Absent Fathers: A Millennium Trilogy

By David Serafino

Absent Fathers is a satirical weave of three interconnected stories examining the fate of Generation X set against the complicated politics surrounding the war on drugs, teenage prostitutes and the meaning of success. Irreverent and nihilistic where fatalism battles hope, it is the story of a young man who searches for his father to find himself. Danny Fortune is in jail in Toronto at the start of the new millennium, passing the time logging entries into his journal. He has returned home to visit his sister, while avoiding his overbearing mother; and also to uncover clues as to his absent father who went missing seven years earlier. These clues are uncovered in letters written to his best friend 'Uncle Marc', a well-traveled journalist who Danny idolizes. As an aspiring writer himself, he has spent the last few years traveling to find inspiration. A draft copy of a novel written by his father provides more clues. The final and disturbing piece of evidence is revealed in Uncle Marc’s journal.

The trilogy falls under three titles: ‘Notes from a Jailhouse Floor’; ‘TheWhores of Eden’; and ‘Zambonis of the Amazon’. ‘Notes’ includes entries into Danny’s diary as well as letters written from Gabriel Fortune to his best friend, Marc Bryant, and are interleaved throughout the book. ‘Zambonis’ is a novella supposedly penned by Gabriel which reads like an autobiography and stands on its own as an aside but still offering clues leading to discovery. ‘Whores’ extends Gabe’s letter writing to Marc but also begins a correspondence between the two which leads to their eventual reconvening in a proverbial den of iniquity. Throughout the book, an ongoing narration by Danny develops his character and examines the complicated relationship he has with his family and the love and trust he and his sister share for each other. Primarily, however, the narrative assists in maintaining a clear connection between the three methods of telling a complicated story.

• Language: English
• Publisher: David Serafino
• Release date: Jul 15, 2020
• ISBN: 9781005453312

David Serafino

David Serafino was born in 1947 and grew up in Niagara Falls Ontario but has lived almost all of his adult life in the historic town of Port Dalhousie, now a suburb of St. Catharines Ontario. He began writing while a young adult, contributing to local publications and attempting a first yet-to-be published auto-biographical novel. In 1997 he began publishing Dalhousie Peer Magazine which ran for 14 years and 150 monthly issues. He is a published author by virtue of having a short story adjudicated for inclusion in a Canadian literary journal in 2009. In 1997 he co-authored and printed a history book of Port Dalhousie titled “A Nickel a Ride” In 2020 he produced, published and co-authored a more detailed and complete history of Port Dalhousie titled “Port Dalhousie: An Intimate History. Serafino has also written a series of five plays based on the War of 1812 and two children’s plays, some of which were performed locally and in New York State. He has also published two novels and a book of short stories & poems as eBooks. He is an amateur musician who uploads self-produced music videos of original songs to YouTube. Together, with his wife Lana, they have built an off-grid, solar-powered retreat in Central Ontario where they spend much of their summer. Since retirement in 2010 they have spent part of their winters in Latin America.

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ABSENT FATHERS

Copyright © 2013 David J. Serafino

All Rights Reserved

ISBN 9781005453312

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-No-Derivs 2.0 Generic (CC-BY-NC-ND 2.0) Unported license. To see a copy of this license visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/ or send a letter to:

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ABSENT FATHERS

A Millennium Trilogy

Book One: Notes From a Jailhouse Floor

Book Two: The Whores of Eden

Book Three: Zambonis of the Amazon

NOTES FROM A JAILHOUSIE FLOOR

PART I

December 31st, 1999; 11:59 p.m. - So Surprise Me!

"What’s it going to be then eh?"

"If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like—"

"A squat grey building of only thirty-four stories."

"It was a bright cold day . . . and the clocks were striking thirteen."

As it stands, at this moment I’m crossing into the new millennium reading the first lines of paperback books the guard has tediously stuffed through the bars. There’s a dozen or so, mostly well worn classics suffering from varieties of abuse. My cell mate’s Frisbee toss is just another instance as he sends one flying back at me. Reading isn’t his thing.

What am I doing in jail in downtown Toronto? That’s a question Marjo, (my mother, Marjorie) will never (I swear) be given opportunity to ask. We have different views on what I should be doing with my life so most of it’s not shared with her. Dad always said, Never take a job unless you know you’re willing to make it your career. I’m still following his advice. That really twists mom into a knot, because she’d like to see me kissing the butt of success and Dad hasn’t even been around in years. (lost?)

