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floor beside the phone, covered with ink doodlings of trees and plants that
looked like part of a child's book of fairy tales. Jackson was a good artist. I
stood again. A half-drunk cup of coffee on the floor by the rumpled bed made me
think for a moment of Ms. Cassaday and her desk full of cups.
    I heard Melissa and Diane bang back inside,
their voices becoming loud and clear again. In a moment Melissa would come
thunking back up the stairs, and I sure as hell didn't want her to catch me in
there.
    But in the corner of the room near the window,
I noticed the bagpipes. They were set down carefully on a chair; the case with
indented felt compartments that usually held its pieces lay open underneath.
With its leathery stomachlike
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    bag and jangle of tubes it looked like a
skeleton of some huge prehistoric spider. I wanted to hold it. I lifted the
contraption off the chair, and the pipes clicked together noisily. I was trying
to figure out how to manage its awkwardness, when my slow brain finally
registered what it had just seen outside of Jackson's window.
    There were no trees to block my vision; there
was a clear view of Crow Valley, the several miles of flat, grassy acreage
behind our planned neighborhood. From where I stood, I saw Little Cranberry Farm
and Osprey Inn, a bed and breakfast that competed with Mom's. I could see part
of the Horseshoe Highway, the main inner island road that connected with
Deception Loop, the main outer road.
    All of this I would have expected to see. What
I didn't expect to see, with such sharp clarity, was the faux Tudor D'Angelo
home. From Jackson's second-story window the adjacent airstrip was a long gash
in the land. The driveway was nearly as long and certainly roomy enough for the
blue Ford Taurus parked there.
    I wondered what Dad's car was doing at the
D'Angelo house.
    I stood at the window, my mind helpfully
supplying the vision of Mrs. D'Angelo the day she'd come into True You, a visit
I'd forgotten about since. I remembered her cool hand stretched out, her voice
like a melted caramel: "I
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    can't believe meeting you like this. I think
your father is wonderful."
    But, God, it wasn't like he was the only one
around who drove that kind of car. It was stupid to think it was his, and why
would it be? My morning with him had gotten me off balance, was all.
    Still, I had a feeling the car was my father's.
Even though I couldn't see the flat Christmas tree hanging from the rearview
mirror, the one that stank worse than any natural car-smell could. Even though I
couldn't see the metal box of Altoids Dad always kept in the half-open ashtray
or the dent in the right passenger door, from when I accidentally ran into a
shopping cart in the Johnny's Market parking lot the day after I got my license.
It was one of those knowings you have with people who you're close to-- the way
you can tell their car is about to come down the street, or that they are on the
other end of the phone you haven't yet picked up. The way you might know their
blue knit hat among a hundred others just the same. I'm sure if you asked that
prune Cora Lee at the Theosophical Society, she'd have something to say about
it, this knowing. Something laughable, no doubt, about energy and crap that
would make you forget what you knew was true.
    "Jordan!"
    Melissa stood in the doorway of Jackson's room,
holding Boog in her arms. Poor old Boog.
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    If the Beenes didn't think to carry him around,
he'd probably never move from the rectangle of linoleum in front of his food
dish. He was round and fat as a bratwurst and about as smart as one,
too.
    "What are you doing in here?" Melissa shrieked.
Boog looked alarmed too.
    "I was just going to the bathroom, and then I
saw ... I thought I saw my father's car," I said. I hooked my thumb at the
window.
    "Oh, right. And that's why you're
holding my psycho brother's bagpipes. Right. I get it. Why you are here in his room." Room, said like it