My old room. This isn’t my house anymore. This isn’t my life.

“I’ve made dinner,” he says, almost proudly. This time he succeeds in pulling himself out of the chair and, leaning heavily on one hand, fumbles for his cane. “I need this thing now.”

I don’t really know what I’m supposed to say, so I just give him a tight-lipped half smile and follow him into the kitchen. He’s slow, hunched over his cane, and seeing him like this is beyond confusing. That feeling again—sadness, pity, yearning to make it better—flares up in me, unbidden. I’ve prepared, but not for this. Suddenly I feel a new kind of fear—that I will have to learn all over again how to survive in the presence of this man, how to find myself. That he will make me love him again, and then disappoint me, and I will have to learn all over again how to unlove him.

My dad has made lasagna—“from scratch,” he says, “not the frozen ones”—and I feel another pang when I imagine him stumping around the kitchen on his cane, cutting onions one-handed, layering the sauce and cheese. It’s vegetarian, too. Although the signs of his illness are there—he forgets the word for potholders, and mentions my mother once in the present tense—he hasn’t forgotten that I don’t eat meat.

I suddenly wonder if he remembers the night we sat at the table and I asked if he knew what happened to Little Bubsy, the pet rabbit I kept as a kid. I was probably five. My mother stared down at her plate, her eyes milky from drugs and illness.

“You just ate him,” my dad said. I haven’t been able to stomach meat since.

I wash my hands in water so hot it sends billows of steam toward the ceiling.

We have our lasagna mostly in silence. It’s only after dinner, when I’m washing the dishes by hand, that I realize we didn’t say grace over our meal.

Did he forget?

Sweat gathers under my armpits.

He falls asleep in front of the TV while I clean. I grab a quilt—a quilt my mother made—and cover him in the chair. He rouses slightly and grabs my arm so hard I nearly gasp, unreasonably—afraid.

“I’m happy to have you back,” he says. “I’m happy you’re here.”

Suddenly I want to cry. This is the worst trick of all.

“Only for a visit, Dad.” I fight to keep my voice from breaking. After so many years. How dare he? Anger was the only thing I had, the only thing I’ve ever been able to depend on.

How dare he take that from me, too?

Chapter Six

Only the second day on the job and the potential civil suit is imploding: in the morning, I find out that two of our half dozen complainants, the Davies and the Ioccos, have now withdrawn their complaints. Rich Iocco is coach of the local Little League team, and funds for new uniforms and a bus to away games mysteriously dried up after Optimal learned he was planning to talk to us.