“I don’t get it, Dad. Why she hit me. And did you see? I didn’t hit her back.”

“Yup, I saw, Teddy. You did the right thing. It’s never okay for a boy to hit a girl. Or for someone to hit someone smaller than they are.”

“But I wanted to. I wanted to really, really bad.”

“Of course you did. She wasn’t behaving well. But you just can’t hurt another person. If you feel mad, you have to let it out other ways…like running as fast as you can for a while. Or punching a pillow. Or getting your mind off it by doing something else, something you like, like a puzzle or your trucks or something like that.”

When Teddy stepped from the bathtub onto the white-and-black-checked tile, Mike was waiting with a man-size black bath towel. Teddy might be squeaky-clean, but the bathroom now had more water than a lake. His son thought he was way big enough to take a bath alone. Maybe he was. But Mike wasn’t sure the house could survive the aftermath. Even with him right there, everything in sight and vicinity tended to get soaked.

He covered Teddy’s head, heard him giggle, swooped the damp package in his arms and carted him down the hall into the only room in the house that was decorated-seriously decorated.

The bed was shaped like a car. The wallpaper was a mass of trucks and cars and tractors. Mike had laid down thick, soft brown carpet, both to suck up extraneous noise and because four-year-olds-at least, his four-year-old-tended to accumulate bruises and bumps, so the carpet needed serious cushioning. No curtains. “We men,” as Teddy put it, “don’t need girl stuff like that.”