purpose. She was anxious to get out and start tracking things down.
A few minutes later, the feds snapped their pads closed and rose. 'We're on it,' Ford said. He looked straight at Myron. 'And we'll find your donor. You stay out.'
Myron nodded and wondered if he could. After they left, Win took a seat in front of Myron's desk.
'Why do I feel like I was picked up at a bar and now it's the next morning and the guy just handed me the 'I'll call you' line?' Myron asked.
'Because that's precisely what you are,' Win said. 'Slut.'
'Think they're holding something back?'
'Without question.'
'Something big?'
'Gargantuan,' Win said.
'Not much we can do about it now.'
'Nope,' Win said. 'Nothing at all.'
Chapter 24
Myron's mom met him at the front door.
'I'm picking up the takeout,' Mom said.
'You?'
She put her hands on her hips and shot him her best wither. 'There a problem with that?'
'No, it's just…' He decided to drop it. 'Nothing.'
Mom kissed his cheek and fished through her purse for the car keys. 'I'll be back in a half hour. Your father is in the back.' She gave him the imploring eyes. 'Alone.'
'Okay,' he said.
'No one else is here.'
'Uh-huh.'
'If you catch my drift.'
'It's caught.'
'You'll be alone.'
'Caught, Mom. Caught.'
'It'll be an opportunity—'
'Mom.'
She put her hands up. 'Okay, okay, I'm going.'
He walked around the side of the house, past the garbage cans and recycling bins, and found Dad on the deck. The deck was sanded redwood with built-in benches and resin furniture and a Weber 500 barbecue, all brought to being during the famed Kitchen Expansion of 1994. Dad was bent over a railing with a screwdriver in his hand. For a moment, Myron fell back to those 'weekend projects' with Dad, some of which lasted almost an entire hour. They would go out with toolbox in tow, Dad bent over like he was now, muttering obscenities under his breath. Myron's sole task consisted of handing Dad tools like a scrub nurse in the operating room, the whole exercise boring as hell, shuffling his feet in the sun, sighing heavily, finding new angles from which to stand.
'Hey,' Myron said.
Dad looked up, smiled, put down the tool. 'Screw loose,' he said. 'But let's not talk about your mother.'
Myron laughed. They found molded-resin chairs around a table impaled by a blue umbrella. In front of them lay Bolitar Stadium, a small patch of green-to-brown grass that had hosted countless, oft-solo football games, baseball games, soccer games, Wiffle ball games (probably the most popular sport at Bolitar Stadium), rugby scrums, badminton, kickball, and that favorite pastime for the future sadist, bombardment. Myron spotted Mom's former vegetable garden — the word vegetable here being used to describe three annual soggy tomatoes and two flaccid zucchinis; it was now slightly more overgrown than a Cambodian rice paddy. To their right were the rusted remnants of their old tetherball pole. Tetherball. Now, there was a really dumb game.
Myron cleared his throat and put his hands on the table. 'How you feeling?'
Dad gave a big nod. 'Good. You?'
'Good.'
The silence floated down, puffy and relaxed. Silence with a father can be like that. You drift back and you're young and you're safe, safe in that all-encompassing way only a child can be with his father. You still see him hovering in your darkened doorway, the silent sentinel to your adolescence, and you sleep the sleep of the naive, the innocent, the unformed. When you get older, you realize that this safety was just an illusion, another child's perception, like the size of your backyard.
Or maybe, if you're lucky, you don't.
Dad looked older today, the flesh on his face more sagged, the once-knotted biceps spongy under the T-shirt, starting to waste. Myron wondered how to start. Dad closed his eyes for a three count, opened them, and said, 'Don't.'
'What?'
'Your mother is about as subtle as a White House press release,' Dad said. 'I mean, when was the last time she picked up the takeout instead of me?'
'Has she ever?'
'Once,' Dad said. 'When I had a fever of a hundred and four. And even then she whined about it.'
'Where's she going?'
'She has me on a special diet now, you know. Because of the chest pains.'
'Yeah, I figured that.'
'She's even tried cooking a little. She told you?'
Myron nodded. 'She baked something for me yesterday.'
Dad's body went stiff. 'By God,' he said. 'Her own son?'
'It was pretty scary.'
'The woman has many, many talents, but they could airdrop that stuff into starving African nations and no one would eat it.'
'So where's she going?'
'Your mother is high on some crazy Middle Eastern health food place. Just opened in West Orange. Get this, it's called Ayatollah Granola.'
Myron gave him flat eyes.
'Hand to God, that's the name. Food is almost as dry as that Thanksgiving turkey your mother made when you were eight. You remember that?'
'At night,' Myron said. 'It still haunts my sleep.'
Dad looked off again. 'She left us alone so we could talk, right?'
'Right.'
He made a face. 'I hate when she does stuff like that. She means well, your mother. We both know that. But let's not do it, okay?'
Myron shrugged. 'You say so.'
'She thinks I don't like growing old. News flash: No one does. My friend Herschel Diamond — you remember Heshy?'
'Sure.'
'Big guy, right? Played semipro football when we were young. So Heshy, he calls me and he says now that I'm retired, I can do tai chi with him. I mean, tai chi? What the hell is that anyway? If I want to move slowly, I have to drive down to the Y to do it with a bunch of old yentas? I mean, what's that about? I tell him no. So then Heshy, this great athlete, Myron, he could hit a softball a country mile, this marvelous big ox, he tells me we can walk together. Walk. At the mall. Speed-walk, he calls it. At the mall, for chrissake. Heshy always hated the place — now he wants us to trot around like a bunch of jackasses in matching sweatsuits and expensive walking shoes. Pump our
