I closed my locker and spun the lock. “Good luck, Schwa. I really hope you find her.” But when I looked at where he was standing, he had already vanished.

When I got home that afternoon, the house was empty. Or so I thought. I passed by my father twice in the living room without even noticing he was there. On the third pass, I noticed him sitting in an armchair, blending into the shadows of the room, staring kind of blankly into space.

“Dad?”

“Hi, Antsy,” he said quietly.

“You’re home early.”

He didn’t answer for a while. “Yeah, well, thought I’d take some time off.”

There was something off about this. “Work okay?” I asked. “Are you building a better Bullpucky? Manny, I mean.”

“Work couldn’t be better,” he said. “I got fired today.”

I chuckled at first, thinking he was making some kind of joke, but he didn’t laugh.

“What? You can’t be serious!”

“They called it an ‘executive offload.’”

“They fired a bunch of you?” I still couldn’t believe it. Dad had worked for Pisher since before I could remember.

He shook his head. “Just me.”

“Those creeps.”

He raised his eyebrows. “They gave me a nice parachute, though.”

“Huh?”

“Severance package. Money enough to hold me until I get another job. If I get one.”

“Did you tell Mom?”

“No!” he said sharply. “And you don’t tell her either. I’ll tell her when I’m good and ready.”

I was going to ask him why he told me, but stopped myself. I decided just to feel grateful that he did.

I sat down on the couch, feeling awkward about the whole thing, but still not wanting to leave. I offered to get him a beer, but he said no, that he just wanted to sit there for a while getting used to the feeling of being jobless. Like maybe the air might be thinner for the unemployed.

“So what’s new with you?” he asked.

“Not a whole lot,” I told him. “Remember my friend? The one who’s invisible-ish?”

“Vaguely,” he said, which was better than “not at all.”

I told him the whole story. Everything—from the butcher to the billboard to the box of letters.

“Ran away with the butcher!” Dad said. “Ya gotta love that.”

“So, was letting him know the right thing to do?”

He thought about it. “Probably,” he said. “Did you do it because you wanted to tell him, or because he needed to hear it?”

I didn’t even have to think about the answer to that one. “He needed to hear it. Definitely.”

“So your intentions were good. That’s what matters.”

“But isn’t, like, the road to hell paved with good intentions?”

“Yeah, well, so’s the road to heaven. And if you spend too much time thinking about where those good intentions are taking you, you know where you end up?”

“Jersey?”