That was in 1992. Most of Canada will remember it as the year we stood united, cheering the Blue Jays on to World Series victory. The next day we reverted to animosity and trashed our constitutional accord. America might remember the year as one in which the CIA lost influence in the Oval Office. I will remember it as the year Dad left home and Mom turned to vinegar.

The situation with my parents has not changed in eight years so that leaves my sister Tina to bail me out. She’s always been generous in spite of her condition but I hate putting the squeeze on her again. Anyway, when I look at what awaits me on the other side, incarceration seems like salvation—like being sick for exams.

So here I am, desperate to understand and left looking for it in the written word. Reading has fallen out of favor with my video-infected generation but I’ve been doing more of it since graduating high school. Back then Coles Notes served as a short-cut to a passing grade. Now clutched in my hand are three titles that I actually recognize from the curriculum. The third now lies out of reach on the other side of the bars where it landed after bouncing off the far wall. I beg for its return. The guard is co-operative. Perhaps age has rounded the sharp edges or maybe it’s just the spirit of the New Year. He obligingly scoops the paperback from the floor and smacks it into my palm.

Gradually, voices from my past begin to surface—prophetic masters who dared tell a story before it could happen. Their words had once been lost on me; but now as Y2K paranoia runs rampant, the pictures they paint parallel my own world perched on the precipice of decline. At least that’s how I see it. When I was a kid, one of the things I dreaded most was the state of equilibrium at the top of the roller coaster—the brief moment just before plummeting down. There are things you do just because you’re a kid and things you can’t avoid even when you’re an adult.

I haven’t been an adult for long. If I had my choice I’d rather be a kid dreaming about growing up. Mine was a Hollywood x-rated fantasy filled with fast cars, beautiful women and lots of money. It never turned out that way. Believe me; it’s just as well it didn’t. I would have gone blind.

As I implied earlier, only a fraction of my learning came from books, but if you ask what it is I do, I’d say I’m a writer. Odd eh? It wouldn’t serve to say I’m unemployed because I do keep busy and I pay my way. Mostly I just roam around and take notes. If I have any pride in anything I do, it’s in this journal I keep. I sign my entries G.D. Fortune. My name is Danny but I’ve preferred to be called Gene since the day I left home—October 2, 1994, my twentieth birthday.

In truth, it was only a house that I’d left six years earlier in some dormant neighborhood somewhere in a Toronto suburb. Our home had previously disintegrated. The erosion began some time before my grandmother’s death and carried on well after my father’s departure. I knew if I stuck around, I’d end up beaten down along with my mother and my sister—so I hit the road Jack.

Now I’m back. I think I’m on the verge of finding what I’ve been looking for these past years, but that’s yet to be confirmed. Marjo’s got something tucked away in her closet for me—so she says. I can’t always trust her though. It may be just a ploy to get me to come home. There’s a selfish side to me that says it’s Dad’s final will and testament, but another side is praying he’s not dead. It’s been a long time since he disappeared and, legally, Mom can marry again. But where does that leave me and Tina? I try not to think about it and, instead, just watch life unfold.

So now I’m watching life unfold behind these iron bars that form both my prison and my sanctuary. After six years of wandering freely about the continent it’s strange to be restricted to forty square-feet of space. At the same time, as long as I’m here I don’t have to be there. Where’s there? At Marjo’s. She wants to tell me something. I told her I’d be around some time after Christmas. I’m late but she knows I’m back in Toronto.

New Year’s eve, 1999 isn’t the first time I’ve sat with my back to the wall in a holding cell defending my space. I make sure the ape sharing my cage understands the facts just in case he has designs on getting to know me better. The guard is sitting with his back to us, eyes supposedly transfixed on the monitor, but I can tell from his heaving shoulders that he’s dozing off into some distant dreamland filled with pork chops and big breasted women. My cell-mate sits anxiously on his bunk staring at me like a dog waiting for dinner to drop from the can. I hide behind the mask of a psycho-punk to keep the quizzing intruder out of my world.

What ya in here fer kid? he asks running his eyes over my bony frame. The man has the mad leer of a pedophile and my younger-than-age looks seem to interest him.

Assault, I answer, Maybe manslaughter if the guy dies. The last part is a lie but he doesn’t know it. I belch and turn away. He clues into my attitude and goes back to drooling over a girlie magazine.

