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repress me.”
    I made a deal with the owner of Big Apple Comedy Club: For each ticket I sold, I would get a cut of the price and Mikey would get stage time. I started barking on Saturday and Sunday afternoons. At the same time, Mikey was barking for shows at other clubs. We started doubling his weekend spots.
    “Let me run a few shows a week,” I told the club owner. “Give me the nights you aren’t filling up. I’ll sell every seat in the club.”
    I started approaching other clubs. “Let me run your Friday night early show . . . Let me run your Sunday night show . . . Let me run all three of your Saturday shows.”
    Within six months, I was able to quit my office job, which my father’s friend had given me. By then, I was running three shows a night—twenty-one shows a week at clubs all over the city. Mikey was performing in all of them. I traded, too: I would book a comedian who ran another show if he would book Mikey on one of his shows.
    Within a couple of years, Mikey could hold his own at Caroline’s, at Gotham, at Comic Strip Live. He could work a crowd with perfect reflexes. His size became his niche, and he took a stage name: Big Mike. And then came a starring role in a potato chip commercial. A brief appearance on HBO. A less brief appearance on Comedy Central. The Montreal Comedy Festival. He quit bartending. He passed his audition at the Comedy Cellar. And gradually, the clubs I was booking started paying him the way they were paying comedians who had been in the circuit for ten years. Colleges started booking him. Corporate parties. Even a few casinos. He bought a used car for all the road work. He was making it as a comedian.
    Two years had passed since I’d seen my father. He had long since stopped calling, but my mother still tried to run interventions.
    “He misses you,” she would call to say.
    “He can let me know when he’s ready to change.”
    “People don’t change, sweetie. You’re asking too much.”
    And then a third year passed. Three whole years I withheld myself from him.
    Until two weeks before my twenty-sixth birthday, when he called me and I answered.
    “Come home,” he said. He sounded older than I remembered. “Won’t you please come home?”
    My father died on my twenty-sixth birthday in the parking lot of Morgan Rye’s Steak House. It was June. The sun had only just begun to set. I’ll never forget how the sky was bleeding—messy red-pink smears across the wide blue face of twilight.
    Nearby, an old woman stood caged in a walker. A child holding a shiny balloon asked, “What’s more important, the clouds or the trees?” Overhead, an airplane moaned in exertion. A woman yelled, “Dang it! I forgot my doggie bag!” And the last sound that came from my father was a sigh. It sounded like other sighs—the one he’d released after finishing his steak, the one he’d always heaved upon sitting in his armchair, his first-sip-of-scotch sigh, his that’s-some-good-jazz sigh. Often, when I think of that night, I remember my father, sighing.

CHAPTER SEVEN
    Three weeks after the funeral, just before I headed back to New York, my mother told me that my father had left me in charge of his will. “We all know I’m no good with that stuff. You, on the other hand . . .”
    “This makes no sense,” I said. “I suck at finances.”
    “You do not. You’re a whiz with organization. Practical matters.”
    “I don’t feel like dealing with practical matters.”
    “I know,” my mother said. “I don’t want to do anything. I want to crawl into a hole.”
    So did I. I wanted to lie in a wooden box and be lowered into a hole. In between my sleepless nights, I was filling my days with food. Already, my pants were leaving indentations on my waist, the sides of my bras were bulging, and my cheeks looked vaguely inflated. Hunger felt so much like panic, and fullness like despair.
    I did not make an appointment with Saul Weiss, the fiduciary of my father’s will. Instead