“Because he was known to be so forgiving? Look-forget about how he felt about my father. Do you realize how hard life was for my mother, after she split up with my dad?”

“Did she try to make contact with my father?”

“Did Patrick try to contact her?” he shot back.

I tried to count to ten. I got to three, and said, “A moment ago you said I didn’t know what was going on in Las Piernas then. You were only eleven. You didn’t know what was going on in my father’s life then, did you?”

“How could I? He wasn’t speaking to us. Besides, it couldn’t have been as bad as what was happening to her.”

“Oh, no? Well, listen to this, Your Honor, Judge of the Family. He had cancer. How’s that for an excuse?”

“He didn’t tell us,” he said, but he wasn’t shouting now.

“No, he was sort of like your own father. He had his secrets, too. He didn’t like to appear to be weak. He was the one who had to be strong for everybody else. He didn’t let me know about it until he was too sick to work. So I came down from Bakersfield and took care of him.”

“But Barbara-”

“Barbara couldn’t take it. She still hasn’t forgiven him for knowing that, for calling me to come to him. Then again, she hasn’t forgiven herself for running away from his illness.”

There was a long silence.

“Go ahead,” he said. “Ask.”

“Ask what?”

“Ask me why I was out riding around in a purple-and-yellow camper-”

“Oh, Christ-”

“-telling children’s stories-”

“That’s not what I was trying to say!” I protested.

“Telling fairy tales, while my parents were dying.”

“You didn’t know that!”

“I didn’t know what would happen to my mother.” He paused, swallowed hard. “But I knew my dad was dying.”

“Travis-no, please. I wasn’t trying to say anything like that.”

“Let me-let me explain.” He couldn’t go on for a moment, but gradually he pulled himself together and said, “I think I’ve told you that I reached a point in my life when I wanted to get to know my father-as an adult. My mother didn’t like the idea. I don’t think, looking back on it, that it was because she hated him then. Even during the worst of it, I think she still loved him. I guess I’ve always known that.

“But I don’t think she was ever a person who found it easy to trust others. She had trusted him, though, and he destroyed that trust. After that, she wouldn’t date other men. The one man she loved had caught her up in a thousand lies, and her son was a bastard whose face was a constant reminder of the man who destroyed her life-” Travis-

“No, she said that to me once. ”Every time I look at you, do you know who I see?“”

“She didn’t mean it-”

“Yes, she did. I’ll admit she was angry, but she meant it. It wasn’t so obvious when I was younger, with a boy’s face, but as I became a man, I was a reminder.” He paused, and added, “I’m not saying she didn’t love me. She did. I never doubted that.

“But you can see why,” he went on, “the closer my father and I became, the more upset she became. She started issuing ultimatums to me. You haven’t known me very long, but I guess you can imagine how well that worked.”

I smiled. “Yes, I think so.”

“My father had already been diagnosed with cancer when I started to spend more time with him, but he wasn’t-he wasn’t an invalid. Most of the time, he did his best to make me forget that he was ill. We had a lot of catching up to do. It was clear to me that he still loved my mother. It was the way he would ask about her, the way he would look whenever he’d talk about the years when we were a family.”

He fell silent for a while. By then we had reached San Bernadino. Soon we would be in the mountains themselves.

“Once in a while he would have a bad day,” he said, coming out of his reverie, “and on those days, he’d ask me not to come over. I’d protest, and tell him that I wanted to be with him no matter what, but he could be stubborn.

“When there started to be more bad days, he sat me down and told me-well, many things. He said that the two of us had more than enough painful memories between us, that he preferred this reunion of ours not to include my seeing him helpless and sick. He said he would always feel he had taken horrible advantage of me if he had only brought me to his side to watch him die. He wanted life with me, he said, not death, and nothing but good memories of our time together to sustain him through whatever was to come.”

He was silent again. He reached for the envelope of photographs, pulled out one of the ones of the purple camper and smiled wistfully.

“During one of my earlier visits,” he said, “my father had learned that I had studied to be a reading specialist, and asked me about it. He encouraged me to talk about the things I enjoyed doing-and about the things I dreamed of doing. I told him about storytelling, which I had been involved in locally for a number of years. And another time, I told him that I had this urge to travel. That’s when I learned more about the hobo side of the family-he said I couldn’t help being a nomad, it was the Spanning vagabond in me.

“This last time I saw him, he called in Mr. Brennan, whom I had met when I was younger, but hadn’t seen in many years. My father and Mr. Brennan told me about the provisions my father had made for me. I was astounded, to tell you the truth.

“My father told me he was worried that making me this wealthy would put me in danger, and not just from the DeMonts, but he figured I would understand that, and take care of myself. He said there were members of the family who would try to convince me that I owed them big portions if not all of his money, and he wished I would tell them to go to hell, but if I wanted to hand it over to them, fine. For now, he said, he was the one who had earned it, and so it was his decision to make himself happy by imagining me doing what I wanted to do, making my own choices.

“He asked if I ever thought of taking my storytelling act on the road for a time-and as he went on to describe some of his ideas about it, it wasn’t as if he was pushing me to conform to something he wanted. It was-it was as if I had told my most secret dreams to someone, and he had not only not laughed at them, but he had understood them perfectly.”

“And given you the power to make them come true.”

“Yes,” he said. “Yes.”

“But your mother didn’t like the idea?”

He shook his head. “Hated it. She would have been angry at me for taking a dime from him. She saw it as a betrayal. She even moved to that one-bedroom apartment-a way of saying I wasn’t going to find a room for myself when I came back. I guess- I had lived with her for so long, beyond the time when I wanted to move out, because I knew-I knew!-how lonely she’d be…”

“So for once in your life, you did something for yourself.”

“Oh, not for once,” he said. “She made a lot of sacrifices for me.”

“Your wanting to leave the nest-it was the natural course of things, Travis. I remember how my father-well, never mind.”

“Your father didn’t want you to move out?”

“No. But at that time, I felt as if we’d end up hating each other if I stayed. And I think we would have.”

“But you came back.”

“That’s true. It was what he wanted, what he asked for. For me to be there. I did what he asked. Your father asked for something different. You did what he asked.”

He was silent.

Ghosts, I thought, then suddenly remembered Travis’s e-mail address. “Was he your George Kerby?”

He smiled. “Topper. My dad and I watched a videotape of that film one day. He threatened to start calling me ‘Toppie’ because he said I was just like Cosmo Topper, confined to routine and taking life far too seriously. He said I needed to get out and do the things I wanted to do. He said he’d come back and haunt me if I didn’t start living a little. So Cosmo became my storyteller name.”