big mystery about that. Gran and Mom, they were
always tragic and secretive when I asked them about him. I had lots of stories
to explain his absence: ran off with another woman, thrown in jail for running
guns, murdered in a bar fight. I used to be a bit of a celeb at school -- lots
of kids didn't have dads around, but they all knew where their fathers were. We
could always kill an afternoon making up his who and where and why. Even the
teachers got into it, getting all apologetic when we had to do a genealogy
project. I found out the truth, finally, when I was nineteen. Just looked it up
online. It never occurred to me that my mom would be that secretive about
something that was so easy to find out, so I never bothered."

"So, what happened to him?"

"Oh, you know. He and mom split when I was a kid. He moved back in with his
folks in a little town in the Thousand Islands, near Ottawa. Four or five years
later, he got a job planting trees for a summer up north, and he drowned
swimming in a lake during a party. By the time I found out about him, his folks
were dead, too."

"Did you tell your friends about him, once you found out?"

"Oh, by then I'd lost touch with most of them. After elementary school, we moved
across town, to a condo my grandmother retired into on the lakeshore, out in the
suburbs. In high school, I didn't really chum around much, so there wasn't
anyone to talk to. I did tell my Gran though, asked her why it was such a big
secret, and she said it wasn't, she said she'd told me years before, but she
hadn't. I think that she and Mom just decided to wait until I was older before
telling me, and then after my mom died, she just forgot that she hadn't told me.
We got into a big fight over that."

"That's a weird story, dude. So, do you think of yourself as an orphan?"

Art rolls over on his side, face inches from hers, and snorts a laugh. "God,
that's so -- *Dickensian*. No one ever asked me that before. I don't think so.
You can't really be an adult and be an orphan -- you're just someone with dead
parents. And I didn't find out about my dad until I was older, so I always
figured that he was alive and well somewhere. What about your folks?"

Linda rolls over on her side, too, her robe slipping off her lower breast. Art
is aroused by it, but not crazily so -- somewhere in telling his story, he's
figured out that sex is a foregone conclusion, and now they're just getting
through some nice foreplay. He sm