Sky Harbor Road

             Sometimes I fool myself into thinking that at some point during the summer my father-in-law and I finally sparked some kind of connection, no matter how brief it may have been, but then I remember how, in a fit of anger, he almost got us both killed and how every time I took him up to Sky Harbor Road he refused to acknowledge my existence, as if I were his personal taxi driver with whom he wanted no association. If ever there was something between us, I never felt it and he never showed it. I swear I just about bent over backwards trying to help lift his spirits, but the old man was dead weight. It was like trying to shove a beached whale back into the surf. He was nothing if not impossible.
             It was my wife’s bright idea one day, in an attempt to build up our relationship, for me to take her father up to Sky Harbor Road where he could see the city lights. I really, really didn’t want to do it, but Peggy can be pretty persuasive when she wants to be. Her strategy goes something like this: “Will you please take him?” “No way.” “Pretty please, with sugar on top?” “Huh-uh.” “C’mon, for me?” “I said no.” “I won’t quit bugging you until you say you will.” “I know.” “Then please.” “No.” “I can go on like this all night.” “What’s for dinner tonight?” “I won’t tell you until you agree to take him.” “Peggy, I won’t.” “Then I won’t feed you until you agree to take him.” “I’ll starve then.” And we go on like that until she’s found something that I need and she won’t hand it over until I give in. She learned persistency from her kindergarten class. No one can teach you how to snap a person’s will like a group of five-year olds. She sure didn’t learn it from our girls—they were conducting experiments with ant trails on their windowsills before they could even speak.
             Sky Harbor Road, in case you’re not familiar with it, is a road that dead ends at the edge of a mountain in the foothills of the Sierras. It offers a pretty decent view of the stars and sky, the valley below, and, of course, the city lights. I, however, had never really noticed any of those things before I started taking my father-in-law up there because every time I had gone previously I was lying in the backseat of a car with some girl’s leg wrapped around my own. It is a truly wonderful Mecca for the young and horny. Peggy and I made a couple of trips together in college when all of the good parking spots out by the airport were taken. As you can see, taking my father-in-law up to inspiration point (as those sorts of places were called back in his day) couldn’t possibly have been anything less than painful for me.
             But that’s not even close to the end of my humiliation. Oh, no. My wife insisted that I take him up there in the Moon Buggy. Even if you don’t know about Sky Harbor Road, you would have to have at least heard of the infamous Moon Buggy. Since I was kid I had always wanted a dune buggy and because I was going through a midlife crisis at the time (which my wife considers to be the greatest hoax in history next to Bigfoot), I convinced Peggy to let me get it for the girls. The only problem with it, that I could see anyway, was that the previous owner had painted the entire solar system on the body of the car, complete with an asteroid belt over the rear passenger side tire. We’re talking Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto, not to mention the stars and comets and all that other crap that’s floating around somewhere out there too. I had intended on getting the car repainted when I got it home, but the girls wouldn’t hear of it. They put their heads together in my oldest one’s bedroom one afternoon and wrote out a list of reasons why I should keep the buggy just the way it was. My favorite argument of theirs was listed as number 4: You can’t repaint the Moon Buggy because it is the only thing in your life right now that has character—besides us. What could I say to that? I try to give them the world and they want the solar system.
             They even conned me into using it to take them to school in the mornings so they could show their friends what a bitchin’ ride their old man had. And because I was driving it to drop off the girls, it also meant that I was taking it to work, where my fellow cubicle moles continually harassed me about it. Their greetings always went something like this: “Hey, stellar ride, Pottorf!” “Like, astronomical, dude!” “Hey Pottorf, you should have traded your Oldsmobile in for a Saturn instead of Uranus!” Then they’d start with the moon jokes and I swear they’d actually unbuckle their belts, untuck their short sleeve button shirts, and bare their white asses right there in the parking lot. It makes me feel somewhat superior knowing that I am indeed the only employee at Indemnity Incorporated that acts his age.
