small Boston Red Sox hat.

He looked up at me with an expression that suggested he was irritated I wasn’t of more use.

“Daddy,” he said, “you get things for the headstone.”

I walked toward the shore and began to gather shells. I was barefoot, and the cold ocean encircled my feet up to the ankles. Sanibel is famous for its seashells. There were scallops and mussels, a broken nautilus. I returned to the site of the interment. Zach stood somberly by the hole like a New England minister.

“You should take off your hat, Zach,” I said. He thought about it, then took off the Red Sox cap and held it in one hand. He didn’t ask why, which was good because I couldn’t have told him.

“Okay,” he said. “We are ready to go.”

I realized that this was my cue to lower the gull into its tomb. I wasn’t crazy about the idea of touching the dead bird, not least because whatever had killed it might well have been contagious. In the worst-case scenario, Zach and Sean and Deedie could all have been back there later that afternoon, digging a hole for me.

So I borrowed Zach’s shovel and used it to lift the corpse. Then I lowered the gull into the hole. Zach nodded. I was just about to cover the bird up with sand again when he said, “Daddy. We should say a few words first.”

I looked at the boy. It’s worth noting that he wasn’t a particularly morose character. But he did have a very strongly developed sense of right and wrong. At preschool, he’d once made one of his instructors cross when she’d asked him to pretend to be a character from a story. Zach’s face had grown red and angry. “I’m not a character from a story,” he said tearfully. “I’m me. I’m Zach Boylan!”

“Okay,” I said. “What should we say?”

“I’m going to say a poem,” said Zach. I nodded and thought, Okay. Is this one of those moments you always remember because it’s so adorable? Or because it was the first clue you had that your child would someday grow up to shoot the president?

“Little seagull,” said Zach. “I’m sorry you’re dead. Even though you woke me up with your squawking. Although you are gone now, I can still hear your song.”

Then he looked down into the grave, with melancholy and wonder, and folded his hands before him. While I thought, You have got to be fucking kidding me.

Zach lifted his head and said, “Okay, we can cover him up now.” He put his hat back on.

I glanced toward the stroller, where Sean was still asleep. “Shouldn’t we wake up your brother?” I said. “Don’t you think he should be part of this?”

Zach shook his head. “No, Daddy,” he said, a little surprised I’d suggested such a thing. “This is just for you and me.”

The sky in the east was growing brighter now, a faint wash of blue and gray above the horizon. I got the shovel down into the sand and covered the bird. Afterward, we marked the spot with a stick and decorated the tomb with shells and seaweed. I thought of Shelley’s grave in Rome, where I’d once stood alone and fought off tears. The poet’s epitaph quoted The Tempest: Nothing of him doth remain, but doth suffer a sea-change, into something rich and strange.

Then, having done the right thing by the gull, Zach climbed back into the stroller, and I took up my place once more at the bridge. “Forward!” said my son, and using my superhuman strength, I once again began to push my children across the face of the broad earth.

AFTER SUNRISE, I returned to our condo and traded the stroller for a bicycle, locking the boys into some sort of New Age yuppie rickshaw that I dragged behind a rented ten-speed. I heard the boys talking to each other as we pedaled down the boulevard. Zach was reading The Very Hungry Caterpillar to Sean. He was up to the caterpillar’s sixth day: Our hero was eating through a chocolate cake, a Swiss cheese, salami, a lollipop, a cherry pie, a sausage, a cupcake, and a slice of watermelon. To my right was the endless ocean, the skies turning pink and blue now. There were joggers and shell seekers and loner dudes with metal detectors.

We pulled up at a diner. I picked up the boys and carried them, one on each arm, into the restaurant. There was no one else in the place. A waitress looked at me with a grin. “You can sit anywhere,” she said. I bore my sons to a booth by a window. I sat Zach down on a cushion, then buckled Sean into a high chair. I opened up my backpack and handed out juice boxes and crayons. My sons set to work.

