That night I went to bed with the key in my mouth. I was sucking on it like Carter Junior sucking on his thumb. It tasted like a damp old penny you find under a rock, all mossy and dirty-tasting. It was salty, and when I had worked the crud and flavor off one side I turned it over with my tongue and sucked on the other side. I fell asleep with that key in my mouth and when I woke up it was still there. I must have been sucking on it all night because when I pulled it out in the morning it was no longer mossy and dull. I had stripped everything off the key and now it was as bright and shiny as a brass button.

I hopped out of bed and went into the kitchen. Olivia had been up. The pizza box was open. The last slice was gone but Dad had not come back to eat it. When I looked out the window Olivia was back to posing in the yard. Her crumb-covered right hand was held up by her ear while the birds fluttered midair and darted down in turns to peck crumbs off her palm. In her other arm she held Carter Junior over her shoulder as if he was a sack of rice. He was smacking his lips as he gummed that last slice of special pizza. A bird hovered over his head.

I strolled out to see her, and the birds scattered into the trees.

“You ruined it,” she said, hearing me.

“Ruined what?” I asked.

“I was thinking about Helen Keller,” she said thoughtfully, “and I was telling myself to count my blessings because I can hear birds, and she could not, and I bet if she could have heard birds chirping she’d have been thrilled.”

“That’s very pawzzz-i-tive,” I said in a hugely positive way so she could hear my hugely positive smile.

“Mom always said to be grateful for what you have,” she said. “I do try, but sometimes I lose hope.”

“I know what you mean,” I replied. “I should be happy with just having Mom and Carter Junior but I want Dad too—as nutty as he is.”

“Well, you can have your dad,” she said. “Just give me Carter Junior because he is a good influence on me. It’s impossible to be a grump when I’m with him.”

“He is the perfect Buddha-Baby positive Pigza,” I remarked.

“Yep,” she said, and kissed his head. “Babies make me happy.”

“What about me?”

“You make me happy when you don’t act like a baby,” she said.

I reached out and pressed the key into her hand. “As for the imperfect Pigza,” I said, “he dropped his apartment key last night.”

“And I bet you’re insane enough to try to find him?” she said without enthusiasm.

“Every door in town,” I replied with conviction. “Once an idea gets inside me it’s like I become the idea in motion, and the only thing that will fix me will be to fix him or my head will explode.”

“But while you are out looking for him, he knows where to look for you. Does he have a key to this house?” she asked.

“Mom had the locks changed,” I said, “and got a meat cleaver.”

“Then I’ll stay here with Carter Junior,” she said. “But if he breaks through that cardboard front door, I’ll get the meat cleaver and fix his face my way.”

“You could only make it better,” I said.

Just then the kitchen phone rang. I swiped the key from Olivia’s hand and ran back inside the house. I didn’t have to be an oracle to know who it would be. I picked up the phone and could hear his clammy breathing. “You have my key,” he said. “Give it back.”

“You ruined our family,” I said. “Give that back.”

“I’ll leave you alone if you give me the key,” he offered.

“You’ll never leave us alone,” I replied. “You always say you will, but you never do.”

“Show me some respect—I’m your dad,” he replied.

“Earn some,” I said right back. “Nobody hates you. We’re just afraid of you, which is confusing because we love you.”

“Just be a man and bring the key to Antonio’s,” he said roughly.

I was going to yell back, Just be a man and say you love us, but he hung up on me first. I hate being hung up on.

Now I really wanted to fix him. Just then I noticed the microwave door was open and a gang of roaches were gathered inside. I slammed the door shut and hit the popcorn button. I stuck my fingers in my ears. Even though roaches don’t scream I can hear their pretend screams.

When Dad tells me to be a man he’s really telling himself to be one, and when he says he is happy to be away from us I can hear that he is not. I think he is screaming to grow up and come back to us—the only thing is, he never listens to himself.

I got dressed and said goodbye to Olivia and Carter Junior, then headed out. I wasn’t sure what I was going to do when I saw him so I figured I better think of a plan.

Over the summer while Mom was so depressed in bed and holed up in her room with Carter Junior I spent a lot of time out of the house trying to come up with a plan to find Dad. At first I just started running up and down the streets as if I might bump into him. I wasn’t even sure I would talk to him, but I imagined playing something like tag where I ran by and slapped him on the back and shouted, “Tag! You’re it!” and then I’d turn around and blast off like a giggling maniac and he’d chase after me and we’d both zigzag back and forth across the street as if we were lacing up a tall boot. Finally he would follow me into the house and tag me—but I wouldn’t let him go. He’d be trapped in there like a wild horse in a corral and I could tame him and then we could run through the town together with me riding on his back and he’d be totally under my control.