             The first night I took my father-in-law, Les, up to Sky Harbor Road in the Moon Buggy, I made sure it was nice and dark outside so that even if the other motorists were able to see the colorful orbs floating around on the surface of the car, they wouldn’t be able to see the moron driving it. At least that was my main concern until we actually got up there. I saw a different side of Les that evening, a side of him that I never would have thought existed, one that I wish had remained buried somewhere in the deep recesses of his old, miserable soul. When Peggy moved him in with us he moped around our house like a sloth in its natural habitat, relying on its surroundings and lack of movement for camouflage. He was like an automaton, simply going through the motions of the day: He would wake up and sit at the edge of his bed and wait for someone to herd him into the bathroom where, after he peed all over the toilet seat, either Peggy or I would wet down his hair with a spray bottle and slick it back for him, make him pop back in his set of chops (he’d go the whole day without his teeth if we didn’t make him put them in), button up his shirt and trousers, and set him somewhere around the house, out of everyone’s way, until it was feeding time or he needed to be hosed down and put to bed.
             It wasn’t until that first night when I took my father-in-law up the mountain that I realized he wasn’t really a crotchety old man who couldn’t do things for himself at all—it was simply a case of missing motivation, which he suddenly found up there at Sky Harbor Road. His energy that night “rivaled” the lights of the city itself. When I parked the buggy, he threw open the door and slid out of the seat all by himself. His coarse white hair was electric, wild—as was what little was left of mine—and he scuffled out beyond the end of the asphalt to behold the expanse of twinkling pixie dust that Pacific Gas and Electric had illuminated before us. I called to him to stay away from the rocky ledge, but he stood right out there on the dirt letting the wind blow his clothes lopsided without even feeling it. I wanted to go out there too, right out to the edge with him, you know, to make sure he didn’t fall or anything, but I was, well, a little afraid. Partly because I have a problem with heights (ever since I went to rescue Peggy’s dumb cat from the roof of her old apartment building and she ended up having to call the fire department to rescue me) and partly because when I looked at Les I could hear the maniacal voice of Doctor Frankenstein exclaiming, “It’s alive!” Seriously, when I would run over his foot with a grocery cart at the supermarket he wouldn’t even look at me, let alone holler out in pain. Before that trip I had thought of the old man as something that was all used up, like a lawnmower or cassette player that you keep around and maintain for sentimental value, even after the warranty has expired. So what could I have done, or said for that matter, to a man who after awakening from a two year mental coma was singing songs that the evening breeze carried down into the moonlit valley? I just leaned against the car—not the kind of lean that you’d expect from James Dean or someone cool; it was more like supporting my weight with both hands on the open door—and stood in awe of this man, my father-in-law, who I expected at any moment to start spinning around with his arms outstretched, singing about how the hills were alive with the sound of music.
             If any of the couples in the cars around us witnessed what happened that night, they never said a peep. As for me, I went home and reported back to my wife, telling her everything that occurred up on that mountain. “Good,” she said. “Then you’ll be taking him twice a week from now on.” “Maybe you didn’t hear what I said. He went fucking nuts. Bonkers. The kids that were parked up there didn’t attempt an escape only because they were too petrified with fear.” “Nonsense. He loved it, that’s all.” “Yeah, well, I’m not taking him again.” “Yes, you are.” “No, I’m not.” “Yes, you are.” “No, I’m not.” Now you know as well as I do that I was fighting a losing battle, but what I didn’t know (and yet should have, being that Peggy is my wife and therefore has been blackmailing me for years) was that she was about to throw out one of her coup d’ etat hypotheticals. “Harold, how would you feel if I died and you had to go live with Tasha and her husband who, I might add, didn’t really have the means to take care of you, and her husband treated you like a wretched old man just because you occasionally had an accident on the way to the bathroom?” “Tasha is eight years old.” “You know what I mean!”
