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home-delivery French doctor had told me it would be, but a strangely dry powder that was impossible to apply to anything, unless you happened to have Krazy Glue. Left alone with her father, our child stood no chance of survival.
    The next day came, and the red spots refused to spread, and the fever subsided. The day after that, the fever had gone altogether, and the spots had faded to nothing. To me this was a very good sign: Quinn was cured. No, I had cured Quinn. The doctor had said that there were rare light cases of chicken pox in which the spots didn’t spread: Here was one. To my wife it was a sign that the doctor had queered the diagnosis and that our child must be ailing from some other, heretofore undiagnosed disease. “I want to take her to the hospital,” she said.
    The language of parenthood is encoded. When a mother says to a father, “I want to take her to the hospital,” she is really saying “WE are ALL going to the hospital, and if you whisper even a word of complaint, you will have proved yourself for all time a man incapable of love.” Maternal concern is one of those forces of nature not worth fighting.
    Off we went to find a taxi, and then to find a hospital. Once we did so, we were seated in a small waiting room jammed with toys in which Quinn showed little interest, clinging, as she was, to her mother. Twenty minutes later, we were greeted by another nattily clad doctor, who was, if anything, even more self-assured than the first. He took one look at Quinn, laughed loudly, and said, “Not chicken pox.”
    Tabitha looked pleased. “Then what are these?” I asked, pointing to the faded spots on Quinn’s forehead.
    â€œInsect bites,” he said.
    I handed him the spray and asked why the doctor had instructed me to apply it to chicken pox.
    â€œI don’t know. This is sore-throat spray. Who told you your daughter had chicken pox?”
    I gave him the whole story and handed him the two pages of prescriptions, which, as it happened, had the name of the doctor who had written them on top. This provoked only more laughter. “Dr. D___,” he said, “he doesn’t know anything about children’s medicine.”
    â€œYou know him?”
    â€œHe’s my golfing partner.” He was still laughing; this was the best joke he’d heard all day.
    â€œIs he a good golfer?”
    â€œVery! He spends very little time working as a doctor.”
    On the way home in the car, the family spirits could not have been higher. Quinn was cured—or as good as cured—and well, nestling up against her mother. I was back on the end of the bench. And there, with my incompetence in dealing with matters critical to my child’s survival fully exposed, I was once again well loved. Some sort of natural order had been restored.

PART 2
DIXIE

MY MAIN AMBITION when my wife went into labor was to be sober. When our first child was born, I’d been rushing to finish a book. I’d suspected, rightly, that it would be impossible to reconcile book production with new fatherhood. To finish the manuscript before the baby arrived I’d taken to drinking several cups of coffee after dinner and working right through the night. I’d quit around four in the morning, then knock myself out with cheap wine. When Tabitha’s water broke I’d just thrown back a third glass of unsentimental Chardonnay. I’d wound up driving her to the hospital at five miles per hour and then, somewhat dramatically, passing out on her delivery room bed. I’d woken up just in time to witness the birth of my first child (Quinn Tallulah Lewis) but had made, I fear, a poor impression. For the past two years and eleven months I have been on the wrong end of a story called “How My Husband Was Loaded When My Baby Was Born.” I promised myself I’d do better this time. It was my last chance.
    I remember that it was a Monday evening, just before