It came with a sixty percent pay cut and a warning: his record was known, he’d be watched closely, he’d better mind his step. My father didn’t complain about his demotion; he was confident he would rise again, and installed us in a few rooms of an ante-bellum house on Peach Tree Battle in Atlanta. Toby was often sick that pre–air-conditioned August. The heat shoved like steamed towels against our faces. My mother was anxious, and my father was tormented by back pains from an old injury when he was tossed hard by a wave body-surfing in California. Still, he read to me every night—Robinson Crusoe, Aesop’s Fables, The Arabian Nights, Tales of Uncle Remus and my favorite, Treasure Island—and he bought me a model airplane engine and mounted it with a brass flywheel. Then he took it apart to show me how it worked, and never got it together again. The first time I saw him upset by an event that didn’t directly touch his family was when he heard “we” had dropped an atomic bomb, and then a second one.
