Shortly after Anne moved out, I falsely promised my mother I would consult a shrink. I lifted the name 'Polson' from a Montana road map, and awarded my fictitious psychiatrist an array of lofty credentials from Geneva, Hamburg and Bellevue. I pretended to attend two private sessions a month, and in bogus updates I assured my mother that the man was brilliant, and that he regarded my lightning progress as phenomenol.
'I would gladly go back to Dr. Polson,' I tell her, 'If he wasn't lying in ICU at Broward General.'
'What?'
'The details are sketchy, but evidently a deranged patient assaulted him with an industrial garlic press. It's very tragic.'

A familiar frostiness creeps into my mother's voice.
'I wish you could hear yourself from where I sit. Surely there's someone you can talk, someone who could help ....'
'There is someone,' I say 'You, Mom. You could tell me what happened to my father.'