My son-in-law told me at my grandson’s third birthday party, “Gage doesn’t need a grandpa who looks like a mugshot,” and for eight months after that I wasn’t allowed near the boy. So when a whole store lot watched me stomp on the back door of his locked SUV, all of them thought they knew exactly what I was.
Cassidy hasn’t answered my calls since March.
Pranav answered one of them. He said if I came by their house again he’d have me trespassed.
So I didn’t go by. I mailed Gage a card every month with a five-dollar bill in it, and I still don’t know if he ever got one.
It was the last Saturday in August, a hundred and three degrees, and I’d ridden over to the big-box store off Loop 289 in Lubbock for zip ties and a fan belt for my neighbor’s mower.
I came out the side doors at 2:35 with the bag hooked on two fingers.
Pranav’s gray SUV was three rows over, nosed in by the cart return.
I knew it by the dent in the bumper. He backed it into my mailbox the one Christmas they came over and never mentioned it.
I wasn’t going near it.
I was walking the long way to my bike so I wouldn’t have to pass it.
Then something tapped the inside of the back glass.
A small palm, flat on the tint, sliding down.
The engine was off. Every window was shut tight.
I pulled the handle. Locked. I tried the other three.
I looked at the store doors. Nobody.
I put my boot into the back door as hard as I could.
The SUV rocked on its tires and the alarm went off.
A woman by the cart return said, “HEY. What is wrong with you?”
I kicked it again.
That tint is the limo-dark kind, and from where she stood she couldn’t see a thing behind it.
“He’s breaking into that car,” some guy said. “Somebody call the cops.”
“I’m calling,” the woman said. She was holding her phone out at me like a flashlight.
A teenage cashier wearing a blue store vest stopped with a line of carts and lifted her phone too.
I went for the window next, low in the corner. A guy at the shop told me once that’s where they give.
It went white in a star.
“Check out his arms,” a man near the curb said. “Look at him. He’s on something.”
“They’re going to shoot him,” another woman said, and she said it like she meant to stay and watch.
A man in pressed khakis and a polo came at me from the side and grabbed a fistful of my vest.
“BACK OFF THAT CAR, man.”
I twisted loose. I gave him nothing.
I didn’t have the air.
Two more kicks. My knee went hot on the second.
The glass sagged in one sheet and then fell apart.
Heat came out of that car like I’d opened an oven.
I reached over the broken edge, felt for the button on the door, pulled it up, and yanked.
The lot went quiet except for the alarm.
Gage was in his car seat with the straps still buckled.
His hair was soaked flat to his head. His face was red and blotchy and his mouth hung open.
He wasn’t crying anymore.
That was the part that scared me.
My fingers wouldn’t work the buckle, so I sawed the straps with the little knife on my keychain.
I lifted him clear against me, and he was so hot through his shirt it was like holding a coffee mug.
“THERE’S A LITTLE BOY IN THERE,” the woman said into her phone. “He had a little boy in there.”
She meant me. She thought I’d been the one who left him.
I carried him under the overhang and found the girl with the carts. Her tag said BAILEY.
“Water. Cold. And get your manager. NOW.”
She dropped the carts and ran.
Gage’s eyes came open halfway. He looked at my beard, then at the patch on my chest.
“Pop,” he said.
Eight months, and he knew me.
I was pouring the last of somebody’s bottled water down the back of his neck when the side doors slid open and Pranav came out pushing a cart with a flat-screen box in it.
He saw his SUV first. Then the glass. Then me.
“WHAT DID YOU DO TO MY CAR?”
He hadn’t looked at Gage yet.
“Your son was in it,” I said.
“I was gone ten minutes,” he said. “TEN MINUTES, Leonardo. You’re not supposed to be within a hundred feet of him.”
The man in the polo turned around and looked at him.
The woman lowered her phone.
A patrol car pulled in sideways behind the SUV with its lights going. The officer got out with her hand on her belt. Her nameplate said ORTIZ.
“Sir,” she said to me. “Set the child down and step back.”
“He’s the one with the order,” Pranav said, pointing. “Ask him. He’s not allowed near my son.”
I didn’t set Gage down.
Bailey came back across the lot carrying a gallon jug, the manager behind her, and she didn’t give me the water first.
She held her phone out to the officer.
“I saw when he parked,” she said. “I was on the carts. It was 1:48.”
The clock on her screen said 2:41.
