“Please do.” He straightens up slowly. “Anyway, we were in your uncle’s Oldsmobile, and we stopped at a red light right next to what’s-his-name, you know, that guy with the knuckle ears whose sister went crazy after that fake kidnapping.” He stares at me until I give a little shrug. “The guy who drove that old Chevy pickup,” he says, “the one whose ears looked like knuckles. Anyway, we pull up next to him at this stoplight and he’s got the back of that truck loaded with crap. I mean, there’s a dresser in there, there’s an armchair, there’s crap till Tuesday. So Lucky rolls down the window and asks the guy if he’s skipping town. ‘Not me,’ the guy says. ‘My mother died.’ Turns out his mother died. She’d lived in a nursing home, and you know what they’re like: those people stick a goddamn room-for-rent sign in your chest while you’re still lying there on the floor. So this guy had to get all his mother’s crap out of there, and he had no idea where he was taking it. I mean, he knew where it was going—right to his own fucking house, because he didn’t know what else to do with it. And I said to Lucky, ‘You know what you do? You buy an old motel—and I know what I’m talking about because I used to run one—you buy an old motel, and you don’t worry about linens or room service or any of that. You just charge people to store their crap. This guy was paying his mother’s rent. If she dies and he doesn’t want to give up her crap, he’ll pay to stash it somewhere because it’s going to be cheaper than whatever he was shelling out for the nursing home. For him, it’s a bargain.’ ”

And so my father becomes the inventor of the storage facility. On other days, he’s invented the leaf blower or the hot-air popcorn popper. I lay my head back on the couch cushion and rest my feet on the coffee table, on top of one of his books of word-search puzzles and the dog-eared jacket of a Tony Bennett album. He walks back to his chair at the dining room table and sits down, out of breath from having examined the VCR.

“Lucky took that one and ran with it,” he says. “And I let him. I mean, what else … did he have going on? I had more to do than I could … keep up with. I had half this town.” He coughs—not the out-of-control cough but the deliberate cough, like he’s shoving out of the way whatever’s lodged in his throat. “Where the hell is Wilson?”

“Wilson,” I say, scratching my forehead. I really need to get out of the house.