Before I knew what I was doing, I was on my feet. I ripped the phone off the desk and threw it across the room. It struck the wall and cracked apart, leaving a hole the size of my forehead. I wanted to crawl into it and disappear. Instead I climbed to my feet and picked up the pieces of the shattered phone. I could not put them back together, so I dropped them on the floor. I touched the hole in the wall. Everything was coming apart.

I went to my secretary’s desk because I couldn’t bear the thought of my father’s. I called the funeral home. If the mortician felt strange talking to me, it didn’t show in his voice. It was liquid and measured, as if poured from one of the glass containers I always imagined filling the basement of his mortuary. Not to worry, he told me. All I needed to provide was a date for the service. Everything else was arranged.

“By whom?” I asked.

“Your father. He provided for everything.”

“When?”

The mortician paused, as if speaking of the dead in anything but quiet respect required careful consideration.

“Some time ago,” he said.

“What about the casket?”

“Chosen.”

“The plot?”

“Chosen.”

“The eulogy? The music? The headstone?”

“All provided for by your father,” the mortician said. “He was, I assure you, quite thorough in his preparations.” He paused. “In all respects, the perfect gentleman and the perfect client. He spared no expense.”

“No. He wouldn’t.”

“Is there any other way in which I might be of assistance to you in this difficult time?”

He had asked that question so many times, I felt the insincerity of it even through the phone.

“No,” I said. “No, thank you.”

His voice deepened. “Then may I suggest that you call again? Once things have settled down. All I require is the date you wish for the service to be held.”

“Fine,” I said. “I’ll do that.” I almost hung up, but then I asked the question that had lurked in my mind for the past minute. “Who did my father choose to deliver the eulogy?”

The mortician seemed surprised. “Why, you, of course.”

“Of course,” I said. “He would.”

“Will there be anything else?”

“No. Thank you.”

I put the phone down and sat in silence. Could I deliver his eulogy? Perhaps. But could I say what he would want me to say? When Ezra made his choice, I was a different man, his monkey boy and the repository of his truth. Through my words, he would live one more time, and do it so that all present would remember and be humbled. This is why he’d chosen me, because he had made me, and because he was sure of his craft. Yet my words were merely that, and memories dim with time. So he’d created the Ezra Pickens Foundation, through which his name would live in perpetuity. But still that was not enough, thus the fifteen-million-dollar bribe, to ensure that I would continue his grand tradition.

I wanted to throw my arms around him, tell him that in some small way I would always love him, and then beat him half to death. For what is the price of vanity, or the cost of immortality? A name is just a name, whether it’s carved in flesh or in marble; it can be remembered in many ways, and not all are good. All we’d wanted was a father, someone who gave a damn.

I rested my head on the desk, on wood that was cool and hard. I turned my cheek to it and spread out my hands. It made me think of high school. I closed my eyes, smelled erasers, like singed rubber, and the room melted away. I was in the past.

It was our first time; I was fifteen, Vanessa was a senior. Rain stuttered on the tin roof, but the barn at Stolen Farm was dry, and her skin shone palely in the premature twilight. When lightning flashed, it illuminated the world outside and sealed us in our private place. We were explorers, and when the thunder roared, it did so for us, louder each time, keeping pace with our bodies. Below us, in stalls that smelled of straw, horses stamped their hooves as if they knew and approved. I could still smell her. I could hear her voice.

Do you love me?

You know I do.

Say it.

I love you.

Say it again. Keep saying it.

So I did-three syllables, a rhythm, like our bodies had a rhythm. Then her voice was in my ear. It was soft. It said my name, Jackson, again and again, until it filled me, a spirit.

And then it was louder.

I opened my eyes and was back in my office. I looked up and she was there, flesh and blood, in the doorway. I was scared to blink for fear that she might simply vanish.

“Vanessa?”

She wrapped her arms around herself and stepped into the room. She seemed to solidify as she moved, as if she carried some new reality into the one I’d come to loathe. I wiped at my eyes, still fearing the emptiness of vision.

“I thought you might need a friendly face,” she said, and her voice passed through me like the ghost of a loved one long dead. I thought of the things she needed to hear-of my wrongness, of my need, and of my sorrow.

But my voice betrayed me and rang harsh in the pregnant stillness. “Where’s your new man?” I asked, and her face melted into that of a stranger.

“Don’t lash out at me, Jackson. This is hard enough as it is. I almost didn’t come.”

I found my feet. “I don’t know why I said that. I’m sorry. It’s none of my business anyway.” I paused, looked at her as if she might still disappear. “I’m an idiot, Vanessa. I barely know myself anymore.” I reached out with empty hands and she stopped, safe on the other side of the room. I let my arms drop. “I feel transparent. I can’t hold on to my thoughts.” I pictured the shattered phone, the hole in the wall. “Everything’s coming apart.” I stopped speaking, but she finished my thought.

“It’s been hard.”

“Yes.”

“It’s been hard for me, too,” she said, and I saw the truth of her words. The skin was stretched over the bones of her face, pulled tight by her own problems. Her eyes looked hollow and deep, and I saw new lines around her mouth.

“I tried to call you,” I said. “No one answered.”

She lifted her chin. “I didn’t want to talk to you. But then this happened. I thought you might need somebody. I thought… maybe…”

“You thought right,” I said.

“Let me finish. I’m not here to be your girlfriend or your mistress. I’m here to be your friend, because nobody should have to deal with this alone.”

I dropped my eyes. “Everybody acts like I did it. People look away from me.”

“What about Barbara?” Vanessa asked.

“She’s using this against me. A weapon.” I looked away. “It’s over between us,” I said. “I won’t go back to her.”

“Does she know?” Vanessa asked. She had reason for skepticism; I’d often spoken of leaving Barbara.

I lifted my head, found Vanessa’s eyes, and tried to communicate directly through them. I wanted her to know the truth of what I said. “She hasn’t accepted it. But she knows it.”

“I suppose she blames me?”

“Yes, even though I told her different. She can’t accept the truth.”

“Ironic,” Vanessa said.

“What?”

“Not long ago, I would have welcomed the blame. If it meant we could be together.”

“But not now,” I said.

“No. Not now.”

I wanted to say something to make those words go away, but I was so close to losing her, and the thought of such utter aloneness paralyzed me.

Vanessa’s face had paled and her lips made a thin line as she watched me search for words and fail.

“I’m thirty-eight years old,” she said. “Almost forty.” She walked across the room, confronted me over the desk. “I’ve only wanted three things in this life, Jackson, just three: the farm, children, and you.”

She paled further, as if her blood had suddenly thinned. Her eyes looked enormous. I knew what this was costing her.

“I wanted you to be the father of my children. I wanted us to be a family.” A tear escaped and she wiped it away before it could get very far. “I loved you more than I thought a woman could love a man. Since childhood, Jackson. My entire life. We had what few people ever do; it would have been so right. And then you left me, just like that, after almost ten years. And you married Barbara. That damn near killed me, but I dealt with it. I got over you. But then you started coming around-once a month, twice a month, but I didn’t care. You were there, with me again, and that was all that mattered. I knew that you loved me, even when you used me. Then Ezra disappeared, and you came to me that night, the night your mother died. I gave you everything I had. I held you. I poured myself into you, made your pain my own. Do you remember?”