1:48
Ortiz took the phone in the hand that wasn’t on her belt.
It was a picture, not a video. Pranav’s gray SUV sat crooked across the mouth of the cart return, dented bumper and all. Pranav was in it too, halfway to the side doors, phone at his ear, keys hooked on one finger.
He was by himself. Nobody small was walking next to him.
“He parked in my lane,” Bailey said. “I asked him to move so I could get the carts through, and he told me to go around. So I took a picture of his plate for my manager.”
“You took a picture of his plate,” Ortiz said.
“He was rude. I keep a folder.”
Ortiz swiped up on the photo, and the little box with the time came up. 1:48 PM.
She looked at that for a while. Then she looked at Pranav.
“Her phone’s wrong,” Pranav said.
“It’s a phone,” Bailey said. “That’s the one thing it’s never wrong about.”
The manager stood behind her sweating through his tie, holding the gallon she’d handed him like it might go off. I said, “Open it,” and he did. I poured it over Gage’s head a little at a time, cupping it with my hand so it wouldn’t go up his nose.
He made a sound like a kitten complaining about the service.
I’ll take a sound.
An ambulance came in off the access road with its lights going and no siren. The shorter medic, a woman with her hair in a braid, held her arms out.
“I’ve got him,” she said. “You can let go, sir.”
My arms didn’t want to. She waited. I let go.
His right hand was balled up tight against his chest. When she laid him on the stretcher, something folded and wet dropped out of it onto the asphalt. Paper, gone soft as a tissue. The other medic stepped right on it.
“Back up, sir. Give us room.”
I picked it up so nobody would step on it again, shoved it in my vest pocket, and backed up.
Gage turned his head on the little pillow and found me.
“Pop,” he said, and put his hand out.
“You Grandpa?” the medic said.
“He’s nobody,” Pranav said. “I’m his father.”
He climbed into the back of the ambulance and left his flat-screen sitting in its cart by the curb. Before they shut the doors, he leaned out.
“Officer. Ask him about his record.”
The patch
Ortiz told me to turn around and put my hands behind my back, and I did, because she said it nicely and I’d just broken a car.
“You’re not under arrest,” she said. “You’re being detained while I figure out who’s who.”
“I can tell you who’s who.”
“Everybody in this lot can tell me who’s who,” she said, and put me in the back.
The back of a patrol car smells like a gym bag somebody left in a stock tank. The seat was hard plastic and hot enough to fry an egg on. She left the air on low and went to talk to the crowd, and I sat there with my wrists behind me and my knee filling up my jeans like bread dough.
With your hands cuffed, about the only thing you can look at is your own chest.
The patch is a bulldog in a little round helmet, from the first club I ever rode with. It’s sewn on crooked, tipped maybe ten degrees to the left, in green thread.
Cassidy did that when she was nine.
That winter I threw out my old vest because the leather had split down the back, and I didn’t bother cutting the patch off first. The next morning it was on the kitchen table, sewn onto my new vest with forty stitches where ten would have done. She’d gone through the trash for it in her pajamas. Her mother was in Amarillo by then with a man who sold bass boats, so it was just us.
“You fix everything else,” Cassidy said. “So I fixed that.”
I’ve had three vests since. I moved it to every one of them, crooked.
Last December, three days after Christmas, I wore it to Gage’s third birthday because it was the nicest thing I owned. Pranav’s house. Pranav’s coworkers. Pranav’s father, Rohit, in a sweater at the end of the table. I gave Gage a yellow dump truck big enough to sit in, and he sat in it.
Pranav was cutting the cake when he said it. He looked at me over the knife and said it to the room like a toast, and a couple of his work friends laughed.
Rohit looked at the cake.
“I’m kidding,” Pranav said. “Mostly. I just want what’s safe for him. That’s all I’ve ever wanted.”
Cassidy looked at the floor. “Dad. Maybe just go.”
So I went. Gage waved from the stairs and said, “Bye, Pop,” like I was running to the store.
The front door of the patrol car opened. Ortiz got in, typed, read something, typed some more.
“There’s no protective order,” she said. “No trespass warning. Nothing on file for you with that family at all.”
“I told you.”
“You’ve got an assault from 1996, though. Slaton.”
In fairness to Pranav, I do have a mugshot. I had more hair in it.
The woman with the phone
“It was a bar on a Friday night,” I said. “I was twenty-three, and he hit my brother first.”
