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By Root 902 0

the top shelf, took the postcards out of the envelope, and read them. I read them for the handwriting and not the content and then compared the handwriting on the postcards to the handwriting on my mother's note. They had been written by the same person. Then I compared them to the grocery list. And then I looked at the postcards themselves. From Florida there were two large, barely bikinied breasts with the familiar coconut joke underneath; from Wyoming there was a bucking bronc, its back legs kicked upward toward the postcard's northern border ― but the postmarks on the postcards read not Boca Raton and Cheyenne, but rather Amherst, Massachusetts. This, of course, made perfect sense: my father hadn't sent them at all (which is why he hadn't seen himself in Morgan Taylor's memoir). But my mother had, and my mother had sent them from Amherst, because that's where she lived, with me. But why had she done that? Why had she pretended to be my father sending me postcards from places he'd never actually visited or lived in? And if my father hadn't been doing all these things in far-off places, then where had he been? On that October day when he left us, and my mother sang her mysterious lyric and burned my sandwich and made me cry, where had my father gone? And what had he pretended to be once he got there?

"Dad!" I yelled out, charging down the stairs and armed with the postcards. "Dad!" Just after I yelled, I heard the shower kick off and so I positioned myself outside the downstairs bathroom door, my head filled with questions and waiting for my father to give me the answers.

"Sam?" I heard the voice coming from behind me, from the kitchen and not the bathroom. I knew it was my father's voice without having to turn around, the same way I knew the notes and postcards were written by one person, the grocery list by another. If I were a real detective, I might have had a voice and handwriting expert to tell me these things for sure. But this is another thing I'll put in my arsonist's guide: sometimes you have to be your own expert, and then after you acquire this expertise, you sometimes wish you hadn't.

"Sam, look at me," my father said. This wasn't the stroked-out father, not the drunk one, either, but rather the insistent, scared father, the father wanting to spare his son from seeing that which no son should see. "Sam, turn around right now."

I didn't turn around. I kept my eyes fixed on the bathroom door, which opened slowly, creaking the way doors in movies and old houses do, and my father's voice creaked a little bit too as he yelled, "Deirdre, don't open the door!"

But it was too late: Deirdre already had. She'd opened the door and stood there in front of me, a towel wrapped around her important parts, a blond woman vaguely my father's age, and for that matter my mother's age, too, and for that matter wrapped in a towel my mother had probably bought, long ago, back in the age when my mother bought nice things for the house and actually lived in it, too.

"Hello, Sam," Deirdre said, then extended her right hand, holding the towel in place the way women do, through some complicated arrangement between inner arm and armpit and rib cage and breast. And not knowing what else to do, I took it. The hand, that is.

"HOW LONG?" I ASKED my father. We were sitting in the dining room, at the table, drinking beer. Deirdre had disappeared into my father's room. I could hear a hair dryer in there, the steady hum and blast of its hot white noise.

"How long what?" my father repeated. His face was a mask of nonchalance, although I could feel his legs bouncing jackhammer-like underneath the table.

"How long have you been with Deirdre?"

"Off and on," he said, "maybe thirty years."

"Thirty years," I repeated, doing the math. It wasn't difficult to do. Thirty years. I was thirty-eight years old. That meant my father had been with this Deirdre since I was eight, which was, not coincidentally, the year my father left us for ...

"Dad," I said, "when you left us, where did you go?"

"I went to Deirdre's." I looked at him for a while,