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all I know.”
    “But he showed up again three or four years later.”
    “Out of the blue, just like the first time. I’d given up on him by then. Four years is a long time to wait when you’re a kid. It feels like fucking forever.”
    “And what did you do with the hundred dollars?”
    “It’s funny you should ask that. At first I was going to spend it. You know, buy a fancy new baseball glove or something, but nothing ever seemed quite right, I could never bring myself to part with it. So I wound up saving it all those years. I kept it in a little box in my underwear drawer, and every night I would take it out and look at it—just to make sure it was really there.”
    “And if it was there, that meant you had really seen your father.”
    “I never thought of it that way. But yeah, that’s probably it. If I held on to the money, then maybe that meant my father would be coming back.”
    “A little boy’s logic.”
    “You’re so dumb when you’re a kid, it’s pathetic. I can’t believe I used to think like that.”
    “We all did. It’s part of growing up.”
    “Yeah, well, it was all pretty complicated. I never showed the money to my mother, but every now and then I would take it out of the box and let my friend Walt hold it. It made me feel good, I don’t know why. Like if I saw him touching it, then I knew I wasn’t making it up. But the funny thing was, after about six monthsI got it into my head that the money was fake, that it was a counterfeit bill. It might have been something that Walt said, I can’t say for sure, but I do remember thinking that if the money was fake, then the guy who gave it to me couldn’t have been my father.”
    “Around and around.”
    “Yeah. Around and around and around. One day, Walt and I got to talking about it, and he said the only way we’d ever find out was if we took it to the bank. I didn’t want to let it out of my room, but since I figured it was counterfeit anyway, it probably didn’t matter. So off we go the bank, all scared that someone’s going to rob us, creeping along like we’re on some goddamn dangerous mission. The teller at the bank turned out to be a nice guy. Walt says to him, ‘My friend here wants to know if this is a real hundred-dollar bill,’ and the teller takes it and looks it over real careful. He even put the thing under a magnifying glass just to make sure.”
    “And what did he say?”
    “ ‘It’s real, boys,’ he says. ‘A genuine U.S. Treasury note.’ ”
    “So the man who gave it to you was really your father.”
    “Correct. But where does that leave me now? If this guy is really my father, then why doesn’t he come back and see me? At least he could write a letter or something. But instead of getting pissed off about it, I start making up stories to explain why he’s not in touch. I figure, shit, I figure he’s some kind of James Bond character, one of those secret agents working for the government and he can’t blow his cover by coming to see me. After all, by now I believe all that bullshit about escaping from a prison camp in Vietnam, and if he can do that, he must have been one hell of a fucking macho man, right? A stud and a half. Christ, I must have been a goddamn moron to think like that.”
    “You had to invent something. It’s not possible to leave it blank. The mind won’t let you.”
    “Maybe. But I sure spun myself a ton of crap. I was up to my neck in it.”
    “What happened when he finally turned up again?”
    “He called first this time and spoke to my mother. I remember that I was already in bed upstairs, and she came into my room and told me about it. ‘He wants to spend the weekend with you in New York,’ she said, and it wasn’t hard to see that she was burned. ‘The son of a bitch has got his nerve, doesn’t he?’ she kept saying. ‘That son of a bitch has got his nerve.’ So Friday afternoon he pulls up in front of the house in another Cadillac. This one was black, and I remember