Larry starts looking out the window, counting the restaurants in the breakdown lane. The babbling has helped: He’s seeming somewhat revived…but the story’s left hanging.

“And?” I say.

“And what?”

“And what was the outcome?”

“Oh! Never had another seizure. From the day of the surgery on. And by the way, just for the record, I appreciate how no one in the family ever referred to us as Punch and Judy, at least to the best of my knowledge, despite our occasional knock-down-drag-outs. That goes to the family’s credit, which is a very short category in my mind, but give the devil his due.”

“So, Larry, stay on track here. You changed your sister’s life!”

“But not necessarily for the better,” he’s quick to point out. “Because suddenly after the operation, she had no crutch. Her epilepsy had been the central component of her life around which everything else was structured. Everyone started telling her, ‘Oh, Judy, now you can go get your driver’s license, you don’t have to work at the DMV, maybe you can even get a boyfriend.’ All this terrified Judy. She didn’t want any of it. She just wanted to be babied by our mutha.”

“And then your mutha, I mean mother, dies.”

“Exactly. And no one came to the funeral, which I can never, ever, ever forgive the family for. That goes deep, Dan.”

“But, Larry, you could never decide on a date for the funeral. If you’d just chosen a date, I’m sure everyone would have come.”

“That remains to be seen, which it never will, will it? I’m still too upset to talk about it. Getting back on track, as you say, things took a downturn after our mutha’s death. Judy’s worked by this time nineteen and a half years, she quits six months before she would have qualified for pension. That would have given her a measure of independence, which was the last thing she wanted. She took to chatting with our deceased mutha on the phone and falling asleep in a chair, since our mutha had died lying down and Judy didn’t want the same thing to happen to her. Long story short, one day after a four-day weekend with no activity from her locked room, I grow suspicious. I punch the door down with my shoulder and find her expired in her La-Z-Boy, pills all over her lap, dressed in a black Speedo.”

“Why a black Speedo?”

“Trying to be the alluring dame in death she never was in life? Beats me. But I can tell you that she did not look good at all. In fact, I almost vomited. Never saw her in it before, I would have told her to throw it out. Judy did not exercise. At the end she weighed, I’m guessing two seventy-five, may she rest in peace.”

I don’t bother letting a silence surround this thought. I’m too mad at Judy for not donating her kidney to her twin.

“But you did what you could. Larry, you did a heroic thing.”

“Thank you, Dan. I rarely hear words like that. My need for external validation is bottomless-that’s why I got the three radio ham licenses, three state real-estate brokerage licenses, a pilot’s license, and I took the commercial airline pilot’s license test just to see how I’d do and got a ninety-two, which isn’t great for a professional pilot but not bad for a civilian-”

“Hush, Larry. Settle down. I’m giving you those words. You did good.”

Pause. He inhales a tiny space for himself. “Thank you, Dan,” he says. I hear his breathing become less raggedy, time it against my own. He is settling down.

The driving continues without letup. Jade in the front seat has her head tilted back, letting all this talk flow through her. It’s a comfort to me that she’s here for moral support. Larry sighs a few times to himself, then speaks again with a memorial tone.

“She was the most unhappy person I ever knew, Judy was,” he says. “She was unhappy not having her seizures. She missed them and what they did for her. And she was selfish, insofar as letting her kidney die with her instead of giving it to me. Yet I don’t blame her, poor thing. I blame her mental state. And I miss her. I still wake up and forget that she’s dead sometimes. I wake up and think I have to tell her something, but then I remember that she’s dead. And I think about my dad. Him I remember is dead.”

“Hush, Larry…”

“I got a short straw when I drew my dad. You know his sole advice to me when I tried to play Little League baseball? ‘Never swing, maybe you’ll get a walk.’ That was basically his attitude. Don’t try, maybe you’ll get by. If that isn’t the most pathetic advice a father ever imparted to a son, I don’t know what is.”

His words are beyond bitter-they’re just sad. “Hush, Larry,” I say…but he can’t stop.

“He never gave me any help in any way. So when my students want my help, I go out of my way to do everything I can. Black, white, Chinese, it doesn’t matter. That’s why I’m glad I teach at a second-tier school. Harvard students don’t need my help.”

“So something good came of your relationship. You were able to see him for what he was and rise above-”

“Sam I always saw for who he was. Maybe that’s why I always called him ‘Sam’ and never ‘Dad.’ From the age of four, I knew this was a very limited person. Sam came from an immigrant family, all he was was basically a manservant to his older brother, Irving, who owned the garage Sam worked in and who treated him badly. Gave him a hundred dollars a week and a box of chocolates for New Year’s. And Sam went along with it, thinking that was his function in life, to prop up his older brother and be subservient. One of my first memories was my mutha yelling ‘Yoo-hoo, Irving, see? I’m putting a dime here, only taking a warm Coke from the rack, not one of the cold ones from the cooler.’ I was only four, but I knew this was not right.”

He hardly draws a breath. These words are coming without air going in or out. The memories are so deep that the words are anaerobic.

“Sam never let anyone read in the house, you know why? Because he himself couldn’t read. He had the opportunity to learn many times, but he never bothered to. That’s what I don’t forgive. He didn’t have to be that way. He chose to be that way. The last time he tried to beat me with his belt, I was twelve. I said, ‘Do it! Do it in front of all these people!’ I was scared of a lot of people, but never of him. He never earned my fear.”

“Do you have any happy stories about your father?”

“I’ll try, see where they take us. Here goes: Low as my futha’s branch of the family was, there were a few sparks of glory. One of the cousins, Max, grew up to become professor emeritus of Harvard. Another cousin, Benny, started a famous perfume empire. Another cousin, Lenny, grew up to become the legendary Leonard Bernstein, maybe you’ve heard the name, though he was considered such an obnoxious little prick at fourteen that he got his face punched in and was thrown down some stairs. They still laugh at that one in that branch of Sam’s family, at the expression on little Lenny’s bloody face, obnoxious little know-it-all.”

Larry takes time out to swipe his nose with a hankie that may have been starched once, years ago. “There, was that happy? I can’t even tell anymore,” he says. “But you’ll notice that I use curse words very seldom, if you call ‘prick’ a curse word, so I guess all this is dredging up some pretty emotional material for me.”

“Umm, I’ve heard happier,” I admit. “Any others? What about the Little League you mentioned? Wasn’t your father a sponsor or something?”

“To a degree,” Larry says. “What happened was, Sam never did anything with me, but one day he gets the idea in his head that he wants to sponsor a Little League team. This enabled him to have the words ‘Sam Feldman and Son’ printed on the backs of our Cleveland Indians shirts and watch us parade around the field, making him inordinately proud even though there was no such entity as Sam Feldman and Son. He took pictures, you wouldn’t believe how many. But because he was a sponsor, I had to join the team. Hated every minute of it. I couldn’t bat and I couldn’t catch. Though there was one bright spot: The catcher grew up to become the drummer for the band Boston, which got pretty big in the late seventies, used to get me free tickets, which I’d scalp, made a little pocket change.”