As the silence returns, I struggle to find a retreat inside my head. I need to concentrate on the matter at hand which is figuring out what the hell is going on. I’m not talking about anything so trivial as how I’m going to get out of jail. That little detail will work itself out in due time. How I’m going to evade Marjo’s ambush is a little closer to the real question, but even that falls far short of the meaning-of-life dilemma I’ve gotten myself tangled up in.

It all started when I became conscious and began to think. Ignorance is bliss. I found that out real quick. Thinking leads you into a whole maze of questions and some of the answers make you want to off yourself. I mean, tell me why I should stick around for the future when even the stock-brokers are saying it’s going to get worse. It’s not like the `90s were a belly-laugh and what fun is a world without a sense of humor anyway. So when I thought long and hard about what I could do about this, I eventually came to the realization that I couldn’t do a goddam thing about anything even if I was goddam fuckin’ Superman. The funny thing about realizing my own insignificance was that even though you might expect I’d feel like gulping down a fist-full of Halcion tablets right there on the spot, I truly felt like I’d been relieved of a great responsibility, and that for once, life might be worth living. Why that is, I don’t know and I may spend the rest of my life trying to figure it out.

Sometimes I write just to help me think. At the end of a day after putting the pen down I seem to understand things better. If you want to hear about what I think, I could tell you; if you’d rather hear about how I came to be thrown into the slammer, well, I’d rather tell that story anyway.

It wasn’t like any party I’d been to before. The place was one of those spacious second story converted warehouse apartments that used to rent out cheap until everyone wanted one. The joint was jumping. I wanted to hop right in, only I hadn’t been invited. In fact I was only there to get fed and crash for the night not realizing my friends had since vacated and new tenants had moved in. These new people had money—not much class but lots of money, like drug dealers maybe. There was this surround-sound system with a 51 inch screen playing a porno video; a limited edition Lichtenstein (probably stolen) right next to a framed autographed poster of Guns & Roses; beside that, a real once-living Leopard skin nailed to the wall. The party props included a few virtual-reality helmets which guests were fighting over, a booth called the orgasmatron which couples were trying to figure out, a strobe light, a mirror ball, and don’t ask me why, a six foot tall fluorescent orange phallus under a black light oozing green slime into a punch bowl. This was the centerpiece of the smart bar—healthy drugs in fruit drinks.

Nobody seemed to notice me slip in and mingle with the mindless turf that had been scraped up to fill the room. (So what does that say about me, eh?) I could have been anybody’s friend, and I went about making it appear so, chatting up anything that looked interesting. That’s always the problem though, isn’t it? You take the most trendy ‘vek and find out after a few seconds worth of conversation, he/she don’t know shit from sushi.

Meeting people is such a bitch. Like most things, it’s a numbers game. The more you sample, the more chances you’ll find what you’re looking for, and the best place to hang out at a party is by the toilet or in the kitchen. I usually hang in the kitchen protecting my beverage, but in this case, since I didn’t bring any, I just hung around the punch bowl. As time passed I began to wonder if someone had dropped something into my drink or if it was just that I had drank more than my share from the communal trough. I began to feel all weird and jumpy. It could have been some herbal nutrient potion—one with a high octane power kick—or maybe it was just that I hadn’t eaten all day. The mood was becoming more and more frenetic with time, which was normally okay by me because I could spin on listening to loose talk or watching fanta-play—but all that cyberdilia shit was starting to make me dizzy.

I spotted a table of food in the next room and figured I should eat something. I heard a lot of animated conversation that I could slip in and out of as need be. I’ve always enjoyed talking to strangers—except lately I’ve been pricking a few balloons. I never used to be like that. It was easier to walk away from people who rankled my mood—like whenever they’d go on too much about themselves or when they’d begin complaining about how everything is someone else’s fault. Like the guy with the Rolex on his wrist, a Mr. T starter kit around his neck, and the banana in his pants. Guys like that irk me. They think all women want is money and a big prick. What vexed me more was that he was surrounded by a whole brood of noisy chicks all giggly and chirpy. He was telling bad jokes. Worse than that, he was laughing with his mouth full and open. I could see a spray of spittle launched into the air with every guffaw and landing on the food. My food!

Normally, I might let this sort of behavior pass hoping his friends would notice and rebuke him. They didn’t. I might have even closed my mind to sharing his saliva but this was the cold and flu season, so I knew that if I wanted to eat, I needed to act. I could have been more diplomatic.