“I didn’t ask,” Ortiz said.
She had me out of the patrol car twenty minutes after she put me in it. She took the cuffs off, and my shoulders made a noise like a screen door.
The crowd had thinned to the ones who wanted to see how it ended. The woman from the cart return was still there with her phone up, only now she was talking into it.
“So this is him,” she said. “This is the guy. They’re letting him go, you guys.”
“Ma’am,” Ortiz said.
“I’m allowed. It’s a public parking lot.”
I walked over. My knee made it take longer than I wanted, which was probably good for both of us.
“You can turn that off now,” I said.
“Sixteen hundred people are watching you right now.” She turned the screen so I could see the little hearts floating up the side. “Say hi.”
“There was a little boy in that car.”
“I KNOW. I’m the one who said it.” She turned the phone back to her own face. “Now he’s trying to intimidate me.”
I wanted to take that phone and put it in the cart return with the rest of the carts. I put my hands in my vest pockets instead. My right hand closed on the wet paper, and I left it there.
The man in the polo came over next. He’d got hold of himself, and his business voice was back.
“For what it’s worth,” he said, “I’d have done the same as you. If I’d known. But you can’t blame people. A guy like you, kicking in a car.”
“A guy like me.”
“You know what I mean.”
I did. Pranav meant the same thing in December, and he had cake.
Bailey came across with her vest unzipped and her face red from running.
“I sent it to her,” she said, meaning Ortiz. “I can send it to you.”
“Send it to me.”
I said my number, and she typed it with both thumbs faster than I could say it.
“Your knee’s doing something,” she said.
“It does that.”
“You shouldn’t ride on it.”
“I shouldn’t do a lot of things. I’ve got a record.”
She almost laughed. Then she looked at the SUV with its back window gone and didn’t.
Ortiz had my license on the hood of her car and was writing on a pad. She tore off a card with her name and a number on it.
“Here’s how this goes,” she said. “I write down what everybody saw. The girl’s picture goes in. Your son-in-law says he wants to press charges on the window, so that goes in too.”
“He wants me to pay for his window.”
“He wants a lot of things. I write them all down.” She put the card in my hand and my license on top of it.
“Where’d they take him?”
“Go home and put ice on that knee,” Ortiz said. “And sir. Do not go to that hospital.”
Curtain four
I went to that hospital.
The ambulances from that side of town take kids to one ER, and I’d been there twice with Cassidy. Once for a wrist off the monkey bars, once for a bead she put up her nose to see if it would come out the other side. It didn’t. It came out the same side, in a doctor’s tweezers, and she was furious about it.
I rode there with my left leg stuck out stiff like a kickstand. Every light was red. I sat at every one of them in a hundred and three degrees with my knee beating like a second heart.
The waiting room was cold enough to hang meat in. Pranav was in the chairs by the window with his car keys still in his fist. Rohit was beside him, and must have driven over fast, because he had house slippers on.
Pranav saw me and stood up.
“Are you kidding me? Are you KIDDING me? Dad. This is him.”
Rohit is a small, neat man who sells insurance, and I’ve never heard him raise his voice. He looked at the vest, then the patch, then the knee.
“Is he all right?” I said. “Gage.”
“He’s FINE,” Pranav said. “No thanks to you.”
“Pranav,” Rohit said, meaning sit down. Pranav didn’t.
The doors slid open behind me and Cassidy came in.
She was still in her scrubs from the dentist’s office, the blue ones with little cartoon teeth on them, and her hair was falling out of its clip. She’d cut it since March. She looked thin in the face.
She saw me first. I saw her see me.
I’d been carrying a picture of this in my head for five months, the one where she sees me across a room and comes straight over. She came halfway. Then Pranav said her name, and she went past me to him like I was a coat rack.
“Where is he? Is he okay?”
“He’s okay, babe. They’re cooling him down.” Pranav had her by both arms. “Listen to me. Your dad followed us.”
“I bought a fan belt,” I said.
“He followed us to the store, Cass. He was waiting in the lot. I ran in for ten minutes to get the TV, and when I came out he’d smashed the back window in with Gage right there. Glass all over him.”
“There wasn’t any glass on him.”
“The cops had him in handcuffs. Ask him. Ask him if he was in handcuffs.”
Cassidy looked at me over Pranav’s shoulder.
