I awaken bitter in the late spring afternoon. The sunlight pinches my eyes. I feel the sweat and filth of my midday nap engulf me. I recollect the details of a dream. In it I am 15 and my father is dead and I am living with my mother and sister in a house that is much too large for a orphaned family of three, much larger even than the obscene size of the house we really had. In it I wander halls that seem to go on forever. I come to a door, the only one I have seen on my quest. I open it and my grandmother stumbles into my arms, as though she had fallen asleep leaning against the door and had been startled awake as I opened it. “How is your father?" she asks, "how is your father?" He died, I say. She collapses, slips from my arms to the floor. And then I wake up. My father is alive and well and living in Cleveland. I glance through the window blinds at the cherry blossom tree on my lawn, shedding its leaves to the summer sun.
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