We ordered scrambled eggs for Sean, pancakes for Zach, a bagel with lox for me. From the kitchen I could hear people speaking Spanish. The ceiling of the diner was hung with old nets into which seashells had been placed. On the walls were giant plastic marlins and paintings of the Sanibel lighthouse. Someone turned on the stereo, and a local radio station played Paul McCartney and Wings. We’re so sorry, Uncle Albert.

Sean pointed at me and said, “Man.”

I looked up at the clock on the wall. It was five fifteen. I took off my glasses and rubbed my eyes, felt the stubble against my palm.

Zach said, “Daddy, do birds go to heaven?”

“I don’t know, Zach. What do you think?”

He looked thoughtful. “I don’t know much about heaven,” he said.

“Well, it’s a mystery,” I said.

He thought about it some more. “I think there should be birds in heaven.”

I agreed. “So do I.”

Sean pointed at me again and said, “Man. Man. Man.”

“What do you think God is?” I asked my son.

He answered this question without hesitation, as if he’d been working on his answer for some time. “I think God might be an invisible sparkling wind that talks.” Thanks for asking.

Sean looked at a large conch shell suspended in the net above us. “Shell,” he said.

Zach considered his brother. “Baby Sean is learning a lot of words,” he said.

“Pretty soon he’ll be talking up a storm, won’t he?”

“He’ll be talking a word storm!” Zach agreed.

The waitress brought our breakfasts. She poured more coffee into my cup. “Anything else?” she said.

“We are having a special breakfast,” said Zach.

“Is that right?” said the waitress. She had a name tag that said DESTYNEE.

“It’s just boys,” said Zach.

“Special,” said Destynee. She looked at me and, incredibly, her eyes were shining, as if she were on the edge of tears.

“Negg,” said Sean, raising a fistful of scrambled eggs to his mouth with his bare hands.

I HAULED THE BOYS in their New Age rickshaw back beneath the brightening skies. More people were out now, more members of the dawn patrol. A dad threw a kite into the air and shouted to his daughter: Run, now run! Zach was reading The Very Hungry Caterpillar to his brother again. On day seven, the caterpillar ate a single leaf. He’d had a stomachache, but he was feeling better now.

I rode along the bike path, which now cut through dunes and areas of tropical forest. Now and again I’d traverse wooden bridges that crossed over murky-looking swamps and canals. There was the rumor of alligators. We stayed on the path.

At length we found ourselves at the Sanibel Island light. I locked the bike and lifted my sons once more, and carried them toward the lighthouse.

The light at Point Ybel is not much more than a high pyramid-shaped scaffold capped with a glass dome. Zach and Sean didn’t seem particularly impressed by it, but I didn’t expect them to be. One thing I’d learned as a parent was that views are largely wasted on anyone below the age of sixteen. Still, the boys were glad to be placed down upon the sand, and they began to run toward the ocean crashing endlessly before them. I sat down on the beach and watched as Zach combed the point for shells and Seannie immediately set to work digging in the sand. A flock of tough-looking seagulls looked over at the boys impassively.

I rubbed my eyes again, watching my sons, watching the sunrise bathe everything in blinding light.

A woman about my age ran up the beach, huffing and puffing in her workout clothes. She ran toward the lighthouse, touched the scaffold, and then turned around and ran away in the other direction. I watched as she receded. What if I had been that girl now running down the beach, the wind in my hair, and she had been the father, sitting here at the base of the Sanibel Light? Whose life would have been more altered?

Zach came back up from the shoreline and sat down next to me. “Hi, Daddy,” he said.

I gathered the boy into my arms and gave him a huge hug. He hugged me back, and as we held each other it occurred to me, not for the last time, that so much of the love we offer our children comes not because we are such warmhearted beings, but because we so desperately, thirstily, crave love in return.

I let him go, and Zach sat down next to me. Looking at his brother, happily digging by the water, he observed, with the air of a much older person, “Baby Sean’s really growing up, isn’t he?”

“He is,” I said.

Zach looked down at the sand. “Daddy,” he said, “I keep thinking about that bird.”

I looked over at him. He was still wearing his Boston Red Sox hat. The ocean wind rustled the blond curls beneath the brim.

“What are you thinking about?”

“How he was here, and now he’s gone.”