“Dad. Were you in handcuffs?”
“For about twenty minutes.”
“Were you following them?”
“No, baby. I was buying a fan belt for the mower next door. I’ve got the receipt.”
I didn’t have the receipt. The bag was lying in that parking lot somewhere.
She shut her eyes. She’s done that since she was four. It means she’s already decided and she’s sorry about it.
“You need to go home,” she said.
“Cass, he was in that car almost an hour. There’s a picture. The girl at the store took it.”
“Please, Dad. Go home.”
A nurse came through the inside doors and said, “Mom? You can come back now.” Cassidy went. Pranav went with her. I went after them as far as the doors, and nobody stopped me, because nobody thought I’d be that stupid.
Curtain four was right there, and it was open. Gage was in a bed too big for him with a wet towel on his head and tape on the back of his little hand where the IV went in. He was awake.
He saw me in the doorway and sat straight up.
“POP. Pop, look, I got a band-aid.”
Cassidy turned around to see who he was talking to.
She reached up and pulled the curtain shut.
Level two
A guard walked me out. He was nice about it, the way you’re nice to a dog that wandered into the wrong yard.
“I wasn’t doing anything,” I said.
“I know, sir. They asked.”
I’d parked the bike on the second level of the garage because it was the only shade in Lubbock. I got there and found out I couldn’t swing my leg over it. I tried twice. On the second try something in my knee made a noise like a knuckle, and I sat down on the concrete curb in front of the bike and stayed there.
My phone buzzed. Bailey. Her picture came through, the SUV and Pranav and 1:48, and a text right behind it.
“this is that ladys video its everywhere. im sorry”
From where that woman stood, you couldn’t see a thing in the back of that SUV. You saw a big man with a gray beard losing his mind on a family car while people screamed at him to stop. Over the top she’d typed CRAZY BIKER BREAKS INTO SUV IN BROAD DAYLIGHT. Forty-one thousand views.
The comments said tweaker. They said meth. One said, “Look at those arms, he’s been in prison.” One said, “That poor family.”
I’ve had these arms fifty-three years. Half the ink on them is my daughter’s name, done in three different decades by three different guys.
That poor family came down the stairwell about ten minutes later. Just Pranav. The guard must have told him where I went, and he’d come two flights down to stand over me with his hands in his pockets.
“You saw it,” he said.
“I saw it.”
“Forty thousand people. My boss sent it to me.” He was smiling a little. “He goes, ‘Isn’t that your car?’ I said yeah, and that’s my father-in-law. You know what he said? He said, ‘Jesus, you poor guy.'”
“Your son was in the car.”
“My son is FINE.” He took a breath and put his nice voice back on, his birthday voice. “I’m filing on the window Monday. Eight hundred dollars, the glass place said. Plus a new car seat, because you cut the straps.”
“I’ll buy the car seat.”
“You’ll buy all of it.” He crouched down so we were eye to eye, which he hadn’t done once in the six years I’ve known him. “And you heard her. That was her in there, not me. She told you to go home.”
I didn’t say anything. I didn’t have anything.
“And stop sending the cards,” he said.
That one got under my ribs.
“First week of every month. Your handwriting on the front like a ransom note. I tear them in half and drop them in the kitchen trash with the five still in, so you know where your money goes.” He stood and brushed off his knees, though they weren’t dirty. “He’s never seen one. He doesn’t know who you are.”
“He said Pop.”
Pranav laughed. Same laugh as the cake.
“He calls the mailman Pop,” he said, and went back up the stairs.
The fire truck
The lights in the garage came on by themselves around seven-thirty. I was still on the curb.
A little girl with her arm in a cast walked past with her mother and asked if I was a pirate. Her mother said, “Don’t look at him, honey,” and walked her faster.
At some point you have to decide whether you’re going to sleep in a parking garage. I decided I’d call somebody with a trailer for the bike and a cab for me. I went in my vest for my phone, and my hand closed on the paper instead.
I’d forgotten it was there. It had dried against my chest and gone stiff, like a paper towel left on a dashboard.
I unfolded it on my good knee.
It was a card. A red fire truck on the front with a spotted dog hanging out the window, tongue out. I knew that card. I’d stood in the card aisle at the grocery store for twenty minutes in July picking it, because the dog on that one looked friendlier than the one on the tow truck.
August’s card.
It had been torn clean in half, top to bottom.
