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"She got some bad news today, Coleslaw," he said, and of course I knew exactly what the bad news was and who was the one who'd given it to her. "She got some very bad news. But she's tough. She'll get over it. She'll move on. She already has."

"I'll be right back," I said. I walked into the kitchen, yelling, "Anne Marie! Anne Marie!" but there was nothing in there but the adobe tile and casement windows and restaurant-quality galley stove and titanium refrigerator-freezer. I walked back through the dining room and headed toward the stairs. "Anne Marie!" I yelled as I walked up the stairs, and then I yelled it again as I wandered through our bedroom, the kids' bedrooms, the hallway bathroom, the guest room in which no guest had ever stayed, the bathroom in the hallway, back into our bedroom again. I even pulled down the ceiling door to the attic crawl space and yelled, "Anne Marie!" into that and was answered by a shower of pink insulation dust, which I guess was the house's way of telling me, She's not here. Your wife is not here.

"Where is she?" I demanded of my in-laws as I charged down the stairs and into the dining room. "She has to be here. Her van is out front. Where is she?"

"Where is who?" my father-in-law asked. Then before I could clarify, his nonchalance disappeared for a second, and he said, "It's none of your goddamn business anymore." Then he recovered, made a slight adjustment to his head wrap, and added, "Coleslaw."

"Where is she, Thomas?" I asked, turning toward him. Thomas was no longer smiling, no longer "boola, boola'ing." He didn't look content, either, but nervous, as though his place at the table were in peril. Thomas shook his head gravely, lips locked, making it known that one of the big differences between him and me was that I was speaking and he was smart enough not to.

"Mrs. Mirabelli, please," I said. She was a volunteer for most of the Catholic charitable organizations in the area, and so I hoped she would take pity and add me to her body of good works. Mrs. Mirabelli inhaled and exhaled loudly, her veil fluttering with each breath, but no words followed.

So I turned to Christian. He was all I had left in the room, in the house. The towel was on his head now, pouring down his neck and over his ears. He looked so nervous and scared and small, sitting there between his grandparents, not knowing whether to look at me or not, not knowing why he didn't know whether to look at me or not, but knowing all along where his mother was.

"She went to see my grandma," he told me.

"Grandma is right here," I said.

"My other grandma," he said. "I have another grandma?"

How to describe the way Christian said this? How to describe a five-year-old boy who finds out that he has two sets of grandparents and not just one? How to describe a boy who discovers that his father has for years and years lied about his own parents' being dead? And how to describe a father who doesn't once think that, in killing off his parents, he has killed his children's grandparents in the bargain?

"Oh, Christian," I said, "I'm sorry, bud." And then, because as we all know, sorry isn't good enough, I started crying just to show how sorry I really was, crying and crying and crying, all the while patting myself for a handkerchief, which I didn't have. So Christian took the towel off his head and gave it to me, and I wiped my face with it.

"Thank you," I told him.

"May I go watch TV?" he asked me, using the manners his grandparents or maybe TV itself had taught him, because I never had.

"You may," I said, and then he left the room with just the towel for me to remember him by, which made me cry even harder. All this crying must have softened the Mirabellis' hearts just a little bit, although maybe it would have been better if it hadn't: it would be easier for me to remember them now only as the hard-hearted, costumed lunatics they appeared to be, and not as my in-laws who allowed their hard hearts to be softened by the man who had hardened them in the first place and who