It's a story I'd almost forgotten. Almost forgotten, because I'd never told it to anyone. Because I knew other people wouldn't understand the lesson. All they'd see was my father's actions, and then label it cruelty. For 36 years it has been my secret. And my father's. And now these silly women, Bonnie and Molly, are telling it to me and all my drunken friends.

No way was I going to give them any satisfaction. While Ina sobbed, I drank more wine. I smiled and shrugged, saying it was all very interesting prattle. A few minutes later, one of the women fell to the floor, ill, and asked for help getting to her car. The party broke up, and Ina and I stayed behind to finish the wine.

It was disappointing, really, that stupid party. Watching my friends take this nonsense seriously. I can't explain Bonnie and Molly's little magic trick, but there's so much in the world I can't explain.

The night my father was killed, hundreds of miles away, my mother had a dream. She said my father knocked at her door, begging her to hide him. In her dream, he'd been shot in the side -- a year later, the coroner would confirm this -- and he was trying to escape from a man with a gun. Instead of hiding him, my mother shut the door in his face.

That same night, one of my sisters dreamed she was walking through the desert where we grew up. She was walking beside our father, telling him she was sorry they'd grown apart and not spoken recently.

That night he died, I didn't have any dream. No one came to me in my sleep to say goodbye.

Oh, I'd love to believe in an invisible world. It would undermine all the suffering and pressure of the physical world. But it would also negate the value of the money I have in the bank, my decent house, and all my hard work. All our problems and all our blessings could be readily dismissed because they'd be no more real than plot events in a book or movie. An invisible, eternal world would render this world an illusion.

Really, the spirit world is like pedophilia or necrophilia: I have no experience with it so I am completely unable to take it seriously. It will always seem like a joke.

There are no ghosts.

But if there are, my dad should damn well tell me himself.