“My mother isn’t Kitty.”

“You think that matters to Mickey?”

Myron shook his head. “Why would Kitty tell him what I said?”

“What, a mother should lie?”

When Myron was eight years old, he got into a pushing fight with Kevin Werner outside Burnet Hill Elementary School. His parents sat in the school office and heard a stern lecture from the principal, Mr. Celebre, on the evils of fighting. When they got home, Mom headed upstairs without saying a word. Dad sat him down in this very room. Myron expected a fairly severe punishment. Instead his father leaned forward and looked him dead in the eye. “You’ll never get in trouble with me for getting in a fight,” he said. “If you find yourself in a situation where you need to step outside and settle it, I’m not going to question your judgment. You fight if you have to. You never run away from it. You never back down.” And as crazy and surprising as this advice may have seemed, Myron had indeed backed down from fights in the years to come, doing the “prudent” thing, and the truth—a truth that probably explained what his friends described as his hero complex—was that no beating hurts as much as backing down.

“This is what you wanted to talk to me about?” Myron said.

Dad nodded. “You need to promise me you’ll leave them alone. And you already know this, but you shouldn’t have said what you did to your brother’s wife.”

“I just wanted to talk to Brad.”

“He’s not around,” Dad said.

“Where is he?”

“He’s on some kind of charity mission in Bolivia. Kitty didn’t want to give me the details.”

“Maybe there’s trouble.”

“Between Brad and Kitty?” Dad took a sip of water. “Maybe there is. But that’s not our business.”

“So if Brad is off in Bolivia, what are Kitty and Mickey doing here?”

“They’re looking to settle back in the States. They’re debating between this area and California.”

Another lie, Myron was sure. Way to manipulate the old man, Kitty. Get Myron off my back and maybe we will want to live near you. Keep him bugging us and we move across the country. “Why now? Why did they come back home after all these years?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t ask.”

“Dad, I know you like to give your kids privacy, but I think you’re taking this not-interfering thing a little too far.”

He chuckled at that. “You have to give them room, Myron. I never told you how I felt about Jessica, for example.”

Again with his old girlfriend. “Wait, I thought you liked Jessica.”

“She was bad news,” Dad said.

“But you never said anything.”

“It wasn’t my place.”

“Maybe you should have,” Myron said. “Maybe it would have saved me a lot of heartache.”