When a boy is in high school, his family's house is robbed, though no one is hurt, and the robber is soon found passed out from drugs in their car a few blocks away. A few days after the robbery, the boy's father visits his house at night when his mother and stepfather are not home. The father has been visiting his son like this for a little while, and he is always shaking and asking for alcohol. One time, the boy and his father get into a fight, and the father says something cruel when he leaves, although the boy can't remember what he said anymore. The boy remembers the story his mother told him about her separation from his father. She had just told her husband she was going to leave him and was driving to get the boy and his sister from her in-laws house. Suddenly, the father's car swerved in front of hers, meaning to hit her, but while she avoided the crash, his car ended up totaled, having hit a girder. When the police came and took him away on a stretcher, he was staring at the boy's mother the whole time. When the boy is four years old, he meets his stepfather, who has been in prison for most of his life. After getting out of prison the first time, the man robs several homes and stores before eventually getting busted for hijacking a truck after being offered a ride. He doesn't get out of prison again until he is forty, and it soon after this that he meets the boy's mother. He is a smooth talker and showers the mother with compliments, and the two are married after just a few months. The boy remembers his father's obsession with conspiracy theories and the Bermuda Triangle, his fear of demons, and the time he gave his new hat to a homeless couple digging through the trash. Then, he remembers getting into the fight with his father and what his father said to him. After being knocked to the ground, he tells his son about the first time he gave him a bath. He soon found himself riding with him, a baby at the time, in an ambulance to the hospital, because his skin was red from the bath water being too hot. He then tells him about a time when they got stuck at the top of a ride at the circus. He says they could see the whole circus in miniature and that they could even see all the way to Bermuda. Years later, the boy sees his father on a street corner asking for change, and he immediately hides so that his father doesn't see him.