Flashback

I nodded but felt uneasy. This conversation was as thin and fragile as a stray strand of cobweb. The slightest wrong word or tone from me would, I knew, sever it or simply blow it away. I heard myself say softly…

—Are you sure you want to hear her voice and private thoughts, Val? Sometimes grown-ups say things in private that they wouldn’t necessarily want to have shared with…

Val grunted and shook his head and I knew that if it weren’t for the friendly effects of the potent grass that Joe Valdez and his wife, Juanita, had brought up from Old Mexico, I’d be looking at Val’s angry back. Instead, he kept talking to me.

—Yeah, yeah, yeah… but I think in that written diary there may be the clue I need to know why my old man turned against her… maybe even killed her.

—Killed her!

I shouted and actually clapped both hands over my mouth. Val cringed and looked toward the closed curtain. But there was no noise from Julio and Perdita below.

Nor did Val turn his back to me. Not yet. His whisper now was a fast, hot hiss, devoid of any joint-assisted relaxation.

—Leonard, you’ve asked me about a thousand times why I hate my old man. The answer might be in that encrypted diary text. It’s the main reason I’ve kept the goddamn phone all these years.

—Val, you don’t hate your father …, I began.

—I do, goddammit. I hate the cocksucker’s guts and if we somehow manage to get to Denver alive, I’m going to track him down to whatever flashback cave he’s rotting away in and kick him awake and put a bullet in his guts…

I had no idea what to say to this madness so I said nothing. It turned out to be the only way I could have kept the agitated boy talking.

—He found out that Mom was doing something, Leonard, and I think he killed her. Or had her killed. I really do.

I started to say something like—But your mother died in an auto accident, Val”—but I knew at once that I would lose him with that. The conversation would end as suddenly as it had begun. I cleared my throat.

—What kind of things was she doing that would so anger your father?

Val seemed to fold in on himself until he was a mass of defensive knees, elbows, curved back as sharp as those elbows, and lowered head.

—I don’t know. But she was gone a lot in those last weeks—hell, months—before she was killed in that convenient auto accident. She was sneaking out a lot. When the Old Man was putting in double shifts down at the precinct, gone whole weekends—sometimes four or five days at a time—so was Mom. She used to have me stay with my friend Samuel’s weird, smelly old grandmother—Sheila—down the street when she was going to be away overnight. Sometimes for several nights in a row. And the Old Man never knew. Mom swore me to secrecy, Leonard. Imagine a parent swearing her ten-year-old kid to secrecy.

I thought about it. It didn’t sound like the way Dara, my daughter, the light of my life, had ever behaved before. Or would behave.

—What do you think she was doing, Val? Having an… affair?

I couldn’t believe that I was asking my sixteen-year-old grandson this question. But suddenly I wanted to know the truth as much as this tormented boy had for the past six years.

Val shrugged. He suddenly looked very sleepy.