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hadn’t.
    â€œStates!”
    I drag my ass out of bed and haul it up the stairs. Our house is a Cape Cod, with the master bedroom at ground level. Both kids sleep on the second floor, separated by a tiny hallway and bathroom; the noise doesn’t travel much from room to room, and Maude has slept through fireworks displays, but I hustle anyway so she doesn’t wake up. One kid this early I can handle. Two? Please God no. I burst into my son’s bedroom.
    Roland sits on his bed, legs crossed like an Oxford undergraduate’s, his left foot rotating like a ceiling fan in one of his Lamps Plus catalogs, reading a thick grown-up architecture tome I bought him last year at Barnes & Noble, A Field Guide to American Houses (which American Libraries hails as—get this—“the definitive field guide to American homes.”). His hair, now at the midpoint between the white-blond he was born with and the sandy brown it will one day become, and cut in the pixieish style popular in our crunchily hip town, poofs up to such a degree that his (handsome, much more so than his old man’s) face appears too small for his head. The light by the door is on, as usual—he won’t sleep without a light on anymore; monsters—but the pendant light over the bed (a present for good behavior) is still off, so he’s reading small print in the dark. Spread out in front of him on the bed is an oversized Rand McNally road atlas of the United States. What he likes to do is cross-reference; he matches the location of the houses in the Field Guide (as he calls it, with emphasis on the second word)—Cleveland, Ohio; Louisville, Kentucky; New Albany, Indiana; Rolla, Missouri—to the respective dot or yellowed area on the roadmap.
    He won’t turn five for two more months.
    Littered about the room, among pages torn from the Field Guide and various lighting catalogs and maps, as well as countless pieces of myriad toys—Lincoln Logs, Tinkertoys, Legos, bristle blocks, Trios, Thomas tracks, Thomas engines, Playmobil accessories, and a few neglected dolls we got him to encourage pretend play—are foam-rubber pieces from a giant puzzle of the United States (for purposes of scale, Wyoming is about the size of a Pop-Tart). Roland is obsessed with states in general, as evidenced by his cross-referencing game, and these states in particular. He plays with them as if they’re dolls—“What are you doing there, Connecticut?” he’ll ask. Texas and Alaska, I notice, are now stuffed into the bedroom of one of his dollhouses. He sleeps with the states at night, like Maude does with her stuffed animals. On those rare occasions when he actually assembles the puzzle, he insists on placing the states in alphabetical order—Alabama is first, then Alaska, and so on—and he’ll often stack them that way. He knows them in that order because my sister sang a state song for him, two months ago, that rattles off all fifty in alphabetical order. She couldn’t have sung it more than a handful of times—she was only up for the day—but he knows it cold. He never gets the order wrong, never even pauses to think about what comes after Delaware.
    â€œSome of my states are downstairs,” Roland says, by way of greeting. His eyes are aimed in my general vicinity, but he’s not really looking at me. “Louisiana, West Virginia, Maryland, California . . . ”
    Florida. That’s what comes after Delaware: Florida. There are no “E” states.
    â€œAnd this was worth waking me up for?” I say this for my own benefit; he doesn’t pick up on sarcasm. One of the useful symptoms of his complaint, for a father who likes to crack wise—I don’t have to worry about him catching on.
    â€œMaude brought down Maryland,” he informs me. “I brought down Louisiana and California. Then Maude brought down West Virginia.”
    â€œI have to get my