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you think I would know that?”
    “You knew him longer and better than I did,”
I said. “I don’t know him at all.”
    “You know him through his letters.”
    “He doesn’t say anything in his letters.”
    It was true. He revealed very little about
himself. Only superficial stuff, like the places he had seen or if
he happened to sell an article to some magazine nobody ever heard
of. In my almost seventeen years I’d learned scarcely anything
about Jules Penny, the man. About his thoughts, his feelings, his
ideas and goals. Do other people know things like that about their
dads? Maybe not. But I didn’t see why I shouldn’t. He was half of
me. I had a right to know.
    I thought of calling Ben just to talk. He
ought to be home by now, but probably exhausted and hitting the
sack. If I irritated him, he wouldn’t hesitate to say so. That was
part of being an Aspie. They tell it like it is.
    And next year he’d be away at MIT, surrounded
by genius girls who were smart and sophisticated. All the while I’d
still be a dumb little high school kid stuck in dumb old
Southbridge. Sometimes I felt as if I’d lost him already.
    I wanted our relationship to be forever. He
said I was the only girl besides Maddie who understood his
Asperger’s. Probably at MIT at least half the girls have
Asperger’s. The guys, too. I could apply there myself, but knew I
didn’t have the brains to get in.
    My life was a wreck. All I had to look
forward to was my dad coming.
    But not for us. Only for Hey Buddy, who might
be in prison.
    Mom went back to her reading and I wandered
around the room, visiting all the things I used to play with when I
was little. The miniature elephants from India on her dresser. The
cut glass atomizer from somebody who never noticed that she didn’t
wear perfume. The Victorian-style lamp with roses painted on it and
crystal icicles dangling from the shade.
    She was looking at a fat catalog of real
estate listings. Reading in bed was a favorite luxury of hers, but
real estate listings? Okay, it was her job.
    The luxury part was the bed itself, a big
four-poster with swans carved on the headboard. She and Daddy
bought it, at least the frame, at an antiques fair not long after
they were married, which wasn’t long before I was born. It was
obvious they’d had to get married because of me.
    Maybe they weren’t really married and the
antiques fair was only a story. Maybe he wasn’t really my
father.
    She looked up from her listings. “Did you
want something?”
    “I would like to know…” I couldn’t say “who I
am.” I would get an earful about how loony that was.
    So I tried a different approach. “When he
came that other time…”
    He actually did visit a few years back, but
the visit was brief and he was always running off somewhere.
    “Yes?” Her eyes went back to the catalog.
    It’s hard to talk when your listener isn’t
listening, but I tried.
    “He kept going into the city. What did they
have there that he wanted to see more than us?”
    “The way he put it—” Mom didn’t sound very
convinced, “he was trying to establish some contacts for selling
his articles. Have a good night, sweetie. Would you close the door
on your way out?”
    Well, if that wasn’t a brush-off. I said,
“’Night,” and went across the hall to my own room.
    From there I could see down the street to
Olive Hurlow’s house. That’s where I used to spend afternoons and
evenings, looking after her two little boys while she served drinks
at Bernie’s Bar & Grill and paid me not too badly. I missed
that job, especially the money. I missed the kids, and when the
baby got kidnapped, I was the one who found him.
    And almost got killed in the process. Olive
was grateful, but she blamed me because I’d been late getting there
that day. I blamed Olive. She could have waited for me even if it
made her late for work. She couldn’t see it that way, or
didn’t want to.
    I lay on the bed and looked up at my poster
of a