Hey buddy, I said stepping up to him and interrupting his conversation. Do you mind turning your mouth away from the food table when you laugh? You’re spitting all over it.

This was a factual statement that no one could dispute. No one did, but they didn’t know me and didn’t join me in my condemnation. The girls stopped giggling and the guy went quiet. He glared at me, dipped a nacho into the salsa and stuffed it into his mouth. Pushing his face to within inches of mine, he opened his trash mouth and said Wanna make something out of it, fuckhead?

Now I was in over my head. This guy wasn’t about to debate me in an intellectual forum. Why I persisted I don’t know. I think it was the drugs in the punch.

Yeah, I do, I answered. I want to teach you some manners.

That didn’t come across how I meant it. I really did want to explain to him why he shouldn’t be spitting all over the food, but that’s not how he saw it.

"How about I teach you some manners, asshole!"

The girls moved back to give us room. The fist came flying at my face and glanced off the side of my head. I went down just the same and came back up swinging.

I’d never throw the first punch, but I won’t take a second either. I’d run first, but this time the room was too crowded and he was on me like vomit. Along with the adrenaline, there must have been some other weird shit surging through my brain like megawatts through a walkman. My fists and feet were doing the Freddy.

I broke an expensive vase. I had to stop him somehow. By the time the cops arrived, I had settled down, being restrained by two bouncers while blood dripped from my nose. His friends were bandaging his forehead. So not only did I get charged with assault but also for willful damage. They took me in and told me to sleep it off, which might have been fine if I could have slept. Instead I begged for something to do and that was when I got the books.

Things are starting to come clear now. I’m convinced that whatever was in the punch has something to do with it. The trouble is, thoughts are whizzing through my mind like a video on fast-forward and I think I’ve got to write it or lose it. My cell mate is snoring in his cot. I plead with the guard for a pencil and paper but he is either ignoring me or has also fallen asleep. I sacrifice one of the books. It bounces off his fat back and lands on the floor. The officer wakes with a start and swivels his chair around.

Could you pass me my book again? I say in a display of vexation, casting a disparaging glance over my shoulder to where the ape is lounging.

He reaches down and picks it up, eyes looking at the ape then at me then back at the ape. He’s not sure.

My journal’s in your drawer. And a pen too if you don’t mind?

He obliges me and then quietly returns to the mesmerizing flicker of the security monitor before falling back asleep. I sit cross-legged on my mattress, flip to a blank page and open a vein.

January 1st; 8:05 a.m. - The Madness in the Closet

It’s the next morning. I’m flat out on my mattress, pen still in hand, an empty breakfast plate now beside me on the floor. The ape has a well-fed look about him and a deliberate snarl on his face that says `wanna make sumpt’n outa it?’ This time I don’t.

The click-clack of high heel shoes echo in the halls and a woman appears at my cell door. She’s a Justice of the Peace on her holiday rounds of bail duty. I’m relieved to be spared the indignity of courtroom 101 and its prisoners box full of bleached and groggy men, which I recall from having once witnessed my father’s day in bail court. She asks to speak with me in private. I oblige her and follow along, journal in hand, into a small unadorned room with a desk and two chairs. Somewhere in the middle of the interrogation she asks to read what I’ve been writing and sends me back to my cell minus my notes. Moments later I’m taken away in a squad car to the psychiatric hospital for evaluation.

Now what I wrote was not all that crazy—as my psychiatrist admits; it’s just that I wrote it in a crazy sort of way, which is what happens when you fire off in a stream of consciousness without the benefit of an edit—like all the earlier entries. That’s what I tell him. He says fine, and tells me that what I’ve written has all been said before. "It’s the determinist argument," he tells me. The what?

Anyway, this is what I figured out. I’d always wondered how that ‘random’ feature you see on a CD player works. Well it doesn’t—at least it’s not random, and that’s the basis of my argument. It’s because computers can perform such complicated mathematical functions at a high rate of speed that things can be made to appear random. So what you see looks like a toss of the dice but in reality is a high speed calculator; and if you had a high speed brain you could probably predict the answer yourself. Now, someone once told me that they’ve proven there is no such thing as random—not even with dice; and if you apply this to nature, you might even realize how a weatherman tells which way the wind blows—because nothing in nature is left up to chance. Everything is a mathematical equation—complicated as hell, but a function of cause and effect nonetheless. (A butterfly flaps its wings over a flower in China, etcetera, etcetera) So if nature began with the big bang, then isn’t everything falling into place as was originally pre-ordained?

