“My dad was no saint,” he said. “Not by a long shot. He was mean as hell. Uncle Jim says it was because he was depressed. Not depressed like he got the blues sometimes—the serious kind of depression, the kind you need medication for. He tried to kill himself in college. Did you know that? Of course you didn’t. He washed down a bottle of sleeping pills with a fifth of Jack Daniel’s. Uncle Jim found him and took him to the hospital. They had to pump his stomach. He went off for a while after that. Everybody thought he was just in a spin-dry clinic for booze. Not that he didn’t need that too, by the way. He went to rehab three times before he finally got sober, and that was only because of the cancer. You know what else? He was cheating on my mom when he got sick. And not with some random woman either. It was the wife of one of his best friends. They were all friends—Mom and Dad, Uncle Jim and Aunt Cici, and the Potters. It was a big scandal. The Potters actually moved to Atlanta to get away from the gossip. My mom was humiliated. Then dad got sick. That changed the subject, I guess.”

Arch stood up from the bench and walked slowly around the headstone.

“Everyone in Belle Meade considered my dad a first-class asshole,” Arch said. “People pitied my mother. Then along comes cancer, and just like that, Dad went from spoiled loser to saint. It’s amazing what a lethal illness can do for your reputation.”

“How do you know all of this?” I asked.

“I heard things. Saw things. My sisters told me some of it. They tried to hide the affair, but we knew there was something weird when the Potters just disappeared after being around our parents nonstop for most of our lives. They didn’t ever visit. Didn’t even come to the funeral. And the Potters were my oldest sister’s godparents. When I got older, I asked Uncle Jim about it, and he came clean. Said he hated to do it, but he’d promised he’d never lie to me.”

Arch sat down next to me.

“He really was brave at the end,” he said. “But I think if he’d lived, he’d still be thought of as the guy who cheated on my mother and nearly broke up the marriage of two of their dearest friends. Even if he’d quit drinking, he’d still be remembered for all the times he got plastered in public and shot his mouth off or had to be carried out to the car at the end of the night. Instead, he got to go out as a martyr.”

I noticed that his hands were shaking.