Rides a Stranger Read Online Free PDF Page B

dishwasher. I stood in the doorway and watched for a few moments. I knew she knew I was there, but she didn’t look up from her work.
    “Mom?” I said.
    “Yeah?”
    “What do you think of all that?” I asked.
    I didn’t think she was going to answer me. She kept cleaning. But then she stopped what she was doing and said, “I don’t put much stock in it.”
    “Did you ever know Dad wanted to write something?” I asked.
    “Your father wanted to do a lot of things,” she said. “He had a lot of dreams. He wanted to run his own business, and he wanted to retire to Florida, and he wanted us to take a trip to Europe. He did none of it. Your father was a dreamer but not a doer. There’s a big difference there.”
    “That sounds depressing.”
    “Be glad you didn’t get those qualities from him,” she said. “You got an advanced degree. You have a good career.”
    “Dad had a career,” I said.
    “Dad had a job. That’s it. He hated it, and it made him miserable.”
    “So maybe he really wanted to be a writer. Maybe he tried it …”
    I stopped in mid-sentence as something occurred to me.
    Mom didn’t notice. She dried her hands on a red towel and turned off the light over the sink. When she turned around, she said, “What’s wrong with you?”
    “What year did Hyland say that book was published?” I asked. “The one Lou Caledonia thinks Dad wrote? Do you remember?”
    Mom’s forehead creased, but I knew she remembered.
    “What’s the year?” I asked.
    “1972,” she said.
    “1972. That’s the year I was born,” I said. “He quit writing because I was born.”
    After Mom went to sleep, I tore into the boxes. I wasn’t sure what I was looking for, but I hoped to find something related to all the things I had been talking about with Detective Hyland and Lou Caledonia. What did the used book dealer really want with Dad? Had the old man written a book—a novel—and a rare one at that? Could the book be so rare and valuable that someone would kill for it?
    But then I had to ask myself something else: Did I really care about the book stuff at all? What was I really trying to understand? It was pretty simple, really. If I could get my hands on a copy of that book, then I assumed I would understand something about my dad. Up until that point, I really didn’t understand anything about him. How did he marry my mom? What made him choose the life he chose?
    And his death and the death/murder of Lou Caledonia only raised more questions. Did he really write a novel? And if he did, why did he stop? Was it just because he had a wife and a child and had to make a better, more stable living than writing could provide?
    The boxes provided no answers in terms of the books. I hoped to find manuscripts and rejection letters, book contracts or correspondence with editors and agents. But there was nothing like that in the boxes. In fact, looking at the contents of those boxes, one would think my father didn’t have any literary aspirations at all. I found nothing about books or writing. Nothing like that.
    So what did I find? Pictures. Lots and lots of pictures. And all of these pictures were taken before I was born. Before Dad met and married Mom, I guessed. They revealed that Dad did, indeed, have a life before he was married. My father had few friends when I was growing up—and maintained little in the way of friendships even after I was an adult and he was retired from work. My mother had friends. My father had his books and sports on the television.
    But the pictures in the boxes told a different story. In the pictures Dad lived in a swirl of friends, men and women. He went to parties, to bars, to nightclubs. He spent time at the beach and in the big city. He drank from beer cans and champagne bottles. He wore suits and swim trunks. He had a life, one that I never imagined. He apparently had more of a life than I ever had.
    One woman showed up in more of the pictures than anyone else. She was pretty, very