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trick
    I arranged and rearranged the words until finally, on a gray misty Friday morning before school, I stood on the driveway, a folded note in my sweaty hand, and I hoped it said:
    What is your favorite food?
    Where did you learn to juggle?
    Would you please tell me how you lost your voice?
    While I was standing there, my cell phone startled me, and I found myself staring at my father’s name on the screen: GLEN DEWITT .
    I ran my fingers over the edge of the paper and watched the foggy edges of the grove. I listened for the whir of Amiel’s bicycle, and the phone rang again, then again, until I finally said a grudging hello to my father.
    “Pearly girl!” my father said. I could imagine him wearing a perfectly starched pink shirt. Cuff links. Obsession for Men cologne.
    “Where are you?” I asked.
    “The office,” he said. “You ready for a surprise?”
    “I don’t know,” I said. A surprise could be dinner at which he would introduce me to the woman or man who must havebeen eating with him for all those months at La Vache and the French Laundry while he was so-called missing us.
    “This is a pretty damn good surprise,” he said. “It’s a place.”
    The purple jacaranda tree was blooming its head off where I stood. Jacarandas can make the whole world look like a Technicolor dreamland, as if Walt Disney had decided everything green should be purple.
    “Just think of the place you’ve always wanted to go,” my father said, waving his own Technicolor wand.
    I pictured, because I couldn’t help it, the Eiffel Tower. Every August, Agnès, Robby, and Hoyt went to Paris to visit her mother, and although they had twice invited me to go with them, both times my parents had come up with reasons why the timing was bad.
    I watched the dirt road where Amiel still wasn’t riding in on his bicycle, and I touched the folded note that I hoped said,
Where did you learn to juggle?
not,
Where did you learn to deceive?
    “Well, what are you thinking?” my father asked.
    “I don’t know,” I said, because I couldn’t tell him about Amiel and I didn’t know how to ask why he had canceled our health insurance.
    “Paris, France,” my father said to me from what felt like a faraway room. “This summer. I know someone who actually has a pied-à-terre in Paris, France, so you just need to tell me when you’re going to be finished with school, and I mean finished with the learning part—no need to stay for those days when everyone’s just signing yearbooks and flirting around.…”
    I had an inkling about who owned the pied-à-terre, though I didn’t know if the someone was male or female, and I wondered what my dad thought my mother would do with herself while I was in Paris, France, with him and his mistress/
mistredo
. Maybe she would try to move into the fifth instar for human beings, which is I don’t know what.
    “I have to go, Dad,” I said.
    “Well, think about it,” he said.
    “Okay.”
    I pushed the End button as Amiel’s bicycle came humming through the iron arch. He saw me, lifted his fingers in a small wave, and coasted to a stop.
    For a second, I couldn’t move or breathe. What is it about a person that makes him harmless to others and fatal to you, like a bee sting or a trace of peanut butter? I put the phone in my pocket and took out my folded message, but Amiel was already walking away to the grove, swinging the long metal prong he used to turn the sprinklers on.
    “Amiel?” I said. I tried to say the name nicely, with Spanish vowels.
    Amiel turned, so he wasn’t deaf, just like he said. I held out the piece of paper and he got a worried look. He glanced up at the house, and he turned the sprinkler key slowly in his hand like a baton.
    “It’s nothing bad,” I said.
    He took the paper and set the key down so he could unfold it. His shirt was a white and brown plaid, I remember, and I saw for the first time a sort of leather-thong necklace he worearound his neck. I’m not a fan of man