He tries to retrieve more, but can’t. He is invaded by his present and his fictions. Stories of his own origins never work. He is unable to create a father out of nothing. He does not appear as a janitor in the apartment building across the street or as a rich man in Kenwood. He knows there is a real story dormant within Betty, so no fiction will do. Any mother he fashions always ends up looking and acting like his aunts. They are still talked about as the most beautiful Indian girls in South Minneapolis, even though one is dead and the other so distant and hateful, she might as well be. Instead of making unsatisfactory stories out of his life, he pins them on other people and on the decrepit houses that line his walk from school. Not that they help. He knows his father must have walked the same walk, must have seen the same houses, but they don’t hold anything of him. He knows his father went to Greeley Elementary, which stood on the site of Lincoln’s own school. But it was knocked down the year before Lincoln started the first grade, and so he was unable to plumb it for clues, or even to be able to take comfort in knowing his father had been there.

He hurries by the Institute of the Arts deep in thought. The morning was something to puzzle out. He nears the house and looks to see if the lights are on. They’re not and he is relieved that he has some time before Betty comes home from the hospital. He will have time to look for a clue about Simon, for some trace, the way high clouds prefigure a storm. He knows he won’t find anything. Theirs is a house with no pictures. No photo albums spill off the coffee table, laden with blurry and bleaching pictures taken at picnics or graduations. They have no lopsided snapshots from parties where people hold aloft beer bottles like trophies. There are no wedding pictures pressed into scrapbooks. There are no plaques from the speech team or old football banners. The mantel above the disused fireplace sports no tobacco tins filled with movie stubs or playbills. They have no yearbooks collecting dust on the single bookcase in the kitchen with gaudy portraits of graduates overdressed in ill-fitting clothes borrowed from older siblings or parents. There is nothing to prove that Lincoln had a father who’d once been a boy like him. There are no copybooks or report cards tucked into shoe boxes with canceled checks. Surely nothing to show he has an uncle. Irma once said that the closest thing they had to a family album was the face book at the police station.