Here’s another angle. You’re born with inherited genes into someone else’s environment. From the day you left the womb all your responses were learned responses. Everything you do is a reaction to something that’s happened. The fact that your sitting in a chair reading this now has been predetermined by some complicated formula that reaches back beyond your own birth and into the genes and activities of generations before you.

And if you can believe that, you’ll realize it doesn’t matter what you do—you can’t change anything. Now that’s where things start to fall apart for me, because I feel I’ve got some choice in what I’m doing and what’s the point of living if I don’t? So I ask the psychiatrist to explain.

It’s a paradox, he says.

I swear that’s all he says and that really pisses me off because it’s a pretty skimpy answer for someone who’s supposed to be so goddam fart-awful smart. I figure maybe he’s just upset that he’s on-call on New Years day.

Anyway, I say, So how am I supposed to understand this paradox?

You can’t.

Well if I can’t understand it, and I know I can’t change things, what’s supposed to keep me acting like I can?

Faith.

So it all comes down to faith and doing the right thing and realizing that you can’t change things anyway but you still have to do the right thing and have faith that it makes a difference?

Yup.

I really hate one word answers. He says I can go. I ask him if that means I’ve been granted bail. He says he’s recommending it and all I have to do is come up with the money. Fat chance. It’s just as well. I’m not sure where I’d go anyway. It certainly won’t be Marjo’s place; but the road isn’t calling me back either. Things are always really interesting at first. It’s like when you meet a girl and think she’s perfect until you’ve seen her three or four days in a row and then you notice how squeaky her voice is or that the mole on her face isn’t really a beauty mark after all. Life on the road can be like that, but it takes longer to realize it; and if you don’t quit it in time, it becomes like a bad marriage that you’ve grown accustomed to. I sometimes think of going to university, but I don’t have the money, and even then you need to have good grades. I wish I had worked harder in high school. I wish we still had Grandma’s money. I didn’t mind not having the house to go back to anymore though. The ghosts of my teenage years still haunt the rooms and I’d just as soon forget them.

What I do remember most is the way everyone smelled. Toward the end Grandma didn’t smell so good. Tina and I used to make her laugh until she farted but mom and dad made us stop it. Then she only smelled of pee and didn’t nearly have as much fun. What a shame. She’d said she only began to have fun after Grandpa died. For awhile, his cremains used to sit on top of her piano. If you opened the lid on the urn, he still smelled the same—like cigarette butts and cancer. I think she kept it there as a warning to us all, especially Dad. Dad never smoked tobacco but that justified him his other vices. He usually smelled of either rye whisky or mouthwash depending on the time of day; and sometimes of deodorant or B.O. depending on the kind of day.

Mom was the one who smoked in spite of what Grandma said, but she never let herself smell like it. She always smelled like she was ready to go to a ball. Expensive perfume, hair spray and red wine. She loved red wine—and lottery tickets. She wanted so much to be filthy stinking rich. Maybe that’s why Grandma never said anything about the money—except in her will. She left it to both of them, probably to keep them together but more because she was afraid dad would blow it.

Tina smelled of soap. That was good. She couldn’t stand dirty hair and hers was long—almost down to her bum. I miss Tina most. She’s my twin, and from what I overheard Dad telling Uncle Marc, we came within a D&C of not being born.

Marc’s not our real uncle. He’s an old friend of Mom and Dad’s from university days—a journalist. Whenever he’d return to Canada from some assignment, he’d come visit. He always smelled different—like he sweated spices. I was dazzled with the way he traveled all over the world writing for different magazines. He kept a journal and that’s how I got the idea. If Tina and I asked for a story, all he’d have to do was flip open any page and read. It was too bad the way he ended up though.

I suppose it’s too bad the way we all ended up. We were rich after Grandma died. Dad bought a sports car and Mom bought a ticket to the Riviera. For our sixteenth birthday, Tina and I each got a telephone and a TV installed in our private isolation booths. We argued a lot less after that and no-one complained about Dad’s farting or Mom’s smoking. It was just an illusion though.

Everyone thinks that all your problems end once you’ve got enough money, but take it from someone who’s seen it—that’s when they begin. I suppose if you’re destitute, like with no home and no food, then money is a good thing; but when you’re comfortable already, more money just makes you crazy.

