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you treat it as the answer to a question you’re asking yourself every day, just by being there.
    That afternoon, as I was leaving the apartment for Linda’s, my father called out my name from the bedroom.
    I stopped outside the closed door. He was meant to be napping.
    â€˜Where are you going?’ his voice said.
    â€˜For a walk,’ I replied.
    â€˜I’ll walk with you.’
    It always struck me how everything seemed larger in scale on Summit Street: the double-storeyed houses, their smooth lawns sloping down to the sidewalks like golf greens; elm trees with high, thick branches – the sort of branches from which I imagined fathers suspending long-roped swings for daughters in white dresses. The leaves, once golden and red, were turning dark orange, brown. The rain had stopped. I don’t know why, but we walked in the middle of the road, dark asphalt gleaming beneath slick, pasted leaves like the back of a whale.
    I asked him, ‘What do you want to do while you’re here?’
    His face was pale and fixed in a smile. ‘Don’t worry about me,’ he said. ‘I can just meditate. Or read.’
    â€˜There’s a coffee shop downtown,’ I said. ‘And a Japanese restaurant.’ It sounded pathetic. It occurred to me that I knew nothing about what my father did all day.
    He kept smiling, looking at the ground moving in front of his feet.
    â€˜I have to write,’ I said.
    â€˜You write.’
    And I could no longer read his smile. He had perfected it during his absence. It was a setting of the lips, sly, almost imperceptible, which I would probably associate with senility but for the keenness of his eyes.
    â€˜There’s an art museum across the river,’ I said.
    â€˜Ah, take me there.’
    â€˜The museum?’
    â€˜No,’ he said, looking sideways at me. ‘The river.’
    We turned back to Burlington Street and walked down the hill to the river. He stopped in the middle of the bridge. The water below looked cold and black, slowing in sections as it succumbed to the temperature. Behind us six lanes of cars skidded back and forth across the wet grit of the road, the sound like the shredding of wind.
    â€˜Have you heard from your mother?’ He stood upright before the railing, his head strangely small above the puffy down jacket I had lent him.
    â€˜Every now and then.’
    He lapsed into formal Vietnamese: ‘How is the mother of Nam?’
    â€˜She is good,’ I said, loudly – too loudly – trying to make myself heard over the groans and clanks of a passing truck.
    He was nodding. Behind him, the east bank of the river glowed wanly in the afternoon light. ‘Come on,’ I said. We crossed the bridge and walked to a nearby Dairy Queen. When I came out, two coffees in my hands, my father had gone down to the river’s edge. Next to him, a bundled-up, bearded figure stooped over a burning gasoline drum. Never had I seen anything like it in Iowa City.
    â€˜This is my son,’ my father said, once I had scrambled down the wet bank. ‘The writer.’ He took a hot paper cup from my hand, ‘Would you like some coffee?’
    â€˜Thank you, no.’ The man stood still, watching his knotted hands, palms glowing orange above the rim of the drum. His voice was soft, his clothes heavy with his life. I smelled animals in him, and fuel, and rain.
    â€˜I read his story,’ my father went on in his lilting English, ‘about Vietnamese boat people.’ He gazed at the man, straight into his blank, rheumy eyes, then said, as though delivering a punch line, ‘We are Vietnamese boat people.’
    We stood there for a long time, the three of us, watching the flames. When I lifted my eyes it was dark.
    â€˜Do you have any money on you?’ my father asked me in Vietnamese.
    â€˜Welcome to America,’ the man said through his beard. He didn’t look up as I closed his fist around