“But you might know something that could help us find him,” I say.

“The book is all I have for you. I can tell you that he was a good man, and he was never anything other than kind to me. Or my husband, who was not always kind to him.” She motions toward the book. “He sent me this a year after we met. Go on. Open it.”

On the inside front cover, there’s an inscription. I recognize the shaky handwriting.

She says, “It’s the AA Big Book. Russ sent it to me from San Francisco on his first AA birthday. That’s the anniversary of his first year in the program.”

San Francisco! Now we’re getting somewhere. “Okay,” I say, waiting for the next thing. The big thing that’s going to tell us what to do, where to go next. San Francisco, I guess. But that’s a pretty big place.

“So he got help for his problem,” Lois says.

I nod again. That’s cool. I’m glad my grandfather got help. But then she doesn’t say anything else. “So that’s it?”

Lois looks meek. She shrugs her shoulders. “I thought you’d want the book. I thought you’d want to know that he joined the fellowship of Alcoholics Anonymous. It’s life-changing, you know.”

“Sorry,” I say. “I’m glad. It’s just, I need to find him. I feel like you know something and you’re not telling me, and … I mean, it’s still a dead end. You really won’t tell me about his struggles?”

“That’s not for me to tell.”

I sigh, thinking about the stupid Bible quote. Maybe it’s true that gossip is bad, but I’m not asking for gossip. I’m asking for information about an actual family member so I can find him and save my dad’s life. But Lois doesn’t seem like the kind of old lady who’s going to change her mind. “You sure you don’t know anything else that could help me find him?”

“I’ve found many answers in the book,” she says slowly, and I have no idea what the hell that means, but to her it means something, I guess, because she stands up.

“Bless you both,” she says. “God can, and God will. If you let him.” And then she toddles off.

We sit there, watching her leave, and the only thing she’s told us that’s new is that my grandfather went to San Francisco. But did he stay there? What happened after he stopped writing her? Without any more information, that’s just about nothing.

“Done. Over,” I say. “We’re heading back to Billings.”

Aisha leans back on the bench. “Looks that way.”

I thumb through the book absentmindedly. Two pages after my grandfather’s inscription, on the bottom of the copyright page, is more writing. The writing is circled in a different color of ink.

“Huh,” I say, pointing it out to Aisha.

She looks. “Keep coming back. Turk B.”

“She circled it. That’s a new circle.”

Aisha grabs the book and studies the circle. “Yeah,” she says. “That’s new.”

“I guess she thinks it’s not gossip to just circle something?” Lois is out of sight now, and I have no idea where she went.

“That’s so weird. Religious people can be so weird,” Aisha says.

“What do you suppose the ‘Keep coming back’ part means?”

“I have no clue. Looks like someone gave the book to him before he sent it to Lois.”

“There’s a number,” I say. “No area code.”

Aisha pulls out her phone. “You said he went to San Francisco, right?”

“Yep.”

She Googles it. “The San Francisco area code is four-one-five,” she says. “Give it a try. I mean, it’s from nineteen eighty-something, but —”

“This Turk B. guy could still have a landline. He’s an old person,” I say. My heart is in my throat. I take out my phone and punch in the number. The ring sounds old, which gives me hope. It just rings and rings. I stay on for a full minute, wishing someone would answer.

Finally I hang up. “No dice,” I say to Aisha.

She says, “Wait. Say the number again.”

I repeat it.

“And his name?”

“Turk B. Funny last name.”

“I think they just use initials in AA,” Aisha says as she types in the number. She stares at her screen and then she stands, all her attention on her phone. “Got something.”

“What?” I stand too.

“Turk Braverman. Thirty-six Prosper Street, San Francisco, California, nine-four-one-one-four. Reverse lookup.”

“Turk Braverman,” I repeat. “Okay.”

But then we just stand there, because the number is from thirty-plus years ago. It could easily be an old number. An old address. I mean, I looked up my mom once on whitepages.com, and she was still listed as living in the apartment she grew up in near Columbia University. The guy may not have known my grandfather that well, and he is probably ancient by now. He could be dead, for all I know.

“Google him,” I say, and Aisha does so. The only thing that comes up is an ad for criminal background checks, and that’s for Turk B., not Turk Braverman. Google asks if we mean Tzuriel Braverman, which we definitely don’t.

We map the address. It’s right in the center of San Francisco, near Market Street, which I think is probably a famous street since even I’ve heard of it. Aisha tries to pull up the satellite image on her phone. The webpage spins and spins.

“Maybe Turk Braverman will be, like, standing out in front of his house waving,” I say, and Aisha laughs.

“And underneath it’ll say, ‘Hi, Carson and Aisha, you found me!’ ”

Finally the picture comes up. It’s a block of thin row houses that look like they come from a hundred years ago, with intricate awnings and rickety staircases. There’s an orange one, a light-blue one, and a lime-green one. But what are the odds some guy who wrote “keep coming back” to my grandfather thirty-plus years ago still knows him? And is it worth a long-ass drive just to find out? Would Aisha even go for that?

I look at her, and it’s like she can read my mind. She maps the route. It’s 737 miles, almost eleven hours away, according to Google Maps.

I wince. “Too far?”

“Too far for what?” she asks.

“You wouldn’t be up for —”

“Hell I wouldn’t!”

“You mean —”

“Carson,” she says. “You think I’d rather go back to Billings than drive to San Francisco? Gay mecca of the world?”

She grins. She wants to go. A slow grin crosses my face too.

“Are we going to San Francisco?” she asks.

“We can keep calling the number on the way,” I say, and she nods.

It occurs to me that we have about a hundred dollars left to our name. I try to figure out if that’s enough money for gas to get there. Gas is like $3.50 a gallon.

“How many miles to a gallon of gas does the Neon get?” I ask Aisha.

“About thirty.”

So $3.50 buys thirty miles. Which means seventy dollars buys six hundred miles, and ninety dollars buys seven hundred and fifty miles. Yes. We have barely enough money to get to San Francisco if we don’t eat, which sounds like a bad idea to me. But so does going home, when we have this one shot at finding my granddad.

So I swallow my fear, say nothing about the cash flow situation, and shout, “San Francisco, baby!”

WE STOP AT the West Salt Lake City Flying J, a gas station, because a sign along the highway alerts us that there will not be another gas station for more than a hundred miles.

“How is that even possible?” I ask. “What if you live in between the two?”

“Might be that no one does live there,” Aisha says, and I realize, of course, that I still have an East Coast perspective. Out here, the empty spaces can be as big as Rhode Island. Bigger.