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Bill spends his first night in our house on the living-room couch. “He’s temporary,” Nails tells me when I bang on the bathroom door wanting to know what variant of mold spore grew there and why it’s battling Jonathan for the PlayStation.

Bill’s an entrepreneur. Later I’ll grow to know the type: The kind for whom dreams exceed brainpower. “He’s got ideas,” Nails says. “He’s going to make a fortune. And we’ll benefit.”

“What ideas? He can’t hold the video-game controller without drooling.”

“Don’t be difficult.” She finishes her grooming with a squirt of Jean Nate. “It’s unattractive.”

My father takes up residence at The Boulders, where everybody’s father lives during the divorce. It’s a new apartment complex on the wrong side of Interstate 15. “You hear that?” he asks Adam, Jonathan and I when we visit for the first time. “That’s people walking. Upstairs. I bet your mother doesn’t have to hear that.”

His tears quickly gave way to vengeance. Rooster’s hired the meanest, cheapest lawyer in San Diego County. He’s gunning for blood. “That scumbag,” he says, stirring the Kraft out-of-a-box dinner for us all to share. “She banging him yet?”

“He sleeps on the couch,” Adam says.

“My ass. You don’t need to tell me. I guess you won’t. You’re all teamed up against me. The Breakfast Club. Nothing’s changed.”

Crooked walkways lead through the apartment’s necessary paths: bedroom to bathroom, kitchen to garage. Boxes line them all: the booty with which my father escaped Lomas Verdes. “I’m house-hunting on the coast,” he tells us while we practically sip dinner through a straw. How can you fuck up macaroni? “Enough of this provincial inland shit. We moved here for the schools and look how those turned out.”

My father loathes the Poway school district. He hates our neighborhood, full of arrogant snobs, Audi drivers. “Krautmobiles,” he says when he sees one. “Those leather seats are made from our ancestors.”