That plan never worked. As I continued to roam the streets I saw a lot of dad-duds I thought were him. I’d run by a diner and glance in the windows. There were always a lot of blank-looking guys hunched over cups of coffee and sandwiches but none with Dad’s patchwork face. When I passed a corner store that sold lottery tickets I always gave the guys slouching in the doorway a second look because playing the lottery was Dad’s favorite game.

I’d run up and down the lines of homeless men waiting for a handout from the shelter at Saint Francis. I jogged by a man stretched out on a sheet of folded cardboard. He had a filthy scarf loosely wrapped around his face. Through the opening I could see two eyes balled up into small dark fists. He was about the right scrawny size as Dad and as I circled him he unwrapped his stiff scarf and glared at me.

But it wasn’t my dad. “Wrong face,” I yelped as he snatched at my sneaker with one hand like it was the edge of a cliff.

I felt bad for him but he did give me an idea. I wrapped white toilet paper around my head and kept it tight with a few rubber bands. I separated a few of the edges around my eyes so I could see, and lifted a little flap under the tip of my nose so I could breathe, and I opened a gap for a mouth. I didn’t want much of me to show. I got some ketchup and mixed it with garden dirt and rubbed that on the toilet paper to make it look as if I had been bleeding and dizzy and had fallen down and was hurt. This is what I figured Dad must have looked like at some time.

Then I got a piece of cardboard out of the trash and with a marker I wrote in big letters:

HIT MY HEAD!

LOST MY MEMORY.

DO YOU KNOW WHERE I LIVE?

I walked downtown to an old section by the farmers’ market and held up the sign. I wasn’t asking for money. I was just asking how I might find my dad. But no matter how many streets I ran up and down and how many windows I looked into or how long I sat pretending to have amnesia, I still couldn’t find Dad or anyone who knew where he was. He had vanished behind that new face, which was so repulsive that people wanted to forget it.

But then, just when I thought I’d never find him, he came to my front door and now I had his house key and knew he worked at Antonio’s pizza. All I needed was the other piece of the key—the lock.

So I jogged down Chestnut Street to Antonio’s parking lot and crouched down behind a car fender and spied on him just as he had been spying on us. Every few minutes a big hat would slowly jut out the side kitchen door and the dark shadow of his face would stare down the street as if I was dumb enough to show up and stick the key into his hand.

After a while he stepped outside and was smoking a cigarette with another delivery guy when his boss leaned out the door and said, “Hey, Pigza, run these pizzas up to the college dorm.”

Dad snuffed his cigarette out on the bottom of his shoe and hustled into the kitchen. He came out with a stack of pizzas and got into the Antonio’s delivery truck.

Once he was out of sight I trotted over to the kitchen door where the other guy was still smoking.

“Is Mr. Fong around?” I asked.

“He only works nights,” the guy said.

“Oh,” I said to myself. I was hoping Mr. Fong could tell me where Dad lived.

“Well, do you know where that other pizza delivery guy lives?” I asked, trying out Plan B.

“Why do you want to know?” he asked.

“I’m his kid,” I said proudly. “Can’t you tell? I look just like him.” I made a bug-eyed, bucktooth, silly face because no matter how hard I tried I never could make a scary face.

“You must be pulling my leg,” the guy remarked, and began to laugh out loud. “Pigza has a kid? Women won’t open the door when he delivers. If you were his kid you’d already be dead from fright. Just looking at him almost gives me a heart attack!”

“But do you know where he lives?” I said, feeling a little sad about what he had just said about Dad.

“Does he know you are his kid?” he asked.

“Just as much as I know he’s my dad,” I replied.

He blew out a final puff of smoke and flicked the butt into the parking lot with a little smile on his face as if he had thought of something clever. “Try Alley Oop Street. Alley Oop is his nickname. We stopped there once after a delivery and he ran into his place for something. I didn’t pay attention to the number but I remember the street name because he was singing that silly caveman song about Alley Oop. You know, ‘He got a big ugly club and a head fulla hairuh, Alley-Oop, oop, oop-oop.’”

“Alley Oop?” I repeated.

“Alley O. Over by Buchanan Park,” he said and pointed. “Offa West End Ave, like Alley A, Alley N, Alley O.”

“Oh,” I said. “I got it.”