And it had been taped back together. Clear tape, too much of it, crooked, one long strip down the tear and then a row of short ones across it like stitches. Five where one would have done.
I opened it. Under where I’d written Love you buddy, Pop, my five-dollar bill was taped down flat so it couldn’t fall out.
Under that, in blue ink, in handwriting I’d know on a ransom note:
This is Pop. He fixes things.
Under that, in orange crayon, somebody small had drawn a dog. It had a circle on its head and a line under its chin. Like a strap. Like a helmet.
I put my thumb on the green thread on my chest and held it there.
I got up off that curb on the first try.
He’d had it in his fist in that car for fifty-three minutes, and he never let go.
The hallway
The guard by the sliding doors saw me coming and stood up.
“Sir, you can’t come back in here.”
“Two minutes,” I said. “Then you can throw me in the street. I’ll help you.”
He looked at my knee and decided he could catch me if it came to that.
They were all in the hallway outside curtain four. Pranav. Rohit in his slippers. Cassidy with her arms crossed tight, holding a paper cup of ice chips gone to water. And Ortiz, in the middle of them with her pad out, because it was her report and somebody had to take Mom’s statement.
Pranav saw me and put both hands up like I was the one with the gun.
“Officer. OFFICER. He was told.”
Ortiz turned around. She didn’t look surprised. She looked like a woman whose shift had ended at six.
I didn’t go to Pranav. I went to Cassidy and held out the card, and she took it, because people take what you hand them.
She looked at it, and her face went.
“Where did he get that?” Pranav said. “Where did you get that?”
“Out of your son’s hand,” I said.
“That’s not possible. I threw that out.”
Rohit turned his head.
“You threw what out?” he said.
“It’s nothing, Dad. It’s junk, he sends these things.” Pranav reached for the card, and Cassidy pulled it in against her scrubs. “Cass. Give it to me.”
“No.”
“I tore that in HALF. I put it in the trash. I watched it go in.”
“I know,” Cassidy said. “I took it out.”
“You took it out.”
“I took all of them out.” She was crying already, the ugly way, the way she cried at nine when the patch came out crooked and she thought I’d be mad. “Every one. Before the trash went to the curb on Tuesday. I taped them back together in the bathroom with the door locked, and I taped the money back in so it wouldn’t fall out, and I read them to him at night. Every night, Pranav. He keeps the other seven in a shoebox under his bed. He calls it his Pop box.”
“Behind my back.”
“YES, behind your back. Where else was I supposed to put them?” She wiped her nose on her wrist. “You go through my phone every night since March. Where was I supposed to call him from? The bathroom?”
Rohit looked at his son. His son didn’t look at him.
Pranav laughed, but there was nothing in it this time. He looked from Rohit to Ortiz to Cassidy like a man adding up a bill and coming out short.
“After everything,” he said. “After what I told you about him. You saw the video. Everybody at my work saw the video.”
“He took it to the store,” Cassidy said, and held the card up. “He asked me this morning could he bring Pop’s fire truck to show the TV man. And you left him in the car with it.”
“For TEN MINUTES.”
“Fifty-three,” Ortiz said.
Everybody looked at her.
She held her own phone up with Bailey’s picture on it. “One forty-eight you walk in. Two forty-one that girl shows me. Fifty-three minutes, sir. That’s what’s going in my report.”
“They had to bring it from the back,” Pranav said. “It wasn’t on the floor, they had to go get it. There was a line. Dad. There was a LINE.”
Rohit stood up out of the plastic chair. He’s not a tall man. It didn’t matter.
“For a television,” Rohit said.
“Dad, listen.”
“You left my grandson in a car in August for a television.” His voice didn’t go up. It went down, and that was worse. “And you stood over that cake and told me this man wasn’t safe.”
Pranav opened his mouth, and nothing came out of it.
Cassidy put the card in the pocket of her scrubs. She held her other hand out flat.
“Give me the keys.”
“It’s my car.”
“It doesn’t have a back window,” she said. “Give me the keys. Then go home and get your stuff and go to your dad’s.”
Pranav looked at Rohit for help. Rohit had his arms folded across his sweater.
“Your mother will make up the back room,” Rohit said.
So Pranav turned on me, because I was the only place left to put it.
“This is what you wanted,” he said. “Since day one. You show up to my son’s birthday in that vest, looking like that, and now you get to stand there. It doesn’t change anything. You’re still a mugshot.”
