“Everybody makes mistakes. Mine just happen to be bigger.”

“You talked about getting married?”

“Never. I wanted to help out, but she didn’t want it. She wanted the money, but she didn’t want anything else. Then she met up with the wrong guy. Then the money wasn’t going to the kid, so…”

We watched the rent-a-dump some more. The big metal buildings were lit up and looked fake, like part of a movie set. It was late, the time when you say stuff maybe you shouldn’t. But it was true. My father would have liked Frank, under the right circumstances. He would have liked him better than me, I think. They had more in common. Frank had done a lot of the same things my father had, a lot of the things my father wished I’d done. I should have kept quiet, but I kept talking. “There was a guy in town when I was growing up who got caught stealing money out of the parking meters,” I told Frank. “He had figured out how to skim money out of the machines somehow, and stole thousands. Tens of thousands. All in dimes and quarters. He thought he had it figured out, but somebody noticed and went looking for the missing money. The guy had figured out to steal money all right, but then he went and took too much. Something like sixty thousand. All in change. My father said you had to admire the guy, a little, hauling all those dimes and quarters around. But the guy got greedy, so he got himself arrested and went to prison. ‘Take enough,’ my father said, ‘but never take more than that.’ That’s something you’d say,” I told Frank.

“I wish I’d met him,” Frank said.

—

I don’t know when my father became a thief. Maybe he started young like me, or maybe he didn’t start stealing until after my mother died, or maybe he started stealing for her. I remember him joking about things he’d bring home, a gift for my mother, a nice bottle of wine for dinner, something a little extra, and he’d say, “compliments of Uncle Sam.” I didn’t think anything about it when I was young. My father worked for the government, so everything was sort of “compliments of Uncle Sam.” And I didn’t suspect until I was in high school and began to think I knew how things worked.