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for his children to grow up’ so that we could at last ‘engage in adult conversation’? In the meantime we bored him. So he left the raising of his offspring to his wife, and then had the temerity to rage when his eldest didn’t turn out as he’d have liked. When I was young he was so rarely in evidence, forever in ‘meetings’, that my favourite birthday present was to spend an hour with my father alone, and to do so again I would have to wait another year. Gruff, inaccessible, buried in briefs with glasses down his nose, Sturges McCrea had been more icon than parent to me, and in truth I owed him little.
    You’d think that the one reward for doing all the puke-wiping and nappy-dunking would be a little credit; instead we dismissed our mother for being so apparently unimportant. So she redeemed herself by mailing off for coffee mugs, and settled for victories of remarkably intact quick-sale vegetables while my father brought home honorary degrees.
    ‘I thought you might want some milk.’
Truman delivered a carton, and sat down with his panda mug. ‘You’re not spending much time downstairs?’
‘It doesn’t feel like mine yet.’
Yet . I didn’t take issue, for Truman charmed me in the morning. He
    took hours to wake up, and rubbed his eyes, bear-like, with the backs of his hands. For years he’d collected panda posters from Peking, Tshirts from the National Zoo, and mugs like the one he was slurping from, on which LingLing nibbled bamboo. In fact, he looked like a panda: with dark rings around his eyes and a myopic bumbling amble, especially on rising, like a massive, muscular mammal I knew to be vegetarian and could tease if I liked.
    ‘Ready for the big pow-wow?’ Though a question, the sentence fell. ‘As I’ll ever be. I noticed nobody’s cleaned out the fridge.’ ‘That’s right, nobody has.’
‘There’s some furry yellow squash casserole in there that could cure all Tanzania of TB.’
    Truman wandered to the sink; he compulsively tidied. ‘Nuts.’ He stopped. ‘The sponge.’
I turned to glimpse, fossilized by the faucet, the horror of Truman’s childhood. It had been his job to wipe the kitchen table, and my mother could not have started a fresh sponge more than once a year. The same fastidious boy he’d been then, Truman wet it by knocking it into the sink and running the tap; he squeezed it with a fork. Touching the sponge with only his fingertips, he nudged the foetid greenish square through my sloshed coffee. He scrubbed his hands, sniffed his fingers, and washed them again.
‘How much can a new sponge cost?’ he despaired. ‘Thirty cents?’
As his first act of revolution, Truman pinched the reeking tatter by its very corner and dropped it in the bin.
    Not expecting any surprises, I wasn’t dreading our conference with the estate lawyer. If anything, I looked forward to seeing Hugh Garrison, who had handled the particulars of my father’s death two years before. For a lawyer, he was unprepossessing, big on corduroys and always tugging at his tie; when he resorted to legal jargon, his eyebrows shrugged apologetic inverted commas on either side. He and my father had been colleagues, though I suspect that during our one after-hours beer at Brother’s Pizza two years back I got to know him better than my father had over two decades. Had they met socially, my father would have held forth about how Carter was a much better president than reputed to be (he identified with Jimmy Carter, a nuclear engineer maligned as a moron because he had a Southern accent). Sturges McCrea liked issues. Told your wife had just given birth to a paraplegic, he’d start in straight away with the rights of the handicapped; it would never occur to him to ask how you felt.
    At Brother’s Pizza I’d been braced to move on to what a marvellous spokesman of the downtrodden my father had been, how fair-minded and self-sacrificing, and what a shame…The usual. Hugh Garrison launched into no such