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that?”
    â€œMaybe,” I said. “But all that stuff about ports and loneliness—what was that all about? Some perverse way of… of…?”
    â€œStuck for words, Charlie?”
    â€œLet’s just forget it, okay?” I said. I picked up the check. “Let’s just forget it and blow this joint.”
    â€œDo you have one?”
    â€œVery funny,” I said. “But you know what?”
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œYou’re not that funny,” I said. “You’re weird—I’ll give you that—and—like some of the characters in your books—with a distinctive mean streak. For sure. But you’re not funny.”
    â€œI’ll take that as a compliment,” she said.
    Â 
    A short while later, in the car, Seana fell asleep, her head against the window, a rolled up sweater for a pillow. She snored lightly, her mouth open, and I tried to stay angry at her for making me believe, if only for a moment, that my father was living on borrowed time, but then it occurred to me that maybe he really was, and that when she saw my reaction, she had changed course.
    I wondered, though: What difference did it make if I knew for sure—if he knew for sure—if he and Seana knew for sure, or if none of us knew anything? I tried to imagine what he might do if he did know—if he’d make any changes in the way he lived, and decided he wouldn’t, which was when I realized that the idea of getting rid of the unused parts of his writing life might have come from the knowledge—and fear—that he wouldn’t be here much longer, though a second later this led to the thought that the tag sale might have only been what it was: the kind of thing Max did now and then for no other reason than that he felt like doing it.
    North of Portland, I turned off the main highway—Seana
was awake now, but quiet—and took a detour west toward Naples so we could swing by the place where I’d gone to summer camp as a kid—Camp Kingswood—and where I’d been a counselor the first two summers I was at UMass. I’d been to Maine a bunch of times in the years since I’d been a camper and counselor there—Nick and Trish were married in Maine, and the year Nick and I graduated from UMass, we’d gone up there and had a wild few days with a group of friends, eight or ten of us, partying, drinking, and screwing our asses off.
    Now, seeing Camp Kingswood again—leaves gone from the trees, you could see the old bunk houses, and the lake beyond, the lake calm, flat, and steel-gray in the autumn chill—I found myself telling Seana about how, starting with my first summer there, I’d fallen in love, not so much with Maine’s lakes or coastline, but with its trees, the evergreens especially—pine, hemlock, juniper, and, my favorite, Norwegian spruce.
    What I’d loved about Maine, I said, was what I’d come to love about Borneo, even though the two landscapes had hardly anything in common, and that was how thick and deep the forests were, along with my sense that they were still—evergreen and hardwood here, tropical forests there—the way they might have been millions of years ago.
    I talked about the different kinds of mangroves in the coastal regions of Borneo and how their root systems looked like tangles of swollen spider webs, and I talked about peat swamp forests, and how they could burst into flame spontaneously, or be set on fire by people clearing them, and how the fires could rage over hundreds of acres for months at a time and were almost impossible to extinguish because so much of the burning went on below ground, in the deepest layers of the peat. And I talked about forests I’d been to on my most recent visit to Kalimantan—Dipterocarp forests—probably at the same time Seana had been moving in with Max. About every four years—I’d been lucky enough to be there when it