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a generous comment to make about your own daddy.”
    “It’s not, but it’s hard to feel charitable to someone who quits the game and leaves you on your own at ten years old.”
    “I’m guessing if he could’ve found another way, he would’ve. Not everyone is made of the sternest stuff.”
    “No.”
    “So what happened to him?”
    There was the question. He saw his father again, holding a bottle of whiskey to his chest as if it might somehow save him. The snow mounting on the tombstones, the man as cold outside of her grave as she was in it.
    “He had a sailboat. We used to go out on the Great South Bay during the summers. One morning, about a month after the murder, we were expecting another blizzard. I got ready to go to the cemetery as always, but instead he drove down to the marina. He started to dig his boat out of the ice with an ax. The bay itself wasn’t frozen, just the edges of the channel where the boats were docked. People drove by and called to him but he ignored everyone. He didn’t say a word to me. I said nothing either. When he got too tired, he looked at me like he might begin crying again, so I took over chopping the ice. Eventually the boat got loose. He left me on the dock. Climbed on board and took it out of the bay and toward the ocean channels. I lost sight of him fast. The storm hit maybe an hour later. I hitchhiked back to the house.”
    Lila’s lips drew together, bloodless.
    Chase said, “You’re not liking him so much anymore, are you.”
    “I just wish he’d found another way. One where you weren’t dragged in so deep.”
    “The wreckage washed up on Fire Island that night. His body was never found. Probably threw himself overboard as soon as he was far enough from shore that the tide wouldn’t take him back in. Has a romantic kind of quality to it, I think. Going out like Shelley and Hart Crane.”
    “I don’t know who they are.”
    “It doesn’t matter.”
    “He didn’t say anything at all to you before he sailed off?” she asked, her fingers tangled in his chest hair.
    Chase thought, I shouldn’t be talking about this. I should’ve kept it under control. We ought to be laughing, rolling over each other, getting ready for another bout. I’m doing her a disservice.
    “No,” Chase told her.
    “Didn’t have the heart to kill himself right in front of you, so he just slipped away.” She looked into his eyes, figuring him out a little more now. “He thought he was doing a kindness to you, but that was the worst part, wasn’t it.”
    “I don’t know.”
    “You know it really wasn’t his fault. There’s no shame in having a nervous breakdown ’cause of such misery. He loved your mama so much, some people can’t go on brokenhearted like that.”
    Saying nothing because there was nothing to say, Chase drew Lila to him and kissed her. The solidity of her body on his connected him not only to the world but somehow also to himself. What had been kept frozen in the cold spot for so long was beginning to warm and loosen. He had always thought of his father as fragile, perhaps even cowardly, but now he saw the man in a different way. A new perspective, thanks to Lila.
    “So how’d you wind up with Jonah?” she asked.
    “My old man wasn’t considered legally dead yet so the house and bank accounts were all tied up in court. I had no relatives I knew of and was sent to live with a foster family. A rich, sweet, older couple, the kind of folks whose favorite game is reading random quotes from the Bible and seeing who can guess the chapter and verse. They had a couple kids of their own and had taken in another six or seven to care for. All different colors and nationalities. Half with prosthetics of some kind. One girl with her face badly disfigured with burns. All of us in a huge home on the North Shore of Long Island.”
    “And you were eyeing the silverware.”
    Even now, she got him grinning. “I wasn’t with the family long. After only about a month Jonah