I can call Candy and see if she’ll buy me a plane ticket home. I know that she will, but I also know that she’ll try and talk me out of leaving. I guess I haven’t been as honest with her as I might have been. She just thinks that our family suffered the normal range of conflict. She thinks, like good people do, that a tearful and heartfelt make-up session will occur before my father’s last breath and I will feel better, or relieved or something, so that this trip will help “heal” me. I know. I’ve seen her pull that Oprah shit on other friends.

But even if I call Candy and convince her that staying is a bad idea, I still don’t have Mack. How can I leave without knowing where he is, without finding him? Even as I think this, I know that each hour that goes by lessens my chances of locating my dog. I still have no idea where he is. Any thin hope that I had squirreled away against the worst thoughts is gone. Artie isn’t driving west now with my Mack alongside, riding shotgun. The unanswerable question is, Where did he abandon my dog? Ohio? Pennsylvania? New York? Massachusetts? How long would he have kept the dog with him before ditching him?

Did he at least leave Mack somewhere that a kind person might find him?

Did my impulsive ride on the back of Mitch’s Harley take me away from Mack? Was he simply waiting for me by the exit? I feel that burn in my eyes, the hollow ache in my throat, and squeeze my eyes shut.

“I didn’t realize how much you cared.” Paul Rose, Jr., casts a broad shadow over me; the sudden shade makes me shiver.

“I don’t. Not really.” The urge to cry vanishes, replaced by the leaden taste of old anger.

“Then why did you come? You think that he’ll leave you an inheritance?”

“Oh, he has. Just not the kind that’s worth anything.” An inheritance of bitterness.

“May I sit?”

“It’s your mother’s house.” I don’t move over until I realize he really intends to lower his bulk next to me. I squeeze against the wrought-iron railing.

He sits with a huff, as if even sitting is a form of exercise for the once-athletic Paul. “Hey, this is hard on all of us.”

“Why? Why would you think that?”

Paul tugs a little at his sweatpants, loosening the obvious constriction of his crotch. “I know things got weird back then, but that’s history. Old, old history.”

I twist my head to get a better look at him. “Some things are always present. I don’t care how many years go by.”

He turns his fat face to meet mine and for an instant I see the other boy, the thin, popular boy whose best friend was Ronnie Markham.

I remember Ronnie Markham even before my father married Adele, when we went to the annual Markham Motors Christmas party with my mother. Ronnie always seemed to be crying at those parties, overtired and oversugared. By the time we were in our teens, Ronnie had stopped crying and turned into a golden boy. Girls fluttered around him. Boys like Paul simply surrounded him, an uneven admiration society. I did neither. I hung in the shadows and nearly died anytime Golden Boy cast his eye on me, as accidental as it might have been, like my being in the sight line between Ronnie and the cool girls, the popular girls he dated. I was not worthy of notice, but, like all the other girls, I daydreamed that someday he might.