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apparently run out of gas there in the lot.
    “Must’ve been coming to see you,” the young cop said when Griffin arrived on the scene to identify his father.
    “It’s possible,” Griffin told him.
    “He didn’t mention it, though? Coming to visit?”
    Griffin said no, that it’d been a good six months since he’d seen him and almost as long since they’d spoken on the phone.
    “That normal?”
    He wasn’t sure what this fellow was getting at. Normal for them, or normal for other adult fathers and sons?
    “I mean, you didn’t get along?” the cop said. He seemed less suspicious than saddened to consider the possibility that over time his relationship with his own dad might similarly devolve.
    “We got along fine.”
    “It just seems … I don’t know. What do you make of the fact that he was in the passenger seat?”
    “I have no idea,” Griffin said, though that wasn’t true. The inference to be drawn was inescapable. He’d been in the passenger seat because someone else had been driving. All his life he’d stopped for pretty hitchhikers, a habit that had infuriated Griffin’s mother. “Better me than somebody else,” he always argued, lamely. “The next guy might be a pervert.” (At this she’d roll her eyes. “Yeah, right. The
next
guy.”) The other possible explanation was that he’d talked one of his coeds into making the trip with him. Though he’d retired the year before, the university still allowed him to teach one seminar each fall. More than once he’d let on to Griffin that girls at Christian schools like this one were often interested in exploring a more secular approach to life and love, if this could be done discreetly. Boys their own age offered neither experience nor discretion. It
had
been a woman, possibly a young woman, Griffin learned from the cop, who’d made the anonymous call to the state police about the man slumped over in his car in the rest-stop parking lot.
    It was unconscionable he’d waited so long to dispose of his father’s ashes, Griffin thought as he unpacked, hanging his suit in the closet and placing his shaving kit in the tiny bathroom. He should have made a special trip to the Cape last fall. His father had left a will but no instructions on where he wished to spend eternity. But on the drive back home from the turnpike plaza, Griffin had come to what had seemed an obvious conclusion. His father hadn’t been on his way to see him and Joy, since if he’d meant to pay them an unannounced visit he would’ve gotten off the pike at the previous exit. No, he was headed for the Cape. Griffin advanced that theory to his mother when he called to tell her what had happened. “His suitcase was packed with summer clothes,” he told her. “He had two big tubes of sunblock.”
    She hadn’t answered right away, which made him wonder if she was trying to compose herself. “I could have told him he’d never make it” was all she said before hanging up.
    The B and B had a large wraparound porch, so Griffin brought his satchel full of student papers down and set up shop in a rocking chair in the sun, where he sat trying to remember how that famous Shakespeare sonnet about death went. “Fear no more the heat o’ th’ sun …” was as far as he’d gotten when his cell vibrated, Joy calling him back.
    “I forgot to ask,” she said. “Did Sid get ahold of you?”
    “No,” he said, sitting up straight. Sid was his agent back in L.A., in his late eighties and still a legend in the business, despite his shrinking client list. Griffin sincerely hoped he was calling about a job. Money had been worrying him of late. Joy, who kept the books and wrote the checks, insisted they were fine, but if Laura got engaged, as she’d been warning them might happen soon, maybe even this weekend, there’d be a wedding to pay for, and a quick studio rewrite would be just what the doctor ordered. “When did he call?”
    “Last night. He wanted to know if you’d turned