He throws the gun into one of the cartons, covers it with some clothes, grabs a couple pairs of running shoes, T-shirts, and some underwear and socks.

Closes the single carton. Lifts it and heads to the front door to hail a cab.

“Toss the rest,” he calls to Gerardi over the landlord’s blaring TV as he heads out the building’s front door.

35.

35.

Joey stands on a curb at Aqueduct Avenue in the Bronx. Looking across the street at a small house he thought he’d never see again. He’d thought he was done with forever.

But he has nowhere else to go. Nowhere else to sleep, to find a meal, nothing. This is where people turn when they have nowhere else.

Are they still here? Are they both still alive?

He left home so long ago that he doesn’t even remember the exact circumstances of his leaving. Has he somehow blocked it out? He doesn’t think so. He knows there was no blowup or drama. It was just a drifting away. There was no particular love there, none he could feel or remember in either direction, him toward them or them toward him.

He’d been an only child, as if they’d quickly decided that children were not really for them or that they were not really meant for children.

He knew now that his strangeness—his diagnosis “on the spectrum”—made it harder on them both. On them all. He wondered now in passing, for the first time, standing there, whether one or both of them were on the spectrum too. But he couldn’t even remember their behavior clearly enough to say. He’d left at fifteen; home life in his last few years there was a blur—not an unpleasant blur, not a pleasant blur, just a blur.

He picks up the carton where the taxi dropped him. He tucks it under his arm, crosses the street, sets it down on the lowest stair of the stoop before ascending to ring the bell.

Twenty years. That’s the math.

A stooped older man he doesn’t know opens the door. Balding. Dangerously thin. Wispy white hair. Thick, black-framed glasses.

Damn. Joey was wrong. They no longer live here. He should have figured.

He is already starting to figure out some other plan—a men’s shelter, an SRO, somewhere he can skip out on the payment in the morning—while the man blinks at him.

“Saw you on the news,” says the man in a thin voice, and Joey realizes now the stooped old man is pretty sick, cancer or something.

And he realizes it’s not just a stooped old man.

It’s his father, Sam.

No hugs, of course. No handshake. They are strangers. A man who rang a doorbell. A man who answered it.