Chapter 10: Denny's Father Walks Into the Creek

The call came at six-fourteen in the morning, and Denny was already awake.

He had been awake since four, which was nothing new. Four was when his father's particular kind of sleep shifted from the unconscious kind into the restless kind, when the drinking had metabolized enough to let the dreams back in, and Denny had learned to surface at the same time the way a body learns tides. He lay in his bed and listened to the house settle and watched the ceiling go from black to gray to the color of old newsprint, and he was thinking about the inscription — IT HEARS YOU THINKING, layered over itself in six different hands, oldest to newest, the most recent cuts still white with concrete dust — when the phone rang.

He got to it before it could ring twice. His father's bedroom door was closed and a closed door meant sleep, however it had been achieved, and Denny treated his father's sleep the way farmers treated dry weather: carefully, gratefully, always waiting for it to end.