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and as we slowed down and I was stretching out, uncurling my body along the diagonal, we made a sharp right onto gravel and pulled over and stopped.
    My father opened the door. The car dipped and rocked, shuddered. The engine clicked. Then the passenger door opened. I waited.
    If I heard her voice today, twenty-six years later, I would recognize it.
    “Angel,” she said.
    I heard the weight of their bodies sliding across the back seat, first hers, then his. They weren’t three feet away. I curled up, crouched into the low space between the golf bag and the back of the passenger compartment. There were two firm points in the cushion where it was displaced. As I lay there, I went over the voice again in my head: it was nobody I knew. I heard a laugh from her, and then something low from him. I felt the shift of the trunk’s false rear, and then, as I lay behind them, I heard the contact: the crinkle of clothing, arms wrapping, and the half-delicate, muscular sounds. It was like hearing a television in the next room. His voice once more, and then the rising of their breath, slow; a minute of this, maybe another; then shifting again, the friction of cloth on the leather seat and the car’s soft rocking. “Dad,” I whispered. Then rocking again; my father’s sudden panting, harder and harder, his half-words. The car shook violently. “Dad,” I whispered. I shouted, “Dad!”
    The door opened.
    His steps kicked up gravel. I heard jingling metal, the sound of the key in the trunk lock. He was standing over me in an explosion of light.
    He said, “Put back the club socks.”
    I did and got out of the car to stand next to him. He rubbed his hands down the front of his shirt.
    “What the hell,” he said.
    “I was in the trunk.”
    “I know,” he said. “What the goddamn.”
     
    The year I graduated from college, I found a job teaching junior high school in Boston. The school was a cement building with small windows well up from the street, and dark classrooms in which I spent a lot of time maintaining discipline. In the middle of an afternoon that first winter a boy knocked on my door to tell me I had a phone call. I knew who it was going to be.
    “Dad’s gone,” my mother said.
    He’d taken his things in the Lincoln, she told me, and driven away that morning before dawn. On the kitchen table he’d left a note and some cash. “A lot of cash,” my mother added, lowering her voice. “Twenty thousand dollars.”
    I imagined the sheaf of bills on our breakfast table, held down by the ceramic butter dish, the bank notes ruffling in the breeze from the louvered windows that opened onto his green. In the note he said he had gone north and would call her when he’d settled. It was December. I told my mother that I would visit in a week, when school was out for Christmas. I told her to go to her sister’s and stay there, and then I said that I was working and had to get back to my class. She didn’t say anything on the other end of the line, and in the silence I imagined my father crisscrossing the state of California, driving north, stopping in Palm Springs and Carmel, the Lincoln riding low with the weight.
    “Leonard,” my mother said, “did you know anything like this was happening?”
     
    During the spring of the year of getting to know us better I caddied for him a few times. On Saturdays he played early in the morning, when the course was mostly empty and the grass was still wet from the night. I learned to fetch the higher irons as the sun rose over the back nine and the ball, on drying ground, rolled farther. He hit skybound approach shots with backspin, chips that bit into the green and stopped. He played in a foursome with three other men, and in the locker room, as they changed their shoes, they told jokes and poked one another in the belly. The lockers were shiny green metal, the floor clean white tiles that clicked under the shoe spikes. Beneath the mirrors were jars of combs in green disinfectant.