What bothered him most was the way she had said it, off-hand, almost as an afterthought, a result of his having struck the hippie. He had the feeling that if he had not done that, she would not have said any of it, ever. So it had if not the ring of truth at least the trappings of it. And he knew the first part of what she said was at least possible. Though he had always been a good father to Chris, even a loving father, he could see that in the boy’s eyes he might at times have seemed “unbending” and “always, always right.” But it had never been Hook’s practice to insist on his own way of doing things; he had never been bullheaded or dictatorial. What he was, simply, was right. And most of the time. But he could not see anything unusual or harmful in that, anything Chris would have resented. After all, Hook was Chris’s father; he had twenty-five years more experience of life than the boy had had, so naturally he had known more, been “right” more. And anyway, as far as Hook was able to judge, what boys seemed to resent in a father was not competence, not decency and strength, but ineptness and weakness. He had seen enough examples of that around Banner Hill, the contempt many of the young showed openly for lazy, boozing fathers, transplanted hillbillies who were basically coon hunters and whittlers by nature and not farmers or businessmen. And Hook in fact resented this attitude, for it was his experience that these shiftless whittlers were usually a lot longer on humanity than some of their more successful neighbors. But now Hook wondered if this general indictment might not include himself as well, that in his “strength and rightness” he had been less warm, less human in Chris’s eyes than he would have wanted to be. What was it she had said? “He was freezing to death in your cold shadow.” And so had left home. No, that Hook could not believe. To believe it would be the same as accepting someone’s word that the sun rose in the west despite his observations to the contrary. All his senses, all his experience with the boy, all his memories of their life together told him otherwise. Yet she had an answer for that too, that the young had to “play roles” with their parents. So this son he remembered, this bright and happy and loving Christopher David Hook, was not real at all but just an actor. The real one had fled his home and father “in order to breathe,” had found nothing but more coldness and misery and unhappiness wherever he had gone, and so had killed himself.

But it was not true. Hook knew it was not true. Only now he had to prove it more than ever, for he had to prove it to himself. Elizabeth Madera had sown in him not some small seed of doubt but a nascent cancer, and he knew that if he was to go on living he would have to cut it out of himself, all of it.