In For a Penny by James P. Blaylock Page B

door, but then reappeared in the kitchen, where she stood at the window, watching. His father was still staring at him, but puzzled, less suspicious now.
    “You remember the time we were up at Irvine Park,” Alan asked, “and we found those old bottle caps with the cork on the back, and you got the corks out and put the bottle caps on my shirt, with the cork holding them on from the other side? And I picked up that cactus apple and got all the needles in my hand? And it started to rain, and we got under the tree, and you said that the pitcher of lemonade would get wet, and mom ran back to the table to cover it?”
    His father dropped the golf club to the lawn, letting it lie there. “That was thirty years ago,” Alan said. “Can you imagine? It’s still funny, though. And there was that time when Mom lost her purse, remember, and she looked all over for it, and you came home from work and found it in the refrigerator?”
    “She put it away with the groceries,” his father said. “That was last month.”
    Alan nodded. “I guess it could have been.” He realized now that his father’s silence was no longer disbelief, and he stepped forward, opening his arms. His father hugged him, and for a time they stood there, listening to the night, saying nothing. Alan stepped away finally, and his father squeezed him on the shoulder, smiling crookedly, looking hard at his face.
    Alan reached into his pocket and took out the odds and ends that he carried, the buffalo nickel, his pocketknife. He showed his father the little antler-handled knife. “Recognize this? It’s just like the one you gave me, except I lost that one. I found this one just like it at the hardware store and bought it about a year ago.”
    “I didn’t give you a pocketknife like that.”
    “You know what? I guess maybe you haven’t given it to me yet.”
    “Then I guess I don’t need to bother, if you’re just going to lose the damned thing.”
    Alan smiled at him. “But if you don’t, then how am I going to know to buy this one at the hardware store?”
    They listened in silence to the crickets for a moment. “How old would you be now?” his father asked him.
    “Forty-two,” Alan said. “How about you?”
    “Forty. That’s pretty funny. Married?”
    “Yeah. Take a look at this.” He dug in his wallet again, removing a picture of Tyler, his high school graduation picture. He looked at it fondly, but abruptly felt dizzy, disoriented. He nearly sat down to keep himself from falling. His father took the picture, and the dizziness passed. “That’s Tyler,” Alan said, taking a deep breath and focusing his thoughts. But he heard his own voice as an echo, as if through a tube. “Your grandson. Susan and I gave him Mom’s maiden name.”
    Alan’s father studied the picture. “He looks like your mother, doesn’t he?”
    “A lot. I didn’t realize it until tonight, when she was standing in my bedroom. You must have seen that the window was open… ?”
    “Your
bedroom,” his father said, as if wondering at the notion. “Here.” Alan took his keys out of his other pocket. Among them was the loose house key that he had removed from the nail in the juniper. “That’s how I got into the house.”
    Still holding Tyler’s picture, his father took the key. He nodded at the other keys on Alan’s key ring. “What’s that one?”
    Alan held out his car key. “Car key. One of the buttons is for the door locks and the other pops the trunk open from a distance. There’s a little battery in it. It puts out an FM radio wave. Push the door button a couple of times, and an alarm goes off.” Alan pushed it twice, recalling that his own car, in some distant space and time, was sitting just thirty feet away, and he found himself listening to hear a ghostly car alarm. But what he heard, aside from the crickets and the muted sound of the television, was a far-off clanking noise, like rocks cascading onto a steel plate. The night wind ruffled his