Paper Daughter Read Free Page A

but I didn't recall him mentioning it. Often, at dinner, he did talk about his work.
    I thought he must have received whatever he was looking for, since I was pretty sure he hadn't made any recent trips to California.
    I flipped to the next page, but the only thing on it was a note. "The trouble with small deceits is that the poet was right: they do become tangled webs. And you can't foresee who will become ensnared in them or who will be hurt if you tear back through to the truth."
    I felt guilty reading thoughts that Dad had obviously written only for himself. It was crossing a line of privacy I'd never have crossed when he was alive. But I told myself that maybe he'd have wanted me to read his notes now. They were probably the last things I'd ever learn directly from him. Things and ideas that maybe he'd intended to tell me about one day.
    Or explain. Obviously Dad was thinking about some lie someone had told when he wrote that last entry. I thought there was probably a story there I'd have enjoyed hearing.

CHAPTER 3
    I didn't take a break till noon, when I put a frozen lunch in the microwave and set about keeping my promise to call Dad's school.
    Intending to get the number from the school's website, I turned on the computer Mom kept in the kitchen, and while it was starting up, I brought in the mail.
    A postcard from the national headquarters of Dad's college fraternity fell out. It was a form for reporting address changes, but someone had written on it, "No Steven Chen in our records."
    This was absurd, I thought. How could two places Dad had been a part of both have lost track of him?
    The microwave beeped that my lunch was done, but I ignored it and called the prep school instead. A recorded message said that the office was closed for summer maintenance, but in case of emergencies...
    So I called Columbia University and asked to be connected to Dad's fraternity house.
    "We have no listing for that," a campus operator told me.
    "But you must," I said. "My dad was a member."
    "Are you sure you have the fraternity name right? My own kid calls himself a Delt, when really the proper designation is—"
    "I think I do," I said, "but I could check. Is there someone who would look up my father's records for me?"
    She referred me to an online website where I meandered around, followed outside links, and never did learn anything. The only reason I gave it any time at all was that the fraternity mix-up, coming on top of the letter from the prep school, created a puzzle that nagged at me.
    Finally I dug through sympathy cards looking for one from a Bill Ames, who'd written that he was a college friend of Dad's and had seen the obituary. Using his return address to get a home phone number, I called and heard my call being forwarded to his cell.
    When he answered, I explained the trouble I was having connecting with Dad's old fraternity. "I thought perhaps you might have been in it with him."
    He didn't reply, so I said, "You did go to Columbia with my father?"
    "Certainly," he said. "Though after we got our degrees, I didn't stay on for graduate work the way he did, going into journalism."
    "But the fraternity?" I said.
    "We weren't in one. The two of us worked together on a cafeteria steam line."
    "Maybe you're thinking of another friend," I said. "I don't think Dad had a job while he was in college."
    "Sure he did. Work-study, like me. Plus, Steven held down outside jobs. He had to, being on his own."
    I disconnected, aware of a gnawing anxiousness, even though I knew Mr. Ames must have confused my dad with someone else.
    Dad's parents hadn't been rich, but they'd had enough money to put him through one of the priciest prep schools in the country and then through an Ivy League university.
    Dad hadn't been comfortable talking about how well off they'd been—probably, I'd always thought, because he didn't want me thinking money was what counted. But Mom had told me how his parents, who'd died while Dad was in college, had