             So I took him out every Tuesday and Thursday night after that and, like one of those rare, delicate flowers that only opens up under the light of the full moon, Les would transform from a lonely old widower into a babbling baby. I bore witness to this freakish phenomenon every time we went up and, let me tell you, it was quite a sight. The transformation itself wasn’t all that dramatic—it wasn’t like the wolf man, howling in pain as his body metamorphisized into a hideous beast, or like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde where he threw himself around a laboratory shattering glass and destroying things. It was more like a sleepy child, whose head had been bobbling in the car seat during the ride, arriving at the entrance of the happiest place on earth and seeing Mickey Mouse standing at the gates, waiting for him with open arms. It really was that instantaneous. He never said a word on the drive up, just stuck his arm out over the side of the car and bared his dentures to the wind. He would speak to me about as much as I would speak to him, which rarely ever went beyond monosyllables. I never had anything to do with the joy he felt when he got up on that ledge; I was merely the vehicle.

* * *

             For the most part Les never bothered anyone else that went up there and they never bothered him. But one time he got the bright idea of going from car to car knocking on all the windows, waving his arms in the air like a lunatic. Most of the poor kids ignored him and his mad rambling, but one scraggly group of teenagers did get out of their van to see what was going on. They must have been having an orgy or something in this Volkswagen bus because five boys and two girls came tumbling out the back doors with a trail of smoke in tow. When Les realized that he actually had an audience, he took a chubby stubbly-headed kid by the arm and led him over to the ledge of the mountain. The rest of the gang followed silently. I watched as his bodily movements transformed before my very eyes. His gestures were no longer wooden and marionette-like, but fluid like a maestro as he carried on about something that seemed, judging by the expressions on their stoned faces, to be utterly profound. In just a few minutes he had all seven of those kids standing out in the dirt, gawking at the nighttime city that they worked at, lived in, and saw everyday of their lives. I think I must have been the only one to even notice, from where I sat in the buggy, the girl with the pink dyed hair blowing chunks over the side of the mountain.
             I couldn’t wrap my head around (and still can’t) how those kids were able to connect with the old man that night. My father-in-law hasn’t so much as farted in my direction since he moved into our place. And I tried to reach him at first; I really did. In the evenings, after a long day at the office, I would get out my lucky cards from college (which were really only my semi-lucky cards since my real lucky deck, the one that helped me strip down over twenty-three poker playing, beer guzzling girls in the dormitory my freshman year, had mysteriously disappeared after I told Peggy about my incredible winning streak) and perform card tricks for the old man, fanning them out in front of his downcast face, choosing a card for him since he wouldn’t pick one for himself, placing it back in the pile, and shuffling the deck a few times only to amazingly come up with the original card that I chose for him in the first place.
             Because he wasn’t responding to my magic tricks I thought maybe I had been going about the whole thing the wrong way. So I began doing other little things for him, things that I thought would be more meaningful. One evening I dug up his old Air Force medals and gave them a good polish. I left them on the dresser where he would see them when he came to bed, but by morning they had disappeared, never to be seen again. So then I plugged in the old phonograph player that Peggy brought with him from his old apartment. I put it beside his bed with a stack of albums (most of which dated back from before I was born), but they just collected dust like everything else in his room. I’ll tell you, the phonograph was a real sacrifice on my part too. All I needed was one more thing making noise around the house. When I come home in the evening Peggy will be running the dishwasher or vacuum, my littlest likes to compose music with a spoon and half-filled glasses of water, and my oldest will sit for hours at a time analyzing cassette recordings of humpback whales making their mating noises and whatnot.
             As much as I tried my father-in-law never responded to anything. I understand that his wife passed away and that they had been together for a good forty years, but life goes on. However dismal and meaningless it may seem, we still have to live it. That’s what I learned from my midlife crisis anyway.

* * *

              Les eventually did find something that would awaken his spirit and, naturally, it had nothing to do with me. I had been sitting in the buggy for about half an hour (our trips usually took anywhere from an hour to an hour and a half) when I noticed a big, round floral print butt over on the side of the road, just beyond a couple of parked cars. As I squinted into the darkness, curious as to whether this posterior hovering above the dirt had a body to go with it, I was slowly able to make out the form of a small Asian woman. She clutched a bundle of roots or weeds or something in one hand and held a pair of orange handled stationary scissors in the other. When she crouched down she bent over quickly, like a hen pecking, and popped right back up with another shrub to add to her collection. As if my father-in-law wasn’t madness enough, now there was some crazy plant killer (probably an escapee from the local nuthouse) roaming the mountainside with a pair of scissors and a really bad perm.