It made mom crazy. One day she just went out and bought a new batch of friends—moved from economy to first class without even saying excuse me. Traded the company of the well off for that of the filthy rich. A classic class jumper. And dad. He quit work. Just up and quit. He never had much respect for people who continued with their mundane lives after they could afford something better. He’d always wanted to write a novel and that’s what he decided to do. Can you believe it? Mom had a hard time believing it—until she got her teeth into the first draft. His characters were based on her phony friends from the country club and it was all about sex and deceit—hardly fiction at all. She burned the draft and reformatted his hard drive. It really made him mad—not just angry, I mean mad. One night after putting away most of a magnum of rye and just before he passed out on the rug in a pool of vomit, he took a stroll through her closet with the electric hedge clippers. Several weeks of silence followed. The battle had gone underground. Mom took her credit cards out for some exercise and financed a new wardrobe. Dad decided to get rich and blew an even bigger amount playing the stock market. Eventually they had to come to some agreement before they pissed away everything that Grandpa Fortune had spent his short but intense life earning. Mom worked her special brand of magic at the club to get dad his old job back, and Dad went back to his mundane life with no respect.

I never knew how much money there was to begin with, but mom kept saying he’d already lost more than half of the lottery. That’s what they called it. I think they were too embarrassed to say it was Grandma’s money because of the chintzy funeral they gave her. I’m not sure if it was so smart what Grandma did. I know she was good intentioned and all, but if she thought they’d stop fighting about money once they had enough of it, it was only because she had hope. She believed what Neville Chamberlain told the world in 1939, but this time she didn’t stick around to realize that we did not achieve peace in our time.

Eventually, they decided to split what was left. Our parents were supposed to contribute equal amounts to Tina’s and my education. Right after high school Mom gave us a real education dragging us around half the stinking world for the next year. The half we saw was comfortable and expensive. Dad never came through with his share. He was gone by the time we returned—the money left with him. It was just a mid-life crisis and I think he’d intended to do right by us eventually. At least if you read what he wrote, you might think so.

I discovered the letters three years later, after not so much as receiving even a post card from him. By then I’d left my teenage years behind and had gone out in search of the man I was to become. The only reason I was back in town was to help my mom and my sister move out of the house now that the bank had taken possession. It was the winter of `95. Uncle Marc had been living there with the two of them for a few months and he had left a closet full of junk behind. I knew he owned a gun and that there was a good possibility it was behind that locked door. I won’t tell you what I was going to do with it.

The key was in mom’s dresser door and it was easier to steal it than to ask her for it, which is what I did. Once inside the closet, I felt the madness engulf me. Marc’s clothes hung loosely on wire hangers like emaciated corpses wanting to confess their secrets. I’d always believed he was telling Tina and me a censored version of what really went on in the third world. It must have been inside those long pauses where the real story was being told. I was always hoping to get my hands on his journals, but that wasn’t what I was looking for on that particular day.

High on the shelf was a small suitcase. It was locked. I jimmied it open with a screwdriver expecting to find the prize. There was no gun, only letters. Letters from my father dated from the time he left. I sat there reading them and the more I read the more I wished I’d found the gun.

It was really painfully weird for me. I remember once watching a baby with a lemon. He’d bite it and scrunch up his face real sour-like but then go back and bite it again. That’s the way I was—like a baby with a lemon.

After I finished reading the last one I wanted to burn them up—and the house and myself too. I didn’t. Instead I bundled them up for later. The next day when Tina was out with a guy, I joined mom in the kitchen and dropped them on the table in front of her, figuring she might as well know the truth. She just looked up at me and said, "Real bastards, aren’t we?" I guess she’d already read them. Then she went into her bedroom and came out with a small shoe box. Inside was a card with a valentine poem which she said was the first thing Dad had ever given her. It wasn’t very good but you could see he was trying to be sincere. There were also his last letters to her. I started reading. What a contrast.

It became too difficult to continue, especially with Mom looking on. I wrapped them up with the others and put the bundle in my old room so I could really indulge myself later. It was like I knew I had to suffer before I could ever be happy again. They said some pretty nasty things to each other and it was just like being back home.

In some of his letters, he talked about this psychiatrist that he’d been seeing for years. It infuriated me to find out that a man, with some name I couldn’t even pronounce, probably knew more about my father than I did. When I went to see him with my request, he obligingly pulled a binder size file from a cabinet but wouldn’t tell me a thing about what was inside. Client confidentiality he called it. I broke into his office later that night—no kidding, right through the washroom window I’d had the forethought to unlock—and went through his files. More