“I’ve got one,” I said. “You’re getting one.”
Ortiz put her pad away. “Sir,” she said to Pranav. “Let’s go outside and talk.”
“Wait,” Rohit said. “Pranav. Say it to him first.”
“Dad, I’m not going to stand here and—”
“SAY IT.”
It came apart from the chin up. I’ve seen grown men cry. I’ve done it myself in this same building, over a bead. But I had never once seen Pranav’s face do something it hadn’t planned.
“I left him in there,” he said. He said it to the floor first. Then Rohit said his name, and he said it to me. “I left him in there. You got him out.”
He put the keys in Cassidy’s hand and went out through the sliding doors with Ortiz a step behind him. The guard held the door for them.
Cassidy pulled back the curtain to number four. Gage was sitting up in the big bed with the towel on his head like a little boxer between rounds.
“Dad,” she said. “He’s been asking.”
I went in, and she let the curtain fall shut behind us.
Zip ties
Pranav had his picture taken at the county jail the following Tuesday. Endangering a child. Bailey found it online before I did and texted it to me with no words, just the picture. It isn’t a good one. He looks like a man who didn’t know the camera would be that close.
The window charge went away on Wednesday. Ortiz called to tell me.
“He withdrew it,” she said. “I didn’t ask him to. I want that clear.”
“Clear to who?”
“Everybody,” she said, and hung up.
On Thursday, Pranav carried the flat-screen back through the side doors of that same store in the same box. $849.99, back on his card. Bailey was on carts. She held the door for him.
“i told him have a good one,” she texted. “i did not mean it”
Under the woman’s video, Bailey had posted her picture with the time showing, and a few hundred strangers did the subtraction. The video was gone by Saturday.
Pranav lives in the back room at Rohit’s now. He sees Gage on Saturdays, at Rohit’s house, with Rohit in the room. Rohit told Cassidy he won’t leave that room for a year, and Rohit sells insurance, so he knows exactly how long a year is.
The Sunday after, I sat on a cooler in their driveway with my leg straight out and zip-tied a square of cardboard over the hole where the back window used to be. The SUV sold in September to a man from Slaton for $14,200, cardboard and all. Those zip ties are the only thing I bought that day that got used for what I bought them for. The mower next door is still broken.
My knee was a torn meniscus. They went in on the ninth of September, and I couldn’t ride for eight weeks. That’s the longest I’ve gone without a bike since I was fifteen.
Cassidy drove me home from the surgery. She got me up the porch steps, then went back to her car and came up the walk carrying a shoebox.
It used to hold Gage’s light-up sneakers. On the lid somebody had written POP BOX in orange crayon, the O bigger than both P’s.
Seven cards were inside, January through July, and she laid August on top from her pocket. Eight. Every one torn in half and taped back together crooked, five strips where one would do. Every one with my five-dollar bill still taped flat inside.
“Forty dollars,” she said. “He won’t let me spend it. He says it’s yours.”
“It’s his.”
“You tell him that.”
Then she sat down on the top step next to me and cried out loud with her whole back, like she’d been saving it since March. I guess she had.
“I’m sorry I didn’t call,” she said. “Dad, I’m so sorry.”
“You were busy,” I said. “Taping.”
She laughed with her nose running and put her head on my shoulder, and I put my arm around her and held on. I’m not a crier. I cried like a radiator with a bad hose. My neighbor came out to look at his mower, saw us, and went right back in.
The Saturday after that, a little silver hatchback pulled into my driveway and stopped well short of the mailbox. Every window in it was rolled down.
Gage was out of his seat before Cassidy got the engine off. He came up the walk at a run in new light-up sneakers, with a card in his hand.
I was inside on my crutches, behind the storm door.
He stopped at the glass and put his palm flat on it, right at his own eye level, and slid it down slow, like he was checking.
“It’s not locked, buddy,” I said.
He pulled, and it opened, and he walked right in.
If this one got to you, send it to somebody who’s still mailing cards to a grandbaby they’re not allowed to see.
For more family confrontations and buried secrets, read “My Son-in-Law Thanked Me When He Heard My Name” and “My Cousin’s New Wife Demanded $11,400 From Me Beside the Cake”. For a very different clash, there’s also “My Old Instructor Kicked My Twenty-Six-Year-Old Kitbag Down the Gangway”.
