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the last round had always been his and the next was always someone else’s.
    “I got our first round,” I said.
    “And I bought the one you just finished,” PaJohn chimed in.
    “So . . .” I said.
    “Okay. Okay. Jeez, you guys act like I’m some kinda cheapskate.” He handed PaJohn a twenty. “I’ll buy, but you gotta get ’em.”
    PaJohn had the outside seat on the booth. “Be right back. What’s yours, Jason?”
    “Nothing. I’m out of here. Time to free my son from the clutches of his tough-love shadow.”
    PaJohn slipped out and headed to the bar. Roger put a hand on my forearm. He spoke softly and urgently.
    “This guy Von Becker looked people in the eye, lied to them, and took their money. You think his kid there really wants to give it back? Three billion is not like finding some guy’s wallet in the back of a cab and mailing him the ID and credit cards.”
    “What about the cash?”
    “Expenses.” He grinned. “Stamps and shit.”
    “Envelope.”
    He nodded in agreement and raised his empty glass. “And, I got overhead.”

| 4 |
    T he Kid was finally asleep. There were nights when he shut down at eight o’clock with no more resistance than a halfhearted breathy moan, and there were nights when he exploded with fears, tantrums, and furious stimming. Remaining flexible, creative, and patient helped. A little. After eight months or so of single parenthood, I was becoming almost sympathetic of my ex-wife’s failure to cope.
    I had mummy-wrapped my son in a spare sheet—the pressure helped him relax—and read to him from the only nontechnical car book that he allowed,
The Elephant Who Liked to Smash Small Cars
. While he did not often laugh—in fact, he was usually startled and frightened by others’ laughter—he did giggle. It sounded like squirrels fighting, but it was the free expression of pure delight, for him and for me. So, though I could repeat all the words of the book by memory—and after the initial reading, so could he—I would have read it every night, if he had let me.
    Most nights it was car books.
The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Extraordinary Automobiles
;
The A to Z of Cars
;
The Car: A History of the Automobile
;
Muscle Cars, Detroit Rising
;
Ford: The Car and the Dynasty
;
How Cars Work
;
Classic Cars
;
Antique Cars
;
Detroit’s 50 Biggest Losers
. Some nights I read to him; other nights he read. He didn’t read, of course. He memorized. When he read aloud, he mimicked the delivery of whoever had first read the page to him. Not the exact voice, but a simulacrum, with identical pace, inflection, and tone. Sometimes it was the half-Cajun, half-southern-syrup drawl of his grandmother; other times the sound of his mother, his uncle, my father, his babysitter, or his teacher at school. And sometimes it sounded like me.
    I wrote a to-do list for Carolina, our Costa Rican part-time housekeeper, mentioning for the umpteenth time that his SpongeBob sheets should not be bleached because that made the colors fade, and my son liked his colors always to be the same. Exactly the same. Her English, however, was no better than my Spanish—what little I had was mostly expletives, learned in prison, or references to food and drink, the only trophy from a deep-sea fishing trip out of Cabo before I was married.
    My laptop was open, recharging on the table while softly playing the
Ladies and Gentlemen . . . the Grateful Dead
live album. The twenty-two-minute jam on “Lovelight” deserved to be blasted from my KEF speakers in the other room, but I had deferred that bit of self-indulgence until my son went away to college.
    I swung the screen around and typed a quick search for the Spanish word for bleach.
Lejía.
The pronunciation guide was no help.
Quitar color. Blanquear.
I tried out
“No quitar color, por favor”
until it flowed as easily as my best Spanish sentence,
“Una más cerveza, por favor.”
    Then I remembered—he would need T-shirts for camp. I felt like I was