“I know,” I said. “It’s sad.”

He curled one of his arms around my elbow.

“Why did Grampapa die?” he said.

My father had died eight years before Zach was born. I didn’t know that my father was even on Zach’s radar.

“He had cancer,” I said. “Melanoma.”

“Are you going to get cancer?”

“No, Zach. I hope not, anyway.”

“How do you know?”

“Because,” I said. “I use sunscreen.”

We sat together for a moment, watching the ocean.

“What was he like?” Zach asked.

“My dad?” Sean was still studiously digging in the sand. “He was quiet. Thoughtful.”

“Was he silly like you?”

“No,” I said. “He wasn’t silly like me. Although if you squeezed his nose, he’d say, ‘Honk.’ ”

Zach’s whole face brightened. He reached out to me and squeezed my nose. I said, “Honk.”

“Like that?”

I nodded. “Like that.”

Zach looked pleased. He knew his grandfather now.

“What did he do?”

I thought about it. It was such an odd question to answer about a man. What did he do?

“He played the piano,” I said. “He raised orchids. He liked to go to the hardware store.”

“What’s a hardware store?”

“It’s a store where they sell paint and tools and help you learn how to fix your house.”

I traveled to a day in 1965. Dad was showing me how to use a soldering iron, fixing a toy of mine—a battery-operated flying saucer, in fact. I remembered his workbench, with its vise, and its pegboard, and an array of tiny drawers, each one containing screws and nails of different sizes. It was like his altar.

My father pressed the solder against the hot point of the iron, and a big silvery drop of the stuff dripped against the contact point on the saucer, where a wire was loose. My nose had filled with the smell of melting tin and lead. I watched as my father moved the curled end of the loose wire into the gooshy metal drop. Then my hand was burning, and I cried out loud. My father, realizing he’d accidentally allowed the tip of the soldering iron to brush against my wrist, dropped what he was doing and clapped me to his chest. I’m so sorry, son. I’m so sorry. He held me for a long time. I didn’t mean to hurt you. I’d never hurt you, Jim. I’m so sorry.

“Did you bury him? Like that bird?” asked Zach.

“No,” I said, uncertain how to explain cremation to a four-year-old. “After he died, his body was turned into ashes.”

“Ashes?” said Zach, uncertain.

I picked up some of the sand at our feet. “Ashes. It’s like white sand. We put it in the ground, under a tree.”

Zach considered this. As he thought, I remembered being held by my father, heard him tell me he was sorry. I smelled the smell of burning lead.

“Do you miss him?” asked Zach. “Grampapa?”

IN THE LAST YEARS of my father’s life he started to sleepwalk. He’d done this off and on when he was younger, but toward the end he made a regular habit of roaming the halls of our house at night. I’d hear his heavy footsteps on the creaking stairs, coming up to the third floor, where I lived in a room sealed most of the time with a heavy deadbolt. I heard him creep through the hallway and open the door to the spare room, diagonally across the hall from mine, and lay himself down in the guest bed. After a while he’d start to snore, and I’d know he was okay, at least until morning.

When the dawn slanted through the small dormer window in the spare room, though, he’d sit up, confused and angry. “Goddamn it,” he’d say. “Where am I? What is this? What the hell am I doing here?”

HE HADN’T KNOWN I was transsexual, or if he did, he never said anything about it. I’m not even sure he knew the word transsexual, or transgender, and almost surely he could not have explained the difference between the two. But that’s all right. For a long time I couldn’t figure it all out, either.

Once, though, when I was in high school, Dad and my mother were watching television, clicking through the channels, and for a moment they rested on a Movie of the Week presentation of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. It was the scene when Frank-N-Furter waltzes around in fishnets singing, “Well you got caught with a flat. Well how about that?”

My father raised an eyebrow and said, “There he is, Jim. Your biggest fan.”

For a single, terrified second, I feared that he knew exactly what was going on in my room, up on the third floor, when the deadbolt was drawn. Was it possible, I wondered, as Frank-N-Furter danced before us, that from the very beginning my father had understood the thing that had lain in my heart, and that I had apparently so completely failed to conceal? But just as quickly, I realized this was impossible. The truth about my identity was so completely improbable that my father could make a joke about it, as if the very idea was funny.

