“Now how about this?” Earl pointed an index finger toward a wooden construction that stood in the middle of his yard, running from one side to another: a play structure, with monkey bars and a swing set, a high perch like a ship’s crow’s nest, a set of tunnels to crawl through and climb on, and a little rope bridge between two towers. I had never seen anything like it, so much human effort expended on a backyard toy, this huge contraption.

I whistled. “It must have taken you years.”

“Eighteen months,” he said. “And she hasn’t played on it since she was twelve.” He shook his head. “I bought the wood and put it together piece by piece. She was only three years old when I did it, weekends when I wasn’t doing overtime at Ford’s. She was my assistant. She’d bring me nails. I told her to hold the hammer when I wasn’t using it, and she’d stand there, real serious, just holding the hammer. Of course now she’s too old for it. I have the biggest backyard toy in Michigan and a daughter who goes off to the zoo and spends the night there and that’s her idea of a good time.”

“You haven’t heard what I’m about to say,” Earl told me.

“It’s why I’m calling you. It’s what she says.”

“What’s that?” I asked him.

“Not what I expected,” he said. “She pities me.”

“Well,” I said. More shots of the nuclear reactor. I was getting an idea.

“Well is right,” He took another breath. “First she says she loves me. That was shock number one. Then she says she feels sorry for me. That was shock number two. Because I work on the line at Ford’s and I drink beer and I live in Westland, Where does she get off? That’s what I’d like to know. She mentions the play structure. She feels sorry for me! My God, I always hated pity, I could never stand it. It weakens you. I never wanted anybody on earth pitying me, and now here’s my punk daughter doing it.”

“Earl, put that diary away,”

The other three clowns were all fat, middleaged guys, Shriners or Rotarians, and I thought Earl had a good chance. My gaze went from the gun down to the parking lot, where I saw Jaynee. She was standing in the rain and watching her old man. I heard the gun go off, but instead of watching Earl, I watched her.

Her hair was stuck to the sides of her head in that rain, and her cotton jacket was soaked through. She had her eyes fixed on her father. By God, she looked affectionate. If he wanted his daughter’s love, he had it. I watched her clench her fists and start to jump up and down, cheering him on. After twenty seconds I could tell by the way she raised her fist in the air that Earl had clumped his way to victory. Then I saw the new woman, Jody, standing behind Jaynee, her big glasses smeared with rain, grinning.

I looked around the parking lot and thought: everyone here understands what’s going on better than I do. But then I remembered that I had fired shots at a nuclear reactor. All the desperate remedies. And I remembered my mother’s first sentence to me when we arrived in New York harbor when I was ten years old. She pointed down from the ship at the pier, at the crowds, and she said, “Warren, look at all those Americans.” I felt then that if I looked at that crowd for too long. WESTLAND 33 something inside my body would explode, not metaphorically but literally: it would blow a hole through my skin, through my chest cavity. And it came back to me in that shopping center parking lot, full of those LOVE NETWORK people, that feeling of pressure of American crowds and exuberance.