Now his father’s getting scared. Not the same kind of fear he had as he waited for the Schwa to get home, but in its own way just as bad. The Schwa’s afraid, too. It’s the fear you feel when you’re off the bus, standing in front of that beautiful/horrible girl.

“Don’t tell me you don’t remember,” the Schwa says. “Tell me why there aren’t any pictures.”

“There are pictures,” his father finally says. “They’re just put away, that’s all.”

“Why?”

“Because she left us!” he yells.

“She left you!” the Schwa screams back.

“No,” his father says, more softly this time. “She left us.”

And Calvin, no matter how much he tightens his jaw, he can’t deny the ugly green-toothed truth. She left him, too.

They look at each other for a moment. The Schwa knows if it goes on too long, it will end right here. His father will clam up, and everything would go back to the way it was. But Mr. Schwa, to his credit, doesn’t wait long enough for that to happen. “Come on,” he says, and he leads his son out to the garage.

In the corner of the garage, hidden beneath other junk, is a suitcase. He pulls it out, opens it up, and takes out a shoe box, handing it to the Schwa.

The Schwa is almost afraid to open it, but in the end he does. He has to. Inside he finds envelopes—at least fifty of them. Every one of them is addressed in the same feminine handwriting. None of them have been opened, and all are addressed to the same person.

“These were written to me,” he says.

“If she wanted to talk to you, she could have come herself. I told her that.”

“You spoke to her?”

“She used to call.”

“And you never told me?”

His father’s face gets hard. “If she wanted to talk to you,” he says again, “she could have come herself.”

The Schwa doesn’t know which is worse—what his mother did, or what his father had done. She left, yes, but he made her disappear.

“When did the letters start coming?” the Schwa asks.

His father doesn’t hold back anything anymore. He couldn’t if he tried. “A few weeks after she left.”

“And when did the last one come?”

His father doesn’t answer right away. It’s hard for him to say. Finally he tells him, “I can’t remember.”

He can’t look his son in the face, but the Schwa, he can stare straight at his father, right through him. “I spent our savings to rent a billboard,” he tells his father. “A big picture of my face.”

The man doesn’t understand. “Why?”

“To prove I’m not invisible.”