My mother picked up the remote and we moved on to another movie. Kirk Douglas was standing in a sea of men in gladiator costumes. “I’m Spartacus!” the men shouted, one after the other. “I’m Spartacus!”

My mother put the remote down. They loved movies about the ancient world, and I could understand why. My mother was Spartacus. My father was Spartacus. My drunken grandmother was Spartacus. Even Sausage, our gelatinous, overweight Dalmatian, was Spartacus.

In our house, sometimes, it seemed like just about everybody was Spartacus. Except me.

ON HIS FIFTIETH BIRTHDAY, we gave my father an inflatable rubber boat. He spent the rest of that day in it, floating around the pool, with a cigarette in one hand and a martini in the other. I’d spent the morning in my third-floor room with the door locked, wearing my hippie girl clothes and reading Betty Friedan. Then, when it was time for the party, I changed back into boy clothes and helped carry the hibachi grill and the beef patties and the charcoal and the cheese out to the pool, and I made my father a cheeseburger.

By the time he turned fifty, he’d been cancer-free for years, but a year later, in ’79, he had a second mole removed, beet red in color. Then he was healthy for another six years, until the last one. That time, they had to follow through with radiation, and interferon, and cisplatin. Too late, though.

After his funeral, on Easter Sunday 1986, as we followed the hearse through the rain, I thought back to the happy, sun-soaked occasion of his fiftieth birthday, just eight years before. We’d set up a stereo outside and played his favorite music for him. A couple of Beethoven symphonies, and the Toccata and Fugue in D Minor by Bach. It was the first time in his life that my father seemed to understand the joys of a kick-ass stereo. He lay back in his boat with a look of complete peace as he listened to the Bach.

You could see a place on his leg where they’d taken off the mole, and another on his back where they’d taken the skin to do the graft.

When the fugue was over, Dad opened his eyes and said, sweetly, “Can we play it again? Louder?”

MY FATHER’S MOTHER, Gammie, was married four times, although there were times when she dismissed marriage number one as “a trial balloon.” The first husband she actually counted was my grandfather, James, whose nickname for her was “Stardust.” My father was her only child, but she lost interest in him after James dropped dead of a brain hemorrhage, just after my father’s ninth birthday. By the time my father was sixteen, he was living virtually all the time at a friend’s house, on a cot out in the hallway. Now and again he’d show up at his mother’s house to find smashed bottles on the floor, dishes in the sink. A wild party began at Stardust’s house sometime in 1938 and didn’t really finish until 1946.

My grandfather had left her a fair amount of money, but by the time my father hit high school, the cash was gone. What happened to it? As Gammie herself later explained it, “I like men. And I like money. And men who like money, like me.”

MY FATHER’S HOBBIES, in childhood, had been collecting baseball cards and playing marbles. So it was a surprise when he introduced me to model rockets on my twelfth birthday, with the gift of a kit from Estes. The name of the rocket was BIG DADDY.

Our launchpad was an abandoned horse-racing track on a farm a few miles from our house. The grass had grown thick and snarly in the center oval of the track, and in the distance we could see the burned-out remains of what had once been the farmhouse. The farmer’s windmill had survived the fire, somehow, and it spun in the breeze not far from the ruins. I set up the launchpad and unwound the wires with the alligator clips that connected the rocket’s igniter fuses to a battery-powered launch controller. After checking the wind, I adjusted the angle of the launch rod so that the rocket would fly in the windward direction at first, because I knew that once the parachute opened, and the breeze filled it, BIG DADDY would begin to drift.

My father stood at some remove, watching as I ran through my prelaunch checklist. I was very thorough, applying the proper amount of chute wadding into the fuselage (so that the detonator charge, which caused the nose cone to eject, thus activating the parachute at apogee, would not cause the chute’s plastic to melt). I secured the igniter fuses with masking tape. I double-checked the wind speed and the angle of the launch rod. Then I looked at my father.

