She investigated the bedside table. On top were several books, all of them scientific in nature: a history of the oyster, the something about great white sharks, a guide to the seaweeds of the Pacific coast. No wonder you sleep alone, Caddie thought, overcome by the dreariness of her father’s nighttime reading. Only one novel—John Steinbeck’s Cannery Row, a bookmark (really just a scrap of paper) stuck perhaps twenty pages in—provided any hint that her father might be interested in something other than his work. And even that’s about Monterey, thought Caddie, dismissing the book as nonrevelatory.

The table had one drawer, which she opened hopefully. She’d often found interesting things in bedside table drawers. Her mother, for example, kept in hers a vibrator shaped like a dolphin and a bottle of Vicodin, and she’d once found, while snooping through the bedroom of a couple for whom she sometimes babysat, a stack of Polaroids featuring the husband of the pair dressed in women’s underpants while being spanked by a woman in a Mardi Gras mask.

Her father’s drawer contained a number of objects, each of which she examined in turn. First was a pair of eyeglasses, utile and dull. Then there were a number of pairs of shoelaces, all of them meant for black dress shoes, and an assortment of plastic collar stays of the sort that came preinserted in department store dress shirts. A wristwatch, the hands stopped at 7:20, lay in an impotent heap of gold links. Beside it, an expired membership card to a local gym remained affixed to the paper on which it had been mailed.

Caddie shut the drawer with a groan. There was absolutely nothing of interest. No condoms. No phone numbers on scraps of paper. No drugs, not even aspirin or sleeping pills. It was the drawer of an old man. An old man who died fifty years ago, she thought. Her father, she concluded, was completely devoid of personality.

Across from the bed, a dresser leaned against the wall as if it were trying hard not to be noticed. She went to it and pulled open the uppermost of its four drawers. It was filled with underwear—boxer shorts—all of them white and each one folded into a neat rectangle. They were stacked like firewood, alternating directions so that the waistband of one aligned with the leg openings of the next. Beside the undershorts were rows of socks, equally neat and equally predictable.

The second drawer contained T-shirts. These, at least, came in a variety of colors. Many featured the logos of dive shops, dive boats, or other diving-oriented businesses. Still, the sameness of them rendered them interchangeable in Caddie’s mind. She closed the drawer as if sealing a coffin.