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"Why would it be your mother?" my father said. He was really lucid now, his eyes suddenly clear of the booze and the letters and who knows what else that had been fogging them.

"I don't know," I said. "Maybe she's not happy I came back. Maybe it's because of me."

"Don't you ever say that!" my father yelled. I mean, he really yelled this, and then banged on the table, giving his fist the opportunity to yell, too. I don't think he ever banged or yelled once when I was a child; usually he moped and then fled. I'm not sure which was worse, or better. Were these my only choices? Shouldn't you get more than two choices? "Your mother would never do something like that to you," he told me. "Don't be ridiculous."

"OK," I said.

"She loves you, you idiot," he said. "You have no idea how much."

"OK, OK," I said. "But I'm still pretty sure it's a woman, though."

"Then it's another woman," my father said. "Go find another woman." Of course he said this, and of course I listened, finding another woman being both the hope that keeps most men going and the hope that eventually does them in.

That was the end of that. After he told me to go find another woman, my father seemed to stroke out again. He put the letters back in the shoe box, tucked the shoe box under his arm, got up from his chair, and shuffled toward his bedroom. Before he left the kitchen, though, he reached with his free hand and picked up a book on the counter. "By the way," he said. He held up Morgan Taylor's memoir, then tossed it at me. I didn't react quickly enough, and it hit me right in the gut, which, coincidentally, is exactly where the book jacket promised the book would hit me. "I read this. Am I supposed to be in here?"

"Well, not you exactly," I said. "But the things you did, the places you went after you left Mom and me. Those are your stories."

"If you say so," my father said. He shrugged and then shuffled off to bed.

LIKE THE MANY SAD-SACK young male narrators of the books my mother made me read when I was a sad-sack young male, I went to bed that night without my supper, and for that matter without my lunch, too. My stomach was rumbling angrily, keeping pace with the rumbling in my head. There were so many things to think about that I couldn't properly think about any of them. When this happens, the only thing you can do is to locate one thought, the simplest one, the one nearest to you, and do your very best to eliminate it and then go on to thinking about the next thought you want to eliminate.

The thought closest to me that night was this: Morgan Taylor had stolen my father's stories for his memoir. My father had read the memoir and said he wasn't in it, even though those postcards he'd sent me said otherwise. When I was a child, I kept the postcards my father had sent in my closet, on the top shelf, in a manila envelope. I got out of bed, dragged a desk chair over to the closet, climbed up on the chair, reached up to the top shelf, and found the envelope. The postcards were inside: I read them like that, standing on the chair. They were exactly as I remembered, in my father's handwriting, the handwriting I recognized from the "Drink Me" notes he left in the morning beside my hangover potion. I'd remembered the handwriting so clearly, in part, because it was the only time I'd ever really seen either of my parents write anything except for the illegible marginal comments they made on student papers and manuscripts, and even that writing wasn't writing at all but rather symbols telling the writer to indent or not to. The way I figured it, my parents scribbled so much at work that they couldn't bring themselves to write anything at home ― not even a grocery list or a birthday card. Except for my father's postcards. My father might not have remembered the postcards clearly, but here they were, written proof that something important had happened as I remembered it happening. Each postcard was signed, "Love, Your Dad."

"I love you, too," I said to the postcards, putting them back in the envelope and then putting the envelope back on its high shelf.