I took off before Dad returned. Buchanan Park was a few blocks away from where I went to school, for one day so far. When I reached Alley O, I paused and stood behind a tree. The alley was long and unpaved and either side of it was lined with old brick garages that had been turned into apartments. I took the key out of my pocket. It was a Yale key, so I was looking for a Yale lock. I just got myself revved up and marched over to the side door of the first garage. It was a Yale lock but my key didn’t fit. I dashed over to the next garage side door and tried it. Nope. I tried the next one. Nope. I looked over my shoulder to see if anyone was paying attention to me. Nope. I went to the next garage. Nope. The next. Nope. And by the time I finished one whole side of the alley I was feeling like my chances of finding his apartment were either half better, or half worse.

I tackled the other side. Nope. Nope. Nope. I was starting to fidget like a squirrel that forgot where he hid his acorn.

Then “Yes!” I hissed after the key slid into a lock, and when I turned it to the right it kept turning and then the tumblers rolled over and the door cracked open like an oyster.

Until that moment I had only thought about finding his door. But what would I do when I was in the house? What would I say to him if he came home?

I was feeling a little springy inside and realized I’d forgotten to change my patch this morning. I slapped my arm where I had my old patch just to wake it up and called out, “Carter?” I used his name like I was an old friend. “Carter, old buddy. Are you home? I got some money for you.” I figured that last bit would get him out. But no, so I stepped forward and pulled the door behind me.

On the hallway wall was a peg with a doctor’s coat and white surgeon’s mask hanging down. I crept along that dark hallway not knowing what real monster mask was waiting to reach out for me. I turned the corner but didn’t see him.

“Dad?” I called out. “Are you here?” There was no answer so I kept going. I entered the little kitchen. For some reason I opened the refrigerator. All the food was neat and tidy and perfectly wrapped up. On the windowsill he had lined up a row of apple cores and the room smelled sweet like rotting apples. Mom did the same. I went into his bedroom and his bed was perfectly made up. I opened his closet and all his shirts and pants were ironed. Even his socks were folded over hangers and hanging up. I opened a drawer and all his undershirts were folded. On a little desk all his mail was sorted out in neat stacks and there was a soup can full of pencils and pens. There was a framed picture of Carter Junior that was taken when he was born, and the little blue imprint of his foot on a piece of paper.

I looked around for more pictures and noticed a small room off his room, like a closet without a door. I stuck my head around the corner and that’s when I saw the crib. It was brand-new and perfectly made up with clean sheets and a baby blanket and stuffed animals. The walls of the room were freshly painted and in one corner was a changing table with diapers and cream and a soft night-light and everything else a new baby would need.

I reached into the crib and pulled out a little pillow. Carter Junior was hand-stitched on the front of it. Dad must have imagined living with Carter Junior and feeling all the love and happiness of starting over in a new house with a new baby and a new heart and hopes and dreams. But no matter what his dream was I couldn’t just let him take the piece of Pigza he wanted and throw away the rest of us.

I don’t know what came over me but I kicked my shoes off and climbed into the small cage of that perfect crib. There was a mobile of farm animals attached to the rail. I wound it up and a scratchy voice sang “Old McDonald had a farm, e-i-e-i-oooh.” And as the song played I curled up on my side and looked above me at the animals dancing in a circle like a halo over my head. I was cool so I opened the knitted blue blanket and pulled it up to my chin. When I was a baby I had a crib and a music box that played “Twinkle, twinkle, little star, how I wonder what you are.” Now I wondered what I had become because I was a boy but it suddenly felt so good to be the baby again.

I still had the key in my hand and I held it up to my mouth, but instead of the key I pushed my thumb between my lips. It tasted so good and dreamy and I was suddenly as tired as a newborn. I lowered my eyelids and sucked on my thumb until I slipped into a deep sleep like Goldilocks finding just the right bed. I wish I had slept like the ancient Greeks and had a dream that revealed what was going to happen next in my life, but when I suddenly woke up it was night and the apartment was dark and all I felt was fear that he would find me—the wrong Pigza boy—in Carter Junior’s bed.

I grabbed the bars on the crib as if I were trapped inside my own black box and in a panic I hopped out. I felt around and turned on the night-light. I pulled the sheets tight and smoothed them out as best I could with the flat of my hand. I folded up the blanket. Then I slipped my shoes on and slowly turned in a circle to make sure everything was the same as when I walked in. I hoped it was. I turned off the light and marched out of the little room, and through his bedroom and down the hall. It scared me to open his door because he could be an inch away from opening it himself with a new key, and if he was there he would grab me and the scare would hit me like lightning and I’d drop dead on the spot. But I had no other choice but to get out of there. I took a deep breath and turned the doorknob.