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(with the same old Speed Checked by Radar sign—as I child I believed planes flew overhead, that as long as there wasn’t a plane overhead, you could speed).
    A modest ranch of dour color with a finicky dicondra lawn, this house is worth, ironically, half a million dollars now just because it’s in San Marino. It was Dorinne’s house originally. Over the years I persisted in thinking of it as hers, my father as a kind of lodger there. Once she died several years ago he decided to stay—it was near the Y, he reasoned, so he could swim and use the weight room. Actually, he swims at the Valley Hunt Club—the pool at the Y, he says, is not very clean, not very nice , my father’s most serviceable word. The real reason Dad stayed in Dorinne’s house, I believe, is that moving frightened him. Moving houses, that is; offices are different. In fact, he’s acquired a taste for moving offices, studying the classifieds for a deal, the smallest, cheapest office possible. But moving houses? He hasn’t had much practice: he moved straight from his mother’s house to the one he and my mother built, then, more than twenty years later, on to Dorinne’s.
    I ring the doorbell. I don’t have a key and never have had one, even during my brief uncomfortable stays here (the term ‘stay of execution’ comes to mind), when I was a teen.
    No answer. I fight back ivy and shrubs to peer in his windows. No sign of Dad, he must be at his office. Probably walked there, something he wouldn’t dream of doing before the cataract. I get back in my car and drive the route my father would walk and sure enough, there he is on the west side of Garfield, in navy blue canvas tennis shoes and a business suit.
    I roll down the window. “Dad!” I call. I honk. “Dad! DAD! DAD!”
    No choice but to tail him to his office. His stride is that of a diligent schoolboy’s—he actually looks right and left at every driveway—and I wonder, as I always do, what he thinks about. Death? He does seem unusually concerned about it—all the letters he’s sent Corb and me in the last year, for example, about his own death someday. “I have a living will (copy enclosed), so when the time comes, pull the plug.” “A salesman came in here the other day to try and sell me death taxes. I said I have them already, thank you very much.” “As for arrangements, do what you want, but no funerals!” I’ve always found this amusing, as if he anticipated having several. He’s a stickler on the point of funerals. “They’re a waste of money and a lot of people you don’t even know show up.” If other people have difficulty discussing old age, terminal illness and death, it’s the one subject my father can be open about. “I want to be cremated and, please, no fancy containers for the ashes. A box will do. Frankly, I don’t even care if you save them, you can throw them away for all I care, but I suppose you need to put something under the marker.” It’s the details of death he can discuss, the “arrangements”—estate taxes, wills, burial plots, headstones, letters of condolence—not the meaning of death or the emotional implications.
    Finally I catch up to him, heading up the stairs to his office.
    â€œDad? Dad!”
    â€œOh—what?” He has such a bright, happy, glazed expression, dewy-eyed. He can’t really be thinking about death, estate taxes, can he? “Theo!”
    â€œDad, I’ve been driving after you for blocks hollering. Didn’t you hear me?” I find myself talking loudly in case he is hard of hearing.
    â€œNo, no. I didn’t. What is it, is something wrong?” he says.
    â€œNothing’s wrong, Dad.” Nothing more wrong than it was the other day when I saw him, that is—failed marriage, no place to live, about to embark on an adulterous relationship, my