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know you sang so well.”
    I rubbed my eyes. It made no sense. “I don’t sing.”
    “Oh, really?” he said, sweeping crumbs into a pile on the table. Then he wet his thumb and pressed it into the crumbs. And then ate them. I gagged. Orange juice ran from the corners of my mouth, sticky and unpleasant.
    “Moderation,” Prarash advised, holding up two fingers in some sort of spiritual (Vulcan?) gesture. I nodded, just because it was easier. He was about to offer additional wisdom, but I turned and woozed outside, careful not to let the screen door slam.
    My father was in the backyard, half-under an old Volkswagen bus, fixing the brakes or the transmission or possibly retrofitting it to run on chocolate pudding.
    “Hey, Dad.”
    He stood up, wiping his hands on a rag, and peered at me through greasy specs. He was small and wiry, hair cut short, and wearing thick glasses. Still, he was imposing. Thick wrists and calves. A man who spent a lot of time building things. When he was standing next to my nineteen-foot mother, though, it was a different story.
    “You weren’t driving, were you?”
    I gulped. “Huh?”
    He scrunched up his nose, like a rabbit, and then rubbed it with a screwdriver. “Last night. On the way home. When you decided to have whatever it was you had.”
    I sighed and sat on his workbench and picked up a wrench, slapping my thigh with it. Chopper waddled across the yard and laid his jowls on my bare foot, which was instantly wet with drool.
    “Well?”
    I didn’t want to tell him. Anything. A number of lies popped into my head and a tiny Miles sat on my shoulder and made suggestions about which were best. I pictured myself, in Aruba, on a beach, rubbing 40 SPF oil on Ellen’s feet. Then I pictured myself, three hundred pounds later, becoming Keith, and no one, for any reason, letting me touch their feet, ever.
    “I’m sorry, Dad,” I finally said, which was true. I said, “I don’t know what happened,” which was also true.
    He tapped my chest with a spark plug. “You’re almost eighteen, Stan. I am well aware that nothing your mother or I say is going to keep you from doing some things we’d rather you didn’t. Still, you need to promise me no driving. . . .”
    “But I don’t even have my
license.
”
    He nodded. “What I’m talking about, Stan, of which you are perfectly well aware, is getting into a
vehicle
as a
passenger
when others, in particular the
driver,
have been drinking.”
    “I wasn’t,” I lied, which caused my stomach to knot. I tried to stop, but couldn’t. “Really. I was on my bike.”
    He wiped his hands on his shorts. There were tools and metal scraps, templates, and engine parts all over the lawn. He pursed his lips, like he always did when he was trying to decide something.
    “Really,” I said again, like a parrot. A liar parrot. I saw myself with green feathers and a huge hooked beak, bobbing on Bluebeard’s shoulder.
    Is this where the gold’s buried, bird?
    Yeah, caw, that’s where it is, yeah.
    Are you sure.
    Really, caw. Really.
    Then I envisioned an empty hole and an apple shoved in my beak and angry pirates standing around a spit on which a certain parrot roasted.
    “Well, riding your bike inebriated is also very dumb,” my father said, scratching his nose, which now had axle grease on it, “but I suppose you get a pass on that.
This
time.”
    “Mom won’t forget it,” I said.
    “You let me handle your mother,” he said, stroking his beard, a long graying flag that would have made Fidel Castro weep with jealousy. I still had not one chin hair. None. Zip. It didn’t seem fair. Also, as far as I could tell, he had never, in any situation,
handled
my mother. No one had. At least not without a stepladder.
    “Good luck,” I said.
    He frowned. There was a loud noise in the kitchen, something breaking, and then prolonged humming.
    “Dad, why is Prarash always here, anyway? Can there be a new rule or something? Where he’s not here so much?