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     "Mr. Kadinska, the weather being as bad as it is, I'd like to get started back to Scranton as soon as possible. I have to catch a commuter flight out of there early in the morning."
     "Of course, yes," said Kadinska, with an unmistakable note of disappointment.
     Now, he seemed to be a lonely little man who had hoped only for some friendly conversation.
     While the lawyer opened a file drawer on his desk and searched for something, Joey noticed that one of the crookedly hung diplomas was from Harvard Law. That was a wildly unlikely alma mater for a small-town, coal-country lawyer.
     Not all the shelves were filled with law books, either. Many were volumes of philosophy. Plato. Socrates. Aristotle. Kant. Augustine. Kierkegaarde. Bentham. Santayana. Schopenhauer. Empedocles, Heidegger, Hobbes, and Francis Bacon.
     Perhaps Henry Kadinska wasn't comfortable being a small-town lawyer but was simply long resigned to it, trapped first in the orbit of his father and then by the gravity of habit.
     Sometimes, especially in a whiskey haze, it was easy for Joey to forget that he himself wasn't the only person in the world whose dearest dreams had come to nothing.
     "Your father's last will and testament," said Kadinska as he opened a file folder on his desk.
     "A reading of the will?" Joey asked. "I think P.J. should be here for that, not me."
     "On the contrary. The will has nothing to do with P.J. Your father left everything to you."
     A sickening pang of guilt quivered through Joey. "Why would he do that?"
     "You're his son. Why wouldn't he?"
     Joey made a point of meeting the attorney's eyes. On this one day, even if never again, he wanted to be honest about these matters, to conduct himself with a dignity of which his father would have approved.
     "We both know the hard answer to that, Mr. Kadinska. I broke his heart. Broke my mother's heart too. More than two years she withered from the cancer, but I never came. Never held her hand, never consoled my dad. Never saw him once in the last twenty years of his life. I called maybe six or eight times, no more than that. Half the time he didn't know how to reach me, because I didn't always give him my address or phone number. And when he did have my number, I always kept an answering machine switched on so I wouldn't have to pick up. I was a rotten son, Mr. Kadinska. I'm a drunk, a selfish shit, and a loser, and I don't deserve any inheritance, no matter how little it is."
     Henry Kadinska appeared to be pained to hear any man criticize himself so mercilessly. "You're not drunk now, Joey. And the man I see before me isn't bad in his heart."
     "I'll be drunk by tonight, sir, I assure you," Joey said quietly. "And if you can't see me the way I described myself, then you're a lousy judge of character. You don't know me at all - and you should count that as a blessing."
     Kadinska put his pipe in the glass ashtray again. "Well, your father was a forgiving man. He wanted everything to go to you."
     Getting to his feet, Joey said, "No. I can't take it. I don't want it." He started toward the door to the outer room.
     "Wait, please," said the lawyer.
     Joey stopped and turned to him. "The weather's miserable, and I've got a long drive out of these mountains to Scranton."
     Still slumped in his chair, picking up his pipe again, Henry Kadinska said, "Where do you live, Joey?"
     "You know. Las Vegas. That's where you got hold of me."
     "I mean, where do you live in Las Vegas?"
     "Why?"
     "I'm a lawyer. I've spent my life asking questions, and it's hard to change this late in the game. Indulge me."
     "I live in a trailer park."
     "One of those upscale parks with a community swimming pool and tennis courts?"
     "Old trailers," Joey said bluntly. "Mostly real old."
     "No