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overreaction in check.
    Descending the stairs, he kept his arms out for any light switches. I need a drink, he told himself, hoping that a little alcohol might calm his flighty stomach. Every time he blinked those two pricks of red wavered on the water, a premonition. “Calm down,” he whispered. “You caught something.” His voice, coolly measured as a result of twelve years in the classroom, soothed even him.
    The bottle was in the cabinet above the microwave. He unscrewed the cap, poured a shot over a cupful of ice. When the whiskey reached the rim, he broke his wrist and the amber liquid splashed over the rocks. He splashed ginger ale over it and raised the glass. The ice cubes bounced off his lips.
    Instead of having the calming effect he’d hoped for the booze just coated him with fresh anxieties. The blood wasn’t the scope of his problems. It was a monomania, a distraction. He set the glass on the counter and crossed the living room to his office.
    The complete fifteen-volume set of his mother’s diaries was book ended by two unrelated tomes. Sometimes his mother’s words calmed him. Always, they mystified him. Every single day, he wished he’d met her.
    Brain cancer had taken Sarah Eugene Lieber on November 14, 1972, two days after his fifth birthday. He had no recollection of her, no memory of the sickness that had stolen her. All he had were these diaries.
    And he shouldn’t have had them.
    * * * * *
    Christmas of 1982 was turning out to be nicer than Robert had expected. His father, Jimmy Lieber, was finally coming out of a decade-long trance of grief. Over the past six months, he’d lost nearly thirty pounds with a regimen of two hundred push-ups a day. But more important, another love had entered his life. Her name was Juanita Sanchez.
    Robert liked Juanita, liked her two little kids, Pedro and Jose, and loved that she loved his father. She’d lost a husband back in Puerto Rico and she seemed overjoyed to have found Jimmy. Today, Christmas Eve, she was in the living room next to a naked tree, rummaging through a stack of boxes that contained fewer ornaments than she’d hoped. Pedro and Jose scurried through the house, flying paper airplanes. They tried and tried to engage Robert, but he was busy sitting at Juanita’s feet, a place he was growing increasingly comfortable. The years following his mother’s death had not been happy ones in the Lieber home, but she was quickly changing all that. “Now look at that one,” exclaimed Juanita, taking out an ornament with a picture on it. She brought it to his eye level. “Is that your mother?”
    His smile faded somewhat, but he nodded. “Yeah, that’s her. You putting it up?”
    She steadied her eyes on his. “Would it be alright with you and your papa?”
    He thought about it, but had no idea how Jimmy would react. When people pricked his father’s memory, he sometimes exploded.
    Juanita replaced the glass ball. “Maybe next year.”
    “Okay,” he said, hoping she would be here next year.
    Just then Jose yelled and dropped his airplane. The air scooped it up, carried it a few feet before landing it perfectly. “Uncle Jimmy!” he cried, running out to the garage.
    Robert heard his father laugh loudly at his reception. Even after months of this, his father’s laugh, so rare during the first thirteen years of his life, startled him.
    Juanita smiled, then looked back at him. “Coming?”
    She and Robert met him in the kitchen. Jimmy’s face lit up and he opened his arms, hugging them both. He knuckled Robert’s head. “How’s it going kiddo?”
    “Pretty good, except Juanita and I can’t find all the ornaments.”
    Jimmy released them. “Check the attic?”
    “Me?”
    Jimmy grinned. “Aren’t you big enough to make it up and back?”
    Robert ran to the garage. He drew down the ceiling door, unraveled the ladder. A dingy light pulsed twice, came on. Dust filmed it, dimming the light. Lungs filled with a deep breath, he climbed. At the