He left our family - my mother, my three older sisters and me - when I was four years old and didn't re-enter my life until almost a decade later when my mother, against her better judgement, allowed me to spend a summer in New Orleans where my father hustled a living with his half brother, James Joseph Pelikan. When I told my mother yesterday that Dad had called from a hospice and wanted me to come visit him before he died, she said it's probably a trick, he's not dying for real, he wants money, don't give him any, don't go see him, don't give him the satisfaction.
That single summer ... stretched into three years, from when I was thirteen until just before I turned sixteen, years that broke my mother's heart and programmed me for life.