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drawer and refolded them. She returned all our shoes to the closet. Then she came back to the bed, sat down, and began to cry. Her back was toward me. It shook with her gasps, and I put my hand out and touched her. “It’s all right,” I said.
    “We only saw each other a few times,” she answered. “I’d take it back if I could. I’d make it never happen.”
    “I know you would.”
    “For some reason I thought I couldn’t really hurt you.”
    She had stopped crying. I looked out the window at the tree branches hung low with snow. It didn’t seem I had to say anything.
    “I don’t know why I thought I couldn’t hurt you,” she said. “Of course I can hurt you.”
    “I forgive you.”
    Her back was still toward me. Outside, a few snowflakes drifted up in the air.
    “
Did
I hurt you?”
    “Yes, you did. I saw you two in a restaurant.”
    “Where?”
    “At Denny’s.”
    “No,” she said. “I mean, where did I hurt you?”
    The night he died, Anne stayed awake with me in bed. “Tell me about him,” she said.
    “What about?”
    “Stories. Tell me what it was like growing up, things you did together.”
    “We didn’t do that much,” I said. “I caddied for him. He taught me things about golf.”
    That night I never went to sleep. Lorraine was at a friend’s apartment and we were alone in my father’s empty house, but we pulled out the sheets anyway, and the two wool blankets, and we lay on the fold-out sofa in the den. I told stories about my father until I couldn’t think of any more, and then I talked about my mother until Anne fell asleep.
    In the middle of the night I got up and went into the living room. Through the glass I could see lights across the water, the bridges, Belvedere and San Francisco, ships. It was clear outside, and when I walked out to the cement carport the sky was lit with stars. The breeze moved inside my nightclothes. Next to the garage the Lincoln stood half-lit in the porch floodlight. I opened the door and got in. The seats were red leather and smelled of limes and cigarettes. I rolled down the window and took the key from the glove compartment. I thought of writing a note for Anne, but didn’t. Instead I coasted down the driveway in neutral and didn’t close the door or turn on the lights until the bottom of the hill, or start the engine until I had swung around the corner, so that the house was out of sight and the brine smell of the marina was coming through the open windows of the car. The pistons were almost silent.
    I felt urgent, though I had no route in mind. I ran one stop sign, then one red light, and when I reached the ramp onto Highway 101, I squeezed the accelerator and felt the surge of the fuel-injected, computer-sparked V-8. The dash lights glowed. I drove south and crossed over the Golden Gate Bridge at seventy miles an hour, its suspension cables swaying in the wind and the span rocking slowly, ocean to bay. The lanes were narrow. Reflectors zinged when the wheels strayed. If Anne woke, she might come out to the living room and then check for me outside. A light rain began to fall. Drops wet my knees, splattered my cheek. I kept the window open and turned on the radio; the car filled up with wind and music. Brass sounds. Trumpets. Sounds that filled my heart.
    The Lincoln drove like a dream. South of San Francisco the road opened up, and in the gulley of a shallow hill I took it up over a hundred. The arrow nosed rightward in the dash. Shapes flattened out. “Dad,” I said. The wind sounds changed pitch. I said, “The year of getting to know us.” Signposts and power poles were flying by. Only a few cars were on the road, and most moved over before I arrived. In the mirror I could see the faces as I passed. I went through San Mateo, Pacifica, Redwood City, until, underneath a concrete overpass, the radio began pulling in static and I realized that I might die at this speed. I slowed down. At seventy drizzle wandered in the windows again. At