             As she made her way toward my father-in-law—crouch, bend, cut, crouch, bend, cut—I whispered for him to get back to the car, but he either didn’t hear me or, what’s more likely, he didn’t want to. I would have gone to get him, but I didn’t think he would come anyway, and besides, I have to admit I was morbidly curious as to what might happen when these two stumbled upon each other. When they did come face to face, it was the wildest thing, as if he had been waiting there for her all that time. “Good evening, my dear,” he said. “You in my way, sir.” “Have you come to see the city lights?” “Light too bright. Moon all I need.” After a moment, in which they both looked each other over, she asked, “How you get here?” “In the Moon Buggy,” he said. She turned her head in my direction and, like a cockroach, I instinctively scampered around the side of the car, crouching beside Jupiter. “Your car very pretty,” she said. “Thank you.” “That man hiding, he with you?” “Yes.” “Very strange situation here,” she said, nodding, as if she had made up her mind about something.
             That’s how it all began. Les met with this woman every time we went back up there and although in some ways their meetings seemed awkward and strange, they always acted comfortably around each other and talked as if they had been friends for years. At first she kept returning under the pretense of collecting the mint that grew on the side of the mountain, bearing her scissors and colorful outfits for all to see, but after a while (when she had cut down half of the foliage and greenery that that lined the road and spread out over the outlying terrain) she began showing up empty handed, always approaching my father-in-law with the same greeting, “You here again?” To which he would reply, sometimes with his hand placed sappily over his heart, “I would be perfectly content to die here.”
             After about three weeks of this, I noticed, looking up from an extremely vague and unimpressive astrological prediction (as I had taken to reading the newspaper by flashlight on our little excursions) that the old man was putting the moves on the Asian woman. Honest to God. At least in the world of senior citizenry it would be considered making a play. While he muttered on about something under his breath, and she giggled like a little girl having her toes tickled, he took her hand and held it for a good five minutes or so. And she didn’t even seem particularly put out. I couldn’t believe what I was witnessing—the courting rituals of the old and lonely. It was like watching one of those programs on the Discovery channel and seeing for the first time how some rare and exotic animal communicates to the other sex that it’s ready to mate and going, “So that’s how they do that!”
             On the drive back down I had to try and pump the old man for some information—I was just that fascinated. Here’s the approach I decided to take: “Les, I was thinking we shouldn’t come up here anymore. I mean, it’s the same old thing every time. You wouldn’t even miss it after a couple of days.” I knew it was the only way to get him to talk. “How dare you,” he said. “What?” I said. “What do you mean?” “You know what I mean.” I shifted gears and shrugged a little, but I don’t think he noticed. “So what’s her name,” I asked. I knew he didn’t want to tell me, but I had to know. For once I had an overwhelming desire to know something about my father-in-law’s life and for some reason I had to know all about it right then. It’s like holding a grudge against a co-worker that you’ve never really become acquainted with and you find out something interesting about him—maybe he was cheating on his wife with the new bombshell from underwriting and ran off with her while his wife was in the delivery room giving birth to his quintuplets—and you want to know all about his mischievous goings on, but you can’t get the gory details because then you would have to break your vow of silence and actually introduce yourself to him. Okay, not the best analogy, but it’ll work.
             “Duyen,” he said. “That’s her name?” He didn’t say anything then, but I knew it was. “Where’s she from?” “Vietnam.” “I mean, what’s her story?” That’s when things got a little out of hand. You wouldn’t think that there could be much the old man could do that would scare the living daylights out of me, but if you were to sit down right now and write out a list of the top ten insane things he could have done, I guarantee this would have been number one.
             “Holy shit, Les! Shut the door!” I reached over, grabbing the sleeve of his jacket, and practically pulled him across the seat, over the stick shift, which luckily popped out of gear, and onto my lap. The buggy veered off the road onto a dirt turnoff near some pastures, kicking up a cloud of dust and stuttering to a stop shortly before colliding with a wooden fence post. I let go of Les’s windbreaker and pushed him back into his seat. He was visibly shaken, whether it be because he had nearly gotten us killed or was waiting for me to kill him, so I stepped out of the car and went around to the passenger side to close his door. I noticed that Neptune and Pluto had incurred some damage and hoped that they would be excuse enough to finally slap a new coat of paint on the buggy.
