Grand & Humble by Brent Hartinger Page A

answer of sorts.
     
    Manny stared at his dad’s address book. He’d had the same one for as long as Manny could remember, and it looked like it, dog-eared and doodled on. His dad was always misplacing the damn thing, but Mannyhad found it right away, by the phone in the kitchen, in the clutter of coupons and utility bills.
    Manny thought for a second. Whatever his dad wasn’t telling him had something to do with Manny’s childhood, something that had happened to him when he was younger. So there had to be someone he could ask about that past: an uncle or an old family friend who could answer the questions that his dad would not, maybe even some relatives of his dead mother.
    Manny kept staring at that closed address book, but no names came to mind. Not a single one. He couldn’t think of anyone who might be able to tell him what he wanted to know. His dad said his own family was all gone: he’d never had any siblings, and his parents and grandparents had all died before Manny was born—Manny had never asked how. As for relatives of his dead mom, his dad had never once mentioned any. Could it really be that his dad had lost all contact with them?
    And even if his dad’s relatives were all dead, where were his childhood friends? His college roommate? Sure, his dad had moved since then, but didn’t he keep a Christmas card list? But there were no old family friends, not that Manny could think of.
    He started paging through the address book.
    Henry Bean. Jason Berg. Ernie Cruz.
    Mostly single fathers, Manny saw. That made sense. Birds of a feather. No one in the address book was scratched out completely—that was the kind of person his father was, never expunging anyone from his life forever. But plenty of addresses and phone numbers had been updated—crossed out and replaced by newer addresses and phone numbers squeezed into the margins.
    Jamie Gardner. Margaret Graham. Katie Ingram.
    These were women his dad had dated; even though none of his relationships had ever worked out, he’d stayed friends with some of them. Once he’d overheard one of them accuse his dad of having “issues.” At the time, he’d thought she was just being overbearing. But now, given the way his dad had reacted to the nightmare, Manny thought maybe that ex-girlfriend had had a point.
    Larry Middle. Sarah Newman. Matthew Orner.
    Some of his dad’s friends had moved six or seven times in the years that his father had kept this book, mostly from apartment to apartment. It looked more like the address book of a college student. But it was really just the result of most of his dad’s friends’ being just as poor as they were.
    Melinda Walker. Eldon Wood. Tim Yates.
    He had come to the end of the address book. Heclosed it and put it back on the counter.
    He had recognized every single name. He also knew exactly where and when his dad had met them all: each and every one in the last thirteen years that they’d lived in this city.
    The address book was old, but apparently it wasn’t more than thirteen years old.
    There was no one Manny could ask. It was as if the past, at least the past before they moved to their current city, did not exist.
    For the first time in his life, Manny realized that that was pretty damn suspicious.
     
    Manny went for a long walk in the fading afternoon sun. The idea had been to clear his mind, but it sure wasn’t working. On the contrary, a tornado of questions swirled through his head. Why didn’t his dad have a past? Had his dad been estranged from his parents? Is that why he didn’t keep any pictures of them? Had they disowned him? Were they still alive? Where had Manny and his dad moved from, anyway—and why hadn’t his dad ever said? Where did Manny’s dead mother fit into all of this? And, of course, he still had the question that had started it all: What was it about his nightmare that was causing his dad to act so strangely?
    Something had happened when Manny was a child. That had been his first