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tried to insinuate that Cleve shut himself up there with a girlfriend whom he didn’t want to introduce to his father. But Rose had stopped Empera midsentence.
    “That’s the last thing I need to hear,” he had said. “Cleve’s private life is his business and no one else’s. In this house, no one meddles into the affairs of others, and you should follow suit.”
    “It’s true, neither of you meddle into my private life,” Empera, not one to mince words, had responded. “Not out of respect, but because you couldn’t care less.”
    “And she was right,” Rose tells me. “Empera knew everything about me, down to the color of my underwear, and yet I knew little or nothing about her, except that she was Dominican, that she didn’t have her papers, and that she’d entered the United States illegally not once or twice but seventeen times, basically any time she felt like it. I never had the heart to ask her how she had accomplished that feat worthy of The Guinness Book of World Records .”
    After Cleve’s death, Rose began to suffer horribly, not knowing more about his son, not having been closer to him when he had been alive, not having supported him or met his lovers; eventually, he asked Empera about what he had not wanted to hear before.
    “Tell me, Empera,” he asked her. “Did you get to meet that woman who, according to you, visited Cleve secretly?”
    But Empera, who had learned her lesson, wasn’t about to let that door slam in her face twice.
    “What woman, sir?” she responded dryly as she walked toward the kitchen, her sandals snapping loudly.
    On the day the package arrived, Rose spent the rest of the day out of the house doing errands, but he had not stopped thinking about the package he’d left unopened on his son’s bed. When he returned, he had the urge to go up and examine it, but some scruple about meddling in his son’s private matters stopped him. If there was something his son detested it was for anyone to invade his space, so Rose resisted the urge to open the package and went into the kitchen to make a sandwich. But immediately he was hounded by a completely opposite sensation. Would he not be betraying his son by ignoring such a sign? As he downed his sandwich with a glass of lactose-free milk by the fireplace, he began to think that it would not be so absurd or disrespectful to open the package, which perhaps would be the last sign Cleve sent.
    “Alright, Cleve,” he said aloud, “just let me finish eating this and we’ll open it, see what this is about. You want me to do it, right? You’re giving me permission to open your private correspondence? Of course you do; at this point why would you care?”
    The package contained 140 pages of rose-colored stationery of the kind that adolescent girls used for letters. The manuscript was handwritten, in what Rose was fairly certain was feminine script. The pages had writing on both sides, tighter as it went on, as if the author had calculated that she might run out of paper.
    “Well, Cleve,” Rose said, “it seems as if a girl has sent you a very long love letter.”
    The person who had written it wasn’t the one on the return address, a Mrs. Socorro Arias de Salmon, from Staten Island, but a young woman who wanted to remain anonymous and who declared that she’d use the pseudonym María Paz. This María Paz wrote in the first person to confess something to Cleve, referring to him as Mr. Rose. The following dawn, Ian Rose was still awake reading the one hundred forty rose-colored pages in the attic, sitting up on Cleve’s bed under the blanket, still dressed, the two big dogs lying on the floor, and the small one, Skunko, beside him.
    “It’s his thing, that dog,” Ian Rose tells me, “I don’t allow him to go up on my bed, always been very strict about that, but not Cleve. And now without Cleve, his bed has basically become Skunko’s bed, so I didn’t tell him to get down. After all, if there was an intruder, it was