The suburban loser is lying on the floor outside his eldest son's bedroom door, face down, nose buried into the carpet. With a muffled voice, he begs his eldest son to forgive him. He is sorry, he is sorry, he is sorry. On the other side, his eldest son sits with his back against the door. The suburban loser's wife is in the hallway, saying this situation is just way too fucked up. Moments earlier, the eldest son stood at the top of the staircase yelling at the suburban loser down below. He had a million fake buddha statues in the garden but he didn't know anything about peace. His eldest son was a better person than he'd ever be. The suburban loser was a hypocrite and a joke. He was a suburban loser. Moments before that, the suburban loser had his eldest son pinned by the neck in a corner of the basement. This was his fucking house, he said through gritted teeth. And when he said something, people fucking listened. He tossed his eldest son to the ground like a used towel, the treadmill still whirring in the background. Before that, the suburban loser had come home from a business meeting to find his brand new mountain bike in the garage splashed with mud. He hadn't even gotten a chance to ride it himself yet. It needed to be clean immediately, not after whatever little workout was finished. A few days before that, the suburban loser cleaned crumbs and mayonnaise smears off the granite kitchen counter for the thousandth time after his eldest son made himself lunch without offering to share. Months earlier, his eldest son secretly sold a pair of complimentary baseball tickets the suburban loser had given him, and when the jazz festival volunteer organization found out they banned the suburban loser for life. A year before that, his eldest son asked to move back home after a series of break-ins, evictions, and associations with the wrong crowd had finally driven him out of the city and back into the loving arms of the suburbs. When the suburban loser showed up to the house he was renting one cold winter morning after an icy rain, the eldest son came outside wearing a pair of cowboy boots with smooth soles. He took small steps with tiny boxes down the stairs and up the U-Haul ramp, and the suburban loser wondered if he had failed to teach him something crucial about the world. Twenty some years before that, the suburban loser was in a bar down the street from the maternity ward, raising a toast to his new son and over the decades that followed the suburban loser witnessed his own stubbornness, his own spontaneity, his own sensitivity, his own small ambitions, his own shortcomings, and his own compromises portrayed in a replica so beguiling that the suburban loser often felt like a dog encountering a mirror. And thirty years before that, the suburban loser himself was born, coming complete with an anger that was so total it took absolute hold of him sometimes and made him a stranger to his own behavior. His eldest son opens the bedroom door and touches the suburban loser's back. He raises him to his knees. Though he is still bare-chested in his underwear from the treadmill, he brings the suburban loser's face against his sweaty stomach. He hugs him and says it's okay. It's okay, dad, his eldest son says. It's okay.