I ignored his question, even though I was wondering the same thing. “Was I acting normal? Did I tell you about anything strange going on?”

“We didn’t talk. You and me never talk, remember? We watched the Cubs beat up the Phillies and ate chop suey. I got a fortune cookie that said, ‘Love is a four-letter word, but so is hell.’ I laughed so hard I snorted.”

I shook my head. Three days ago.

Three days ago, I was awake, conscious, and having dinner with my grandfather. If the police were looking to pick me up, why didn’t they do it then? Why didn’t I remember any of it?

And where had I been for the past two days?

I was quiet for another long stretch. More people came and went to stare at the painting. I thought about what Edgar had said: We didn’t talk. You and me never talk. That was true. We’d been hostile strangers since I was a teenager.

“Can I ask you something?”

Edgar didn’t say yes, but he didn’t say no, either. So I plunged ahead.

“What happened to my dad? Did you see it coming?”

Edgar looked at me as if I’d started speaking a foreign language. We never talked, and we definitely never talked about that. He chewed on the question like it was a bad shrimp, and I didn’t know if he’d actually say anything or just pretend that I’d never even brought it up.

“No,” he told me finally. “No, I never saw it coming. Your dad was an angry drunk, I knew that. And things were bad between him and your mother. But I never thought he’d go that far. Definitely not.”

“Do you hate him for it?”

Edgar sighed. “Hating my son’s not in the rulebook for parents. No matter what he did.”

“Well, I hate him. I hate that I’ve lived my whole life afraid of becoming him. Every time I get angry, I think, ‘This is the moment when I snap.’”

“You? Snap?” Edgar snorted. “I’d like to see that.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, a turtle’s more likely to walk out of his shell than you.”

“Are you kidding?” I practically laughed at the absurdity of that comment. I couldn’t imagine Edgar saying something like that about me. The kid who’d argued with him at the top of his lungs practically every day of his teenage life. The kid whose fighting nearly got him kicked out of school half a dozen times. If I was afraid of my temper, it was only because it had gotten the best of me so often.