"Hey," Myron said.

Dad looked up, smiled, put down the tool. "Screw loose," he said. "But let's not talk about your mother."

Myron laughed. They found molded-resin chairs around a table impaled by a blue umbrella. In front of them lay Bolitar Stadium, a small patch of green-to-brown grass that had hosted countless, oft-solo football games, baseball games, soccer games, Wiffle ball games (probably the most popular sport at Bolitar Stadium), rugby scrums, badminton, kickball, and that favorite pastime for the future sadist, bombardment. Myron spotted Mom's former vegetable garden--the word vegetable here being used to describe three annual soggy tomatoes and two flaccid zucchinis; it was now slightly more overgrown than a Cambodian rice paddy. To their right were the rusted remnants of their old tetherball pole. Tetherball. Now, there was a really dumb game.

Myron cleared his throat and put his hands on the table. "How you feeling?"

Dad gave a big nod. "Good. You?"

"Good."

The silence floated down, puffy and relaxed. Silence with a father can be like that. You drift back and you're young and you're safe, safe in that all-encompassing way only a child can be with his father. You still see him hovering in your darkened doorway, the silent sentinel to your adolescence, and you sleep the sleep of the naive, the innocent, the unformed. When you get older, you realize that this safety was just an illusion, another child's perception, like the size of your backyard.

Or maybe, if you're lucky, you don't.

Dad looked older today, the flesh on his face more sagged, the once-knotted biceps spongy under the T-shirt, starting to waste. Myron wondered how to start. Dad closed his eyes for a three count, opened them, and said, "Don't."

"What?"

"Your mother is about as subtle as a White House press release," Dad said. "I mean, when was the last time she picked up the takeout instead of me?"

"Has she ever?"

"Once," Dad said. "When I had a fever of a hundred and four. And even then she whined about it."

"Where's she going?"

"She has me on a special diet now, you know. Because of the chest pains." Chest pains. Euphemism for heart attack.

"Yeah, I figured that."

"She's even tried cooking a little. She told you?"

Myron nodded. "She baked something for me yesterday."

Dad's body went stiff. "By God," he said. "Her own son?"

"It was pretty scary."

"The woman has many, many talents, but they could airdrop that stuff into starving African nations and no one would eat it."

"So where's she going?"

"Your mother is high on some crazy Middle Eastern health food place. Just opened in West Orange. Get this, it's called Ayatollah Granola."

Myron gave him flat eyes.

"Hand to God, that's the name. Food is almost as dry as that Thanksgiving turkey your mother made when you were eight. You remember that?"

"At night," Myron said. "It still haunts my sleep."

Dad looked off again. "She left us alone so we could talk, right?"