He had a disconcerting way of fantasizing about tenure, advancing arguments to us (as if we weren’t on his side) to prove his appointment was inevitable. This year he couldn’t miss, he’d tell us, not that he was a whit less Jewish but because never in his fifteen years of teaching had his competition been so entirely composed of cretins. We’d nod in total approbation at the invincibility of his logic, knowing that logic had nothing to do with it.

That year, the great day came, and went. My mother walked the floor with something on her mind besides her latest carmen figuratum. I called his office on campus, that shit-faced head of his department, the hospital, the police. He had disappeared totally.

Years later, when I told the story to Valerie, she had shaken her head slowly and said, “Unbelievable.” It was, of course, but not to me until the pronouncement tripped off her tongue. Nothing that happens to you is unbelievable. Or maybe everything is.

We had to get out of that town, but how, and where to go, and what to do? We had no money, and not the wildest chance that Old Mom could turn a buck with her dilapidated rhymes. I still had at least another year of graduate work before I got my doctorate; with or without it there was no way I could land a job to support us, not even bagging burritos for take-out in a mini mall. Did I mention that I was fourteen years old at the time? And also I was for some reason resisting the move; at least I was ambivalent about it. I hated that school and all the people in it, those I knew and those I didn’t, and their fathers and their cousins and their state fucking legislature, with more passion than I had ever vented on anything in my life. I wouldn’t even miss my girl in town, a precocious junior-high-school student who was getting to be a large pain in the ass anyhow. But something absurd and totally irrational, something I couldn’t quite get a handle on, prompted my sticking around for a few more days, another couple of weeks, a month maybe. I knew he wouldn’t turn up, but maybe, just maybe he would, with the same unaccountable abruptness that had characterized his leaving. He’d explain everything perfectly and then we’d leave, together, and he’d get tenure some goddam place and… and…

Each day my mother waited for the mail. And then, about a month after the day he left, she came into the room where I was working. She held a letter.

I turned so fast I spilled coffee all over my father’s desk.

“Pop?” That’s what I meant to say. One syllable, but I managed to mangle it. What I said sounded more like “Pulp,” but she understood.

“No,” she said, “but it’s all set.”