“Are we go for launch?” I asked dramatically.

He replied, with as little enthusiasm as it is possible to imagine, “We are go.”

Then I started counting down. “Ten … nine … eight … seven—ignition sequence start!—six … five … four … three … two … one! Liftoff!”

For a moment BIG DADDY sat there on the pad. There was a sizzling sound. I was afraid, for a moment, that it was a dud, that, as they said at Mission Control, we’d have to “scrub the launch.” Then, all at once, there was a vast, silvery swooshing sound, and BIG DADDY raced into the sky, leaving only a vaporous trail behind.

We stood there watching the rocket rise out of sight. It neared the sun, and I shaded my eyes with my hand, like I was saluting. A moment later, I felt a hand on my shoulder, and when I looked over, it was my father, who’d placed his hand on my back, probably without even thinking about it. I remember that his other hand was shielding his eyes from the sun as well. I saw the look on his face, a look of surprise and wonder, not only at the miracle of space flight—which was wondrous enough—but also, I imagined, at me. I was a boy of whom nothing might have been expected—I don’t think so. He’s not much. At times I must have seemed like a strange creature to him, delicate and frail. But I’d done this: I’d made the homely creation fly.

I looked back up at the sky. The far-off speck of the rocket passed directly in front of the sun. For a moment I lost sight of it.

Then we saw a bright flash. A moment later there was a fiery popping sound. I felt my father’s hand grip my shoulder blade a little harder. Then there was smoke, as the pieces of the rocket fell to earth. We stood there in silence as the ruins rained down around us, some of them still smoking.

I looked down at the ground. “I’m sorry, son,” my father said. Then he got out a cigarette—an L&M King—and lit it with a butane lighter. As he blew the smoke into the air, he gave me a weary look that suggested that this was exactly what the world was like, that in the years that lay before us both, it should be expected that all sorts of things would explode and scatter.

“Stupid thing,” I said angrily. “Stupid BIG DADDY.”

WHEN I FINALLY saw Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, years later, I didn’t know that Big Daddy was the name for anything other than a rocket. But there was Burl Ives, embodying the man himself. “They say nature hates a vacuum,” says Brick, his son.

“That’s what they say,” replies Big Daddy. “But sometimes I think that a vacuum is a hell of a lot better than some of the stuff that nature replaces it with.”

ONE NIGHT BACK in 1973, I was up late in my room with the deadbolt drawn. I was wearing a green paisley skirt and a halter top filled with grapefruits, and I was reading Tonio Kröger in German. On the stereo, Jerry Garcia was singing: “Saint Stephen will remain, all he’s lost he shall regain.” Your typical Friday night. From a long way off, I heard a glass break, down in the kitchen.

That was weird.

So I lifted the needle off the record. Then I took off my girl clothes, stuck them back in the secret panel that swung out from my wall, and put on my boy pajamas and a bathrobe and went downstairs. It was almost midnight.

There in the kitchen was my father. He was sweeping glass off the floor. “What happened?” I asked. “Are you okay?”

“Gotta clean up after Mom,” he said in a sleepy, mumbly voice.

“Dad?” I said. “What’s happening?”

“Daddy died,” he said sadly.

This is when I realized that my father was sleepwalking, and that he was playing out some crazy scene from his childhood, from the days after the death of his own father, when Stardust, along with her many suitors, was drinking the money at the endless party. I could see my father’s boyhood self, trying to straighten up the house while his mother lay passed out on the sofa.

He was being very methodical, putting the shards of glass in the dustpan. I held the pan still for him as he swept, again and again and again. Then I poured the glass pieces into the trash, and I said, “All done.” He stood there with the broom, deep in his trance.

“Who—?” said my father, in a voice that sounded like wind rushing through a tunnel. “Who are you?”

I looked at my father’s face—and even though he was forty-five, and asleep, it struck me that, perhaps for the only time in my life, I was seeing what he’d looked like when he was a boy.

“It’s time for bed,” I said.

“Who are you?” said my father.

I considered telling him the truth in reply to this question, but instead I took him by the hand, led him up the creaking stairs, and tucked him into bed. And kissed my boy good night.

