THE OTHER PARTY

My daughter walked into the house with a boy named Brendan. She came into the kitchen limping a little, her mascara smeared, and lay down on the floor in front of the stove.

- MATTHEW KLAM

I was dipping a cookie in icing, checking the color to see if it needed more green. Every year, in December, our block had a Christmas cookie swap, a ritual that had become one of the less disgusting parts of the holiday season.

I was home a lot and took care of things, the cooking and the house stuff. Before being home a lot, I'd worked on a TV show in Los Angeles. It was shot on two gigantic stages at a movie studio in Burbank, near a building shaped like a wizard hat that you could see from the Ventura Freeway. I was out there for a year, living in a canyon above Sunset, and missed my kid so badly that when I passed the playground of the elementary school in Toluca Lake I had to pull over, smoke a cigarette, and cry.

All day long, a dozen of us sat around a big table in a dark room writing a soapy drama about an inner-city hospital, for a guy who'd optioned my novel and wanted me to learn the ropes. He said I had potential, and he thought of what he was giving me as a priceless education, one that came with specific instructions like a Fabergé egg he wanted me to stick up my ass, to keep it safe. But then he got angry and forgot about the egg and kicked me so hard that it shattered, and while I was bleeding to death he blamed me for breaking it.