I felt that Pop had needed something good today. Just as the Florida couple needed to believe that Trixie’s grave would have a fine young guard nearby. Someone who would bring Trix blue hydrangeas as big around as schoolhouse globes, plus maybe Queen Anne’s lace stuck in a red coffee-can. Odd, though I knew my dad did not own the motel, I’d half bought into my own well-intended lie and promise.

In our Packard’s trunk, we’d stacked replacement Bibles for our distant begonia drill-instructor. Thieves had made quite a dent in his inventory. I looked forward to the fuss Colonel always made and to the joys of my passkey’s opening everything. We were bound due east, like on any other day. We faced the three-hour trek one way toward our Colonel Begonia. Now I believe that helping the couple with Trixie’s burial had made me feel too capable. I vowed, the way kids do, that this would be a day of solving all problems.

3.

So I set aside my homework plus the Owner’s Manual. My story could not become as funny as Dad had seemed to hope. I felt worried. My wit failed to help me much today. I kept touching my own swollen sooted eye, kept convincing myself it’d probably given me a concussion, worse. Funny meant weak. Jokes seemed small and false and I was growing up, I told myself. The solemnity of an only child, an intelligent eight-year-old, platinum-blond and male with his first black eye. The self-importance of all men is really one of God’s great triumphs and perversities!

Most days at school I now got shoved and cornered, got told I could not be Clyde Delman’s own blood son. But how could a loving boy believe this? I must be. His. His if anything. Boys told me that my dad was not my dad but that my mom sure was a floozie. I felt I could remember the county fair when Mom first met Doc Dix. But, slow, it came to me, they could have staged that. Even though I’d asked her to go, Mom might have slipped into the bedroom when she fetched her sweater, she could have phoned. She might have arranged to meet him at the Ferris wheel, and since he was late, off tending a blue-ribbon horse, maybe she stayed on there, going around and round till the sickness. I knew I didn’t look a bit like my poor sallow father slumped over there smoking, driving in his usual mild silence. Even set in neutral gear, especially in neutral, such a genial kindness coasted with our Clyde. Here was a man who had, against all odds, learned to entertain himself, then others. He radiated some earned interior attraction, a secret vaudeville of power everybody felt.