             Once the passenger side door had been closed, and I helped adjust his body in the seat so that he sat upright, I went around behind the car and kicked at the dirt and gravel like an angry umpire. I thrust myself into a cloud of smoke and whirlwind of expletives for two whole minutes before I dusted off my Dockers and got back in the car. Needless to say, the ride home was silent. The old man slouched against the door with his hands between his legs, his eyes cast down, watching the blur of dark asphalt race beside the buggy. I glanced over at him every few minutes to make sure that he wasn’t going to attempt any other crazy stunts, but also to make sure he was alright. For a moment there I had considered telling Peggy all about his stupid suicide attempt to show her once and for all how much he needed to be put into a nursing home. I imagined storming inside, leaving the old man sitting in the parked car, and yelling things like, “Your father just crossed the line,” or “You won’t believe what your father has done this time.” Then I would have spilled the beans on him, told her how he almost threw himself out of a moving vehicle, practically killing us both in the process. I would serve up that ultimatum that I had dreamt about for months—“It’s either him or me, Peggy, which will it be?” But the truth was I did feel a little bad about what happened. After all, it was kind of my fault. I would never have admitted that to Peggy, and especially not to Les, but even now I feel a tinge of guilt every time I think about that night.
             When Peggy asked me how the evening went I told her it was fine. “Was the Asian woman there again?” she asked. I had been telling her about the woman that Les was meeting up there and she had been happy to hear that he was talking to someone. I know she very badly wanted to see her old man with the Asian lady, but she knew as well as I did that her going up there with us would have disrupted the harmony of the whole experience (if you can call it that). There could only be one chaperone and I was the unfortunate appointee.
             Earlier in the evening I had planned on telling her all about her father putting the moves on the woman, (this was before I had considered ruining his life by filling her in on the more recent news) but that idea didn’t seem so exciting anymore. “No,” I said. “She never showed.” “Hmm. I wonder what happened to her.” I knew Peggy was expecting a response, that she would have liked to chide me for making some witty remark like, “Maybe she was busy wokking her dog,” or something like that, but by that time I had gotten into bed, pulled the covers up to my neck, and turned to face the wall.

* * *

             I wish I could tell you that things changed between the old man and me after the incident, but they didn’t. In fact, things stayed exactly as they were. The drive up to Sky Harbor that next Tuesday was just as silent as every other trip had been, only this time I was a little less concerned about being seen in the buggy and more concerned about Peggy’s father, who, I realized as I thought about him over the weekend, had built up a barrier between himself and everyone around him. He was fortified in a dreary little cubicle, not so unlike the one that I work in every day, and I was taking him to see the one person that somehow managed to penetrate those defenses. The Asian woman was the key to the old man’s heart and I was merely the means to an end. Maybe Peggy and the girls couldn’t get across to Les, and I sure as hell didn’t mean anything to him, but I was the one that took him to see the one person who seemed to matter in his life. I was the official transporter.
             When I pulled the buggy up at the end of the road the Asian woman was standing there in the dirt, waiting for Les. She was wearing a traditional Vietnamese dress that was high at the neck and low to the ankles. The dress was several shades of green, like a cucumber, and the fabric was especially ornate; there were diagonal patterns of jeweled flowers, orchids or lilies or something, across the top of the dress that sparkled in the headlights of the buggy. Instead of carrying a handful of mint, which she sometimes brought for the old man who would sniff at the bundle as if it were a bouquet of roses, she held a cluster of what looked like white chrysanthemums. Had it not been for the bad perm she would have appeared at least twenty years younger than she was.
