"Thank you," I said as I took the small suitcase off my father's lap. "All right, Dad, are you ready?"

"No." But even as he said it he took hold of my arm and pulled himself to standing. Slowly, together, we walked outside. It was bright outside and warm. My father put a hand up to his eyes and turned his face to the sun.

Later that night I was sitting alone, in my apartment, with a picture of the Grand Canyon in my hand. The picture was on one side of a postcard, the other side had a simple message: "Wish yous was here with us. Thanks." No signature, no name, but I knew who had sent it. Derek Manley. He had picked up his boy and was driving cross-country, seeing the sights, trying to figure out his next move. It would probably be witness protection all over again, but this time starting over with his son. Good for him. But something about the postcard was troubling me. It wasn't Derek I was thinking of, it was myself.

I stared at the great mysterious landscape carved by the Colorado River and tried to put it all together. It was as if everything that had happened to me since Joey Parma had called the morning of his murder had been leading me toward one thing, yet I couldn't figure out what it was. There was something in the confluence, something in the gaps, something I was missing.

I suppose it is a common flaw, to believe yourself to be an acute observer of humanity and yet be totally blind to the circumstances of your own small life. Or maybe I am the only one totally clueless. Because it took me a long time, far longer than it should have. I had been thinking I had unshackled myself from my past when everything I had learned, everything that had happened, had proven with utter clarity that I had not. You don't free yourself from the past by ignoring it and hoping it goes away, because it won't, ever, it can't. The only way to free yourself is to reach out to your past, try to understand it, fight to embrace it no matter what the barriers.

I opened a beer and thought it through. It was there, somewhere, in Joey Parma's failed life, in Tommy Greeley's pathetic search to regain what he believed he had lost, in my father's story, in the justice's relationship with his wife, in the buried box of coins, in Kimberly Blue's revelation, in the Zen proddings of Cooper Prod, in Derek Manley's cross-country jaunt with his son, in the twenty bottles of gin lined up in Mrs. Greeley's china hutch. Twenty bottles of gin. "She left me," my father had said, his voice flat, devoid of rancor or pain. As if the telling of the story had pierced something in him, deflated something angry and ugly and he was left to say, simply, that she left him. She left him. He had said it before, I had heard it before, but never so calmly, never before without the pain. My dad, showing me the way, would wonders never cease? There is a statute of limitations in the law, maybe there ought to be one in the heart.

I reached for the phone, dialed a number I hadn't called in years but that I knew as well as my own. It rang, I was hoping it would keep ringing, but then the ringing stopped and a voice from far away and long ago answered.

"Hello?" I said. "Mom?"

end.