THE YEAR I turned forty, Deedie and the boys gave me a rubber chair that floats in the water for my birthday. Since it was raining, though, I didn’t get to repeat the ritual of my father, twenty years earlier, listening to Bach at top volume. I was still a man then, although I wouldn’t remain one for much longer.

We had a bottle of dandelion wine that my friend Tim Kreider had made on his porch, and I drank it. The wine instantly made me nuts, in the most pleasant way imaginable. I placed the rubber chair on the wooden floor of our house and put Peter and the Wolf on the stereo, and as I listened to the Prokofiev I happily floated around the room as my family waved from the couch. And if one would listen very carefully, he could hear the duck quacking inside the wolf, because the wolf, in his hurry, had swallowed her alive.

AS I FLOATED around the living room, I thought about my dad. I wondered if he had felt as uncertain of what the job of father entailed as I did. Like most of the men I know, he was an interesting mix of the masculine and feminine. Sure, he’d been an athlete in high school and college, and yes, his favorite place in the world other than our own house was the hardware store. He loved to spend hours stripping wallpaper and sanding windowsills and building walls with a sledgehammer and a chisel. At the same time, his hobby was raising orchids in a greenhouse that he and my mother built off the kitchen.

There were times I couldn’t figure him out—he spent all morning swinging a sledgehammer around, making walls out of fieldstone, and then in the afternoon would meticulously divide a phalaenopsis and water his flowers with a misting wand. Still, if there were masculine and feminine things about my father, he never seemed at war with himself about it; he seemed, above all, a man at peace.

I was not a man at peace, I thought as I floated on my raft from the kitchen to the porch. I was restless and uncertain. A will-o’-the-wisp, a flibbertigibbet, a clown. Still, I know a lot of men who meet that description, and it’s that very quality in them that I suspect is responsible for their inventiveness and their charm.

I had been lucky in having Dick Boylan for a father. As a dad myself, I wasn’t going to be anything like him. But in his kindness and his humor, his curiosity and his love, he taught me everything I knew about being a man.

And from whom, I wondered, had he learned this? He’d lost his father when he was still a child. Just as my own children, in years to come, would lose theirs.

ON THE BEACH in Florida, Seannie was hunting for jellyfish. Before us was the Point Ybel lighthouse. “Do you miss him?” asked Zach. “Grampapa?”

I watched as another woman my age loped toward us in her shorts and running bra. This one looked so much like a female version of me that I had to stare. She had the same blond hair, the little wire-rimmed glasses, the birdlike nose. I wondered whether the father of this stranger loved his daughter.

The woman reached out to touch the lighthouse with her fingertips. Then she turned around and ran back in the direction from which she’d come.

I nodded. “Yes,” I said, although my voice had fallen to a whisper. “I miss him.”

Sean came running toward us. He had something in his hand, something globular and dead and tentacled.

“Yellyfish,” he said. He dropped it in the sand.

“Hey, Baby Sean,” said Zach. “Watch!” He leaned over and squeezed my nose. “Honk,” I said sadly.

Baby Sean thought this was the most wondrous thing he had ever seen. He looked at me, and then his brother, and then at me again.

“Can Baby Sean honk your nose, Daddy?” said Zach.

I nodded. I really didn’t see what difference it could possibly make now.

Sean reached out tentatively and clasped my nose. I felt his tiny fingers encircling my nostrils.

“Honk,” I said. “Honk. Honk. Honk.”

ON THE WAY back to the condo, Zach read the end of the book to his brother. The sun was shining all around us now, burning off the mist. I was still thinking of that woman I’d seen. If I’d been her, instead of myself, what would my life have been like? How was it possible, at this point, to imagine a life for me that did not include Zach, and Sean, and Deedie?

“What happens,” Zach explained, “is that in the end of the story, the very hungry caterpillar turns into a butterfly. He builds a little house, and climbs inside it, and then he changes.”

“Then?” said Baby Sean. “Then?”

“Then nothing, Baby Sean,” said Zach. “He changes, and becomes a butterfly. And has to fly away.”