“I don’t know. Seems like he would be involved. I worked up a theory that he told one of his buddies about it while drinking and the guy low-key did it a few days later. Rodney seems okay but the guys he brings around sometimes are shysters. Or he just nabbed it with the hope that he would give Emery some of the cash later, but by the time Rodney heard about it he was so upset that Rodney didn’t want to tell Emery, like, I don’t know, like my mom was still a competition and that by coming clean Rodney would go down in points to Emery. My dad wasn’t even mad at Rodney, too, it’s stupid. He’s such a sad sack. He told me he was mad at himself for letting people into his home to bother him, that he was mad at himself for letting mom steamroll him, that he was mad that he told anyone where he lived, because once people know where you live, they come and fuck up your life. Either way, it didn’t matter. The truck was gone and the scrap metal was gone. I don’t think my dad cared about those. It was the principle of it. It’s a bad idea to give a loner curmudgeon justified reasons to hate the world.”

“Was it worth anything, anyway?”

“A good car can get you three hundred dollars or so worth of cash from scrapping it. It depends on what was in the piles, but you can make good, quick money from scrapping stuff. That’s why a lot of people steal it.”

“People steal scrap?”

“Yeah. It’s why people bust into air conditioners, rip out copper wire. All that stuff.”

“So what did your dad do?”

“Nothing. He didn’t even tell Mom. He told me when I called him on the phone. Mom didn’t even know. I told Mom. I think she suspected Rodney, but she never let me know if she did.”

“Well, what then?”

“Three of the dogs ran away.”

•••

It was my daughter that got to me the most, I was already working all the time, I was already stressed out after moving in with Rodney, after all of the dogs. I don’t think she was really upset about the dogs. I don’t think Carrie was really honest with herself about me and her dad splitting up. So she would try to waylay into me on some moral high ground stuff, defending her completely blank, absent father, the father whom she had called me to complain about when he forgot her birthday (which he told me he did not forget, but simply forgot to call) but she herself never brought it up to her father, she, who gave her father a pass, for what reason I don’t know. Probably because I was the one who left.