Here's another thought, this one about Reg: when I was maybe twelve, I got caught plundering the neighbors' raspberry patch. Talk about sin. For the weeks that followed, my father pointedly pretended I didn't exist. He'd bump into me in the hallway and say nothing, as if I were a chair. Kent the politician always stayed utterly neutral during this sort of conflict.

The bonus of being invisible was that if I didn't exist, I also couldn't be punished. This played itself out mostly at the dinner table. My mother (on her sixth glass of Riesling from the spigot of a two-liter plastic-lined cardboard box) would ask how my woodwork assignment was going. I'd reply something like, "Reasonably well, but you know what?"

"What?"

"There's this rumor going around the school right now."

"Really?"

"Yeah. Word has it that God smokes cigarettes."

"Jason, please don't ..."

"Also, and this is so weird, God drinks and he uses drugs. I mean, he invented the things. But the funny thing is, he's exactly the same drunk as sober."

Mom recognized the pattern. "Jason, let it rest." Kent sat there waiting for the crunch.

Taunting my father was possibly the one time where I became vocal. Here's another example: "It turns out God hates every piece of music written after the year 1901." The thing that really got to Dad was when I dragged God into the modern world.

"I hear God approves of various brands of cola competing in the marketplace for sales dominance."

Silence.

"I hear that God has a really bad haircut."

Silence.

During flu season and the week of my annual flu shot: "I hear that God allows purposefully killed germs to circulate in his blood system to fend off living germs."

Silence.

"I hear that if God were to drive a car, he'd drive a 1973 Ford LTD Brougham sedan with a claret-colored vinyl roof . . . with leather upholstery and an opera window."

"Would the thief please pass the margarine?" I existed again.

It's midnight and Kent's memorial is over. Did I make it there? Yes. And I managed to pull my act together, and wore a halfway respectable suit, which I cologned into submission. But first I packed Joyce in the truck, and we drove to fetch Mom from her little condo at the foot of Lonsdale - a mock-Tudor space module built a few years ago, equipped with a soaker tub, optical fiber connections to the outer world and a fake wishing well in the courtyard area. Everyone else in the complex has kids; once they learned that Mom is indifferent to kids and baby-sitting - and that maybe she drinks too much - they shunned her. When I got there she was watching Entertainment Tonight while a single-portion can of Campbell's low-sodium soup caramelized on the left rear element. I sent it hissing into the sink.

"Hey, Mom."

"Jason."

I sat down, while Mom gave Joyce a nice rub. She said, "I don't think I can make it tonight, dear."

"That's okay. I'll let you know how it goes."

"It's a beautiful evening. Warm."

"It is."

She looked out the sliding doors. "I might go sit on the patio. Catch the last bit of sun."

"I'll come join you."

"No. You go."

"Joyce can stay with you tonight."

Mom and Joyce perked up at this. Joyce loves doing Mom duty: being a Seeing Eye dog is in her DNA, and in the end, I'm not that much of a challenge for her. Mom fully engages Joyce's need to be needed, and I let them be.

It was a warm night, August, the only guaranteed-good-weather month in Vancouver. Even after the sun set, its light would linger well into the evening. The trees and shrubs along the roadside seemed hot and fuzzy, as if microwaved, and the roads were as clean as any in a video game. On the highway, the airborne pollen made the air look saliva syrupy, yet it felt like warm sand blowing on my arm. It struck me that this was exactly the way the weather was the night Kent was killed.

As I headed toward Exit 2, it also struck me that I would have to pass Exit 5 on the way to Barb's house. I rounded the corner, and there was my father, kneeling on the roadside in a wrinkled (I noticed even at seventy miles an hour) sinless black suit. My father: born of a Fraser Valley Mennonite family of daffodil farmers who apparently weren't strict enough for him, so he forged his own religious path, marching purse-lipped through the 1970s, so lonely and screwed up he probably nearly gave himself cancer from stress. He met my mother, who worked in a Nuffy's Donuts franchise in the same minimall as the insurance firm that employed him, calculating the likelihood and time of death of strangers. Mom was a suburban child from the flats of Richmond, now Vancouver's motherland of Tudor condominium units. Her shift at the donut shop overlapped Dad's by three hours. I know that at first she found Dad's passion and apparent clarity attractive - Mother Nature is cruel indeed - and I imagine my father found my mother a blank canvas onto which he could spew his gunk.

I pulled over to watch him pray. This was about as interested as I'd been in praying since 1988. I could barely see my father's white Taurus parked back from the highway, on a street in the adjoining suburb, beside a small stand of Scotch broom. The absence of any other car on the highway made his presence seem like that of a soul in pilgrimage. That poor dumb bastard. He'd scared or insulted away or betrayed all the people who otherwise ought to have been in his life. He's a lonely, bitter, prideful crank, and I really have to laugh when I consider the irony that I've become, of course, the exact same thing. Memo to Mother Nature: Thanks.

From the high school's parking lot I was driven home sitting on a tarp in the police cruiser's rear seat, no sirens. When I walked in the door off the kitchen, my mother shrieked. I could see a Kahlua bottle by the cheese grater, so I knew she was already looped; I'm sure the cops knew right away, too. Mom hadn't been watching TV or listening to the radio, so my appearance at the kitchen door, laminated with a deep maroon muck, had to have been a shock. I just wanted to get the stuff off me, so I kissed her, said I was fine and allowed the cops to bring her up-to-date. In the slipstream of the sedative injection I'd been given back in the parking lot I felt clear-minded and calm. Far too calm. As I was changing out of my bloodied clothes, what passed through my mind was -of all things - curiosity as to how my mother filled her days. I had no idea. She had no job and was stranded amid the mountainside's suburban Japanese weeping maples and mossy roofs. Greater minds have gone mad from the level of boredom she endured. By the time I was seventeen, her once communicative Reg conversed solely with a God so demanding that of all the people on Earth, only he - and possibly Kent - had any chance of making heaven. Just a few years ago my mother said to me during a lunch, "Just imagine how it must feel to know that your family won't be going to heaven with you - I mean, truly believing that. We're ghosts to him. We might as well be dead."

As I disrobed for the shower, flecks of blood flittered onto the bathroom's gold linoleum. I bundled up my clothes and tossed them out the window onto the back patio, where, I learned later, raccoons pilfered them in the night. I showered, and my thoughts were almost totally focused on how cool and sensible the medic's injection had made me. I could have piloted and landed a 747 on that stuff. And with a newly minted junkie's bloodless logic, I was already trying to figure out how soon I could locate more, and at least I had something else to focus on besides Cheryl's death.

When I walked back into the living room, the TV was on. Mom was transfixed, and the RCMP officers were on walkie-talkies, the phone - you name it. Mom grabbed my hand and wouldn't let me go, and I saw for the first time the helicopter and news service images that trail me to this day, images I have yet to fully digest. My mother's grip was so hard that I noticed my fingers turning white. I still wonder how things might have gone without that delicious injection.