He went back to the bottle, and it treated him the way a wife treats a philandering husband-it took him back in and punished him on a daily basis. He started to become a character on Venice Boulevard, a sidewalk cowboy with a three-day stubble on his face and an incoherent diatribe spurting out of his mouth. He got himself tattooed one bad night, got one of those nifty “Don’t Tread on Me” numbers with the flag and the snake on his left forearm.

But Anne Kelley trod on him hard when he showed up drunk one Friday night. She told him that there was no way eighteen-month-old Cody was getting into that truck. Harley tried to kick the door down and then succeeded in smashing a window before the cops got there. They whaled the shit out of him, he got thirty days for disturbing the police, and Anne got a court order preventing him from taking Cody for the month that summer.

Harley disappeared. Anne didn’t know where he went or what happened to him, but about six months later she got a call from him. He sounded calm and composed. Gentle, like his old self. He asked if he could come over and talk to her. She met him at the office and it was like meeting a chastened version of the man she’d first met. He was clean, neat, and almost painfully sober. He apologized for having been such a jackass, explained that he’d cleaned himself up, got himself a job maintaining center pivot irrigation systems in East Orange County, and asked if he could see little Cody.

She invited him over to the house. She had to admit that she cried when she saw Cody wrap himself around Harley’s neck. Harley was as gentle and sweet with that boy as he’d ever been, and she retreated into the kitchen while father and son got to know each other again.