             Les let himself out of the car and walked up to meet her. They stood facing each other in the darkness for what seemed like forever. I pretended to read my paper, but I watched their every move. Tonight was the night of all nights. She had dressed up for him and had waited out on the ledge of the mountain, the way a teenager waits for her prom date at the foot of the stairs. In my head I could hear the low toned whisper of the Discovery channel commentator saying, “Now watch closely as the male sidles up to the female and firmly places his hand on her right buttock.” There was no doubt in my mind that it was to be a special evening—why else would she have gotten all gussied up and waited for the old man at the end of the road with a bouquet of flowers?
             My mind boggled at the limited possibilities. What would they do? What could they do? People their age don’t have sex anymore, and I’m not just making a baseless assumption—as a forty-two year old man who’s married with children, I hardly ever have sex anymore. And even if they did, where would they, you know, do it? I don’t think her bicycle would have anything to offer them in that department and it wasn’t like I was going to give up the Moon Buggy so that a couple of senior citizens could make out in my ride. Sure, they could have shacked up with some kids in one of their cars, but, like I said before, they’re old people. And having been so, they were probably still bound to their old beliefs. Oh, God. What if he had asked her to marry him? Then we would have had two old people to take care of instead of just the one.
            In any case, none of those things happened. What did happen, by the way, was so much more unpredictable and far more embarrassing than any hypothetical situation my imagination could have conjured. They had been standing out by the ledge for well over an hour when a police car pulled up and two officers with flashlights started making their rounds to the parked cars nearby. I watched in horror as one car after another roared to life and trailed back down the hill, as if it were a tailgate party. I did my best to slump down and disappear under the car’s dash, but between the steering wheel and my gut I wasn’t able to get anywhere. I could just see the morning’s headlines: VOYEURIST IN MOON BUGGY ARRESTED ON SKY HARBOR ROAD. Sure, it sounds funny now, but I knew my poor wife and unforgiving kids wouldn’t find it so amusing. I also knew that the guys at the office would find it amusing—hilarious, in fact, and it would be something that I would never live down.
             But for some miraculous reason (divine intervention, perhaps) the cops didn’t swagger over to the buggy to manhandle me or slap cuffs on my wrists and shove me into the back of their cruiser. Instead they approached Les and the Vietnamese woman, shining their flashlights directly into their faces so that both of them had to avert their eyes and turn their heads. I was in half a mind to slide the stick into neutral and silently coast backwards down the road, but I couldn’t abandon my father-in-law. Just like in those Merry Melody cartoons I used to watch when I was a kid, my conscience, in the form of my wife, appeared on my shoulder in a puff of smoke. (I couldn’t tell you if she was wearing horns or a halo, by the way.) I heard her commanding me to get right out of that car and go help her father. “What if you needed help and he was the only person that could help you? How would you feel if he let you down?” God, I hate Peggy’s hypothetical questions.
             I hopped out of the buggy and briskly walked over to the motley group only to receive a blinding beam of light in the face. “Who are you?” a stern voice asked. “I’m Harold Pottorf, officer.” “What are you doing up here?” “It’s a long story, sir.” “What do you say you give us the Cliff’s notes version?” I looked over at Les who was holding the Vietnamese woman’s hand. She was visibly upset over the whole thing and I wanted to get us all out of there as quickly as possible. “This is my father-in-law and his, uh, friend here . . .” I said, searching for an explanation that didn’t sound as ridiculous as the truth. “We all meet up here every once in a while to, uh, gauge the growth of the city and to, uh, check on the air quality of the valley . . .” I couldn’t see the faces behind those bright lights, but they had to be about to burst with laughter. I wouldn’t have even been able to hold the flashlight steady had I found some moron up there with his father-in-law, some Asian lady who was dressed for a festival, and a dune buggy that looked like a third grade science project gone awry. I don’t know if it was the heat of the lights or the blood rushing to my face that suddenly made me feel so hot, but large beads of sweat came trickling down my sideburns and I froze up. I was my father-in-law’s get-out-of-jail-free card and I was totally blowing it. Peggy’s voice kept whispering in my ear, “Say something! Say something!” But at that point I could hardly remember my name, let alone how I got up there and what my involvement was in that whole mess.
