"It's not Thursday," he said as I came up the stairs.
I sat down in the wicker chair beside him. "I just felt like dropping in," I told him.
He stared into the flames. "Warren talk to you?"
"Yeah."
"That why you're here?"
I shook my head.
"I figured he'd go whining to you, try to get me to change my mind, let him come over again."
"No, he didn't do that," I said. "He told me you had an argument, that you said you didn't want to see him again, but he wasn't whining about it."
My father's eyes narrowed hatefully. "Should have done it long ago," he said coldly. "Worthless."
"Worthless," I repeated. "That's what you said about Mom."
He peered about absently, like a man in a museum full of artifacts he had no interest in.
"Speaking of which," I said. "You lied to me, Dad."
He closed his eyes wearily, clearly preparing himself for yet another series of false accusations.
"You said you didn't take out an insurance policy on Mom," I continued. "I found it in your papers. It was for two hundred thousand dollars." When this had no visible effect on my father, I added, "Why did you lie to me about this, Dad?"
His gaze slid over to me. "I didn't."
A wave of anger swept over me, fueled by exasperation. My father was doing the same thing Keith had done a week before.
"Dad, I found an application for a life insurance policy," I snapped.
"An application is not a policy, Eric," my father scoffed. "You should know that."
"Are you denying there was ever such a policy?" I demanded. "Is that what you're doing?"
A dry laugh broke from him. "Eric, you asked me if I took out a policy on your mother. I said I didn't. Which is the truth."
"Once again, Dad, are you saying there was no life insurance policy on Mom's life?"
"As a matter of fact, Eric, I'm not saying that at all."
"So there was one?"
"Yes."
"For two hundred thousand dollars?"
"That was the amount," my father said. "But does that mean I took the policy out?"
"Who else would?"
"Your mother, Eric," my father said flatly. "Your mother took it out."
"On herself?"
"Yes." His eyes glistened slightly, though I couldn't be sure if the glistening came from some well of lost emotion, or if it were only an illusion, merely a play of light. "She took it out without telling me," he added. "She had a ... friend. He helped her do it."
"A friend?"
"Yes," my father answered. "You met him. A family friend." His smile was more a sneer. "Good friend of your mother. Always coming around the house. Glad to be of help, that was Jason."
"Jason," I said. "Benefield?"
"So, you've heard about him?"
"Warren mentioned him," I explained.
"Of course," my father said with an odd, downward jerk at the corners of his mouth. "Anyway, he's still alive. You can ask him. He'll tell you I had nothing to do with that policy. And for your added information, I wasn't the beneficiary of it, either."
I couldn't tell if this was a bluff, but I suspected that it was, and moved to expose it. "Where did the money go?" I asked.
"What money?"
"The money that was due after Mom died."
"There was never any money, Eric," my father said. "Not a penny."
"Why not?"
He hesitated, and in that interval, I imagined all the worthless get-rich-quick schemes into which he had probably poured the money, a bottomless pit of failed businesses and bad investments.
"The company denied the claim," he said finally.
He squirmed uncomfortably, and I knew he was trying to get off the hook. So I bore in.
"Why did the company deny the claim?" I asked.
"Ask them yourself," my father shot back.
"I'm asking you," I said hotly.
My father turned away from me.
"Tell me, goddamn it!"
His eyes shot over to me. "Insurance companies don't pay," he said, "when it's a suicide."
"Suicide?" I whispered unbelievingly. "You're telling me that Mom intended to run off that bridge? That's ridiculous."
My father's glare was pure challenge. "Then why wasn't she wearing a seat belt, Eric? She always insisted on wearing one, remember? She made all of you wear them. So why, on that particular day, when she went off that bridge, did she not have hers on?"
He read the look in my eyes.
"You don't believe me, do you?" he asked.
"No, I don't."
"Then look at the police report. It was all right there—the whole story: How fast she was going. The way the car went straight into the guardrail—everything. Including the fact that she wasn't wearing a seat belt." He shook his head. "There were witnesses, too. People who saw what she did." A contemptuous laugh broke from him. "Couldn't even pull off a simple suicide scheme without fucking it up."
"Don't lie to me, Dad," I warned. "Not about this."
"Go look at the fucking report, if you don't believe me," my father snarled. "There's a copy in my files. You've been digging around in them anyway, right? Dig some more."
I couldn't let him go unchallenged. "Speaking of your files," I said. "I found a letter from Aunt Emma. She blames Mom for spending you into bankruptcy."
My father waved his hand. "Who cares what my nutty sister writes?"
"It's what you wrote that bothered me."
"Which was?"
"A line you scrawled in the margin of Aunt Emma's letter."
"I repeat, 'Which was?'"
'"Now let her get me out of it.'"
My father laughed. "Jesus, Eric."
"What did you mean by that?"
"That Emma should get me out of it," my father said. "She's the 'her' in that note."
"How could Aunt Emma get you out of it?"
"Because her goddamn husband left her a fortune," my father said. "But true to form, she never spent a dime of it. And she wouldn't have given me a penny, either. When she died, she still had every dollar that old bastard left her. Close to a million dollars. You know where it went? To a fucking animal shelter!"
He laughed again, but bitterly, as if all he had ever known of life amounted to little more than a cruel joke.
I waited until his laughter faded, then, because I couldn't stop myself, I asked the final question. "Did Mom have an affair? Warren said she did. With that man you mentioned, Benefield. He said Aunt Emma told you about it."
For a moment, my father seemed unable to deal with this latest assault. "What is this all about, Eric? All this business about insurance policies, affairs. What have you been thinking?" He saw the answer in my eyes. "You thought I killed her, didn't you? Either for money or because I thought she was fucking around. One or the other, right?" He released a scoffing chuckle. "Does it matter which one it is, Eric?" He didn't wait for me to answer. "This is all about Keith, isn't it?" he asked. "You can't bear to think that he may be a liar and a murderer, so you've decided to think it about me." He remained silent for a few seconds. I could see his mind working behind his darting eyes, reasoning something through, coming to a grave conclusion. Then he looked at me. "Well, if you're so fucking eager to find the truth about this, Eric, here's a truth you might wish you hadn't heard." His grin was pure triumph. "I wasn't the beneficiary of your mother's insurance policy. You were."
I stared at him, thunderstruck. "Me? Why would she...?"
"She knew how much you wanted to go to college," my father interrupted. He shrugged with a curious sense of acceptance. "It was the only way she could make sure you had the money you needed."
I didn't believe him, and yet at the same time what he said made sense. In the grips of that dire uncertainty, I realized that there was absolutely nothing I could be sure of. I saw the car's yellow beams sweep through the undergrowth and thought of Keith's lie. And here was my father telling me that my mother had driven the family station wagon off a thirty-foot bridge, a story that could just as easily be used to shift my own suspicions concerning my mother's death safely away from him.