“I won’t get in your way.” I’ve found the remote and I turn on the TV and click over to the news.

“Hey,” he says, “how’d you hear from—” Mid-sentence he breaks up, his lungs heaving, one cough climbing over the next, clawing up his throat for nearly a full minute. On the TV, the local top-dog anchorlady is chuckling at the weatherman, who’s chuckling back.

Finished coughing, my father says “Jesus” in general complaint, then calls out to me, “How’d you hear from Manny? I thought you said he never comes by the storage place.”

“He doesn’t.”

“Well, he didn’t call here. Did he? I didn’t talk to him. I can’t remember the last time I talked to Manny. He’s all lofty now.”

“He didn’t call, Dad. He sent me an e-mail. He’s got his brother-in-law working there today.”

“Oh.” He clears his throat. He pushes his chair back but doesn’t get up. “That’s like a fax in your computer?”

“That’s it. That’s what it is.” We’re three years away from the twenty-first century and my father doesn’t know what e-mail is. He won’t touch the cordless phone I bought, says he can’t hear right on it, and he keeps the clunky yellow ground-wired one next to him on the dining room table and gets his feet tangled up in the cord.

He’s looking at me now over the tops of his reading glasses. “Does your mother use that e-mail?”

“How would I know that, Dad?”

“I don’t know. Maybe you write her that way.”

“I don’t. And she doesn’t write me.”

“Well, then, you ought to call her. See how she’s doing.”

“You were talking about Manny,” I remind him.

He lowers his eyes to the table and gives a little shrug. “Manny used to be a good kid.”

I get up from the couch and carry my empty soda can to the front window. The snow from last week is packed into a hard, dirty crust along the curb and there’s a fresh layer, thin as gauze, over his Cadillac and my Celica. It’s March and the house across the street is still decorated for Christmas.

“He’s a little full of himself now, though. You know what I’m saying?”

I don’t respond to this. I’m thinking about Las Vegas—all the time, lately. I’ve never been there. But any movie or TV show I’ve ever seen about Las Vegas, I haven’t been able to take my eyes off the place.

My father coughs. “I mean, why does Manny never come around here? He’s too busy to be a human being? He’s too important, with his little storage facility?”

An icy draft leaks in around the window frame. I feel the cold on my throat.