             “There’s nothing suspicious going on here, officers. My son-in-law just gave me a ride up the hill so that I could see Duyen. She comes here to pick mint for her family.” As if I hadn’t been in enough shock, I stood there, stunned at the calm and eloquence of my father-in-law. When one of the flashlights shone back on his face I saw that he was playing it cool—acting natural in a completely absurd situation (which was technically unnatural for his character). He patiently waited for the officers to process the information he had given them, holding on to Asian woman’s hand the whole time as if he knew she take off at any second and never come back.
             “You folks will have to find some other place to meet,” one of the officers said. “This isn’t the safest location in town, if you know what I mean,” he indicated with his flashlight the edge of the mountain. With that, they turned around and went back to their cruiser, keeping vigil until we left. I was still a little bit flustered by the whole incident, so I high-tailed it back to the buggy and waited there while Les and the Asian woman said their goodbyes. They only spoke for a few minutes alone and although it was dark I thought I could see tears on the woman’s face. When Les got back to the car he still seemed very sedate, maybe a little morose about our encounter with the fuzz. I took my time turning the car around and heading back down the mountain so the cops wouldn’t think we had pulled something over on them, and also so that Les could watch his girlfriend get on her bike and pedal back up the hill. But once he was in the car he never looked back. He just kept to himself as usual and I thought that’s how it was going to be all the way home. I almost wish it had been.
             Once we were out of the foothills Les said, “Her husband passed away this morning.” Just when I thought I had received all the shock that a person could take for one day, my father-in-law had delivered the second jolt of the evening. I wasn’t sure if he wanted me to say something, but after our last conversation on the road I figured it was better to keep my mouth shut. I kept waiting for more about the Asian lady—I wanted to know what exactly had been going on between them, what the deal was with this husband of hers who practically appeared out of nowhere, why she met the old man up at the point every week, why she hadn’t given him the flowers she brought with her—but that was all he said. I got the sense he only shared that tidbit with me as a courtesy for taking him up there, but it just ended up driving me more crazy with questions that needed to be answered. I secretly think that’s what the old man wanted, to drive me straight up the wall (as if having to baby-sit him a couple nights a week wasn’t sufficient torment).
             I ended up telling Peggy all about what happened that night, but she didn’t find it to be as half as peculiar as I did. “Maybe her husband was sick and she was lonely,” she said. “Maybe he’s still back in Vietnam. Maybe her and Dad were just friends.” But I knew there had to be more to it. Unfortunately I didn’t think another interrogation session would go over well with the old man, so I wasn’t really in a position to find out anymore about it. Especially since, after that night, the Asian woman never returned to Sky Harbor Road. Les and I continued our outings, but they only lasted for a couple of weeks and the city lights now had little effect on him. He would stand out near the ledge for fifteen minutes or so, not really looking at the lights, then come back to the car and ask to go home. I don’t know if he was hoping the Asian woman would come back to meet him or if he just went up there to think some things through, away from the racket of the house. All I know is when he would come back from standing out there, having mostly stared off into the sky instead of down at the city, he would return looking as if everything were no longer illuminated, as if the city was just one big blackout.
             It wasn’t long after that when he asked to be put in a nursing home. Peggy was all broken up about it, but she had known all along that we weren’t able to care of him the way an old folks home could. Every now and then I think about the fact that he was Peggy’s father and not just some geezer that we were obligated to take care of—that he was once to Peggy what I am to my girls. It still doesn’t make much sense to me, seeing as how I never knew him as anything other than a miserable old man who gave me the fright of my life when he nearly leapt out of the Moon Buggy. But that’s the way with family I suppose. Everyone means something different to someone else and no matter how hard you try to like somebody else’s someone, sometimes things just never seem to work out. I know he’s my father-in-law and I worry about him because Peggy wants me to, but we’ll just never get along, Les and me. I thought that if I drove up there one last time, to Sky Harbor Road, I might be able to find a small piece of the connection that was missing between us. Even though it made me uncomfortable, I walked all the way out to the end of the road, where Les would stand in the dirt. I looked down at the lights and up at the sky, but I didn’t see anything that moved me. I don’t think I saw anything remotely close to what he saw when he stood out on that ledge. Whatever it was that brought Les to life up there either went away with him or no longer existed because I didn’t feel anything. Not a damn thing.