7

Problem is, it’s hard to ask a kid a question if the kid’s out somewhere.

So instead I called William Allen back and agreed to check up on his prospective neighbors in return for a check from him. Then I spent the best part of two hours at the computer. Doing some gen-u-wine de-tec-tive work. And for my pains I turned up information about four nearby condo neighbors. One was an ex-bankrupt, one had an expired pot conviction in Hawaii, and two had unpaid parking tickets. No felons or politicians. It would be up to the estimable Mr. Allen to decide if that was the kind of neighborhood he wanted to live in.

When I turned the computer off, I turned me off too.

Or so I thought.

I found it hard to get to sleep.

Was it neglectful of me to let my only child find her own path without active intervention, or at least attempts there at?

Ah, but Mom wasn’t suggesting intervention. She was urging communication—the chant word honed in the old century to be ready-sharp in the new.

And, like many a mother, chances were she wasn’t far wrong. I talked to Sam every day, but we rarely said anything.

Once upon a time I communicated with my kid. I wrote her letters, especially when she was young. Often they had stories in them—fancies, fantasies, whatever came to mind when I sat down to commune with paper and pen. As I remember it the stories were more interesting than anything I could have reported about my actual life, with few exceptions.

And now my kid and I lived under the same roof for the first time since she could speak sentences and I might as well be the parent who’d stopped writing letters. It was nighttime, and she was out, and I didn’t have the faintest idea where she was or who she was with.

Was that so wrong? Was that so bad? The “kid” in question was a grown-up, so in that sense it wasn’t wrong. It wasn’t bad. But it wasn’t right and it wasn’t good.

And I certainly did not know what my child’s objectives in life were.

Except that she wanted me to solve the problem of her mother’s missing letters.

Probably j, c and r.

Ha ha.

No, no, better: whatever the missing letters were, they wouldn’t be any that helped spell “money.”

Ha ha ha ha ha.

I got out of bed. I went to the office and dug out a piece of plain paper. I sat down to write whatever came into my mind. I wrote “duck.” Then I drew something that looked to me impressively like a creature that would quack. And then I wadded it up and flew it away.

But as I sat, uninspired, I felt comfortable. My life was whole again. I could feel it, in my shoulders, in my limbs. The bits of my body were individually and collectively more me than they had been for a long, long time.

Can a job really be like a body part?

I guess it can, if the job really resonates in you.

But why was being a private investigator, a licensed private investigator, such a big deal for me? