“Is that your question you were working up to?” He laughed. A wonderful spiraling kind of sucked-in chortle my Clyde had. (If I could redo one thing I’ve risked in life, I’d retract my next request and all it took out with it. I might have made him notice those frothy white blooms or three distant mules or some pond-fishing red-haired farm kids. I could have made my sharp yellow pencil press deeper into the spongy lined pad, bearing down upon our Owner’s Manual; I might’ve written out several of Clyde’s own jokes, then read them aloud to him. The generous guy would have given me full credit and slapped his knee with joy, and literally not known those jokes were his. But I did not do this. So …)

“Daddy? I got this eye on a argument. Boys rag me more and more. It’s got to where I hate school, playground especially. I always say no. But there’s way more of them. Dad, you know Doc Dix?”

I heard the massive Adam’s apple snag. There came a pause one-eighth of a mile long. “Sure, he’s right prominent in town.”

“Teddy, Ralph, and Walter Early. Some other older boys, sixth-graders? They said I was, that he might could be … Is. They say Doc Dix is my … REAL ONE.”

I had just called Clyde Melvin Delman, Sr., my sole reality, unreal. Even today, I must re-explain to myself how often I’d been punched. I felt so tattered by the daily denying. I simply meant to beg my dad for some assurance.

“Talk, idle talk,” he mumbled, head shaken sideways.

Then, alone, so loud he scared me as our car lurched, my father started singing, “Into the aiiiir, Junnnior … upside down … keep your noses off the ground!” And he was doing it very hearty but I could see his chest grow tense, bucking as if trying to close down over one huge latent cough.

With trying to sing, he meant to stop me. But I would not give way. Why not? Was it my mother’s crueler genes? Why was I demanding both Dad’s promise and denial?

Then I said, “What if you and me are not really … ?”

I did not make much sense. I was in most ways working blind. Pressing toward some fact literally unimaginable. It meant taking away the only earthly thing that I felt sure of standing on. What else in this life was I—except Clyde M. Delman, Sr.’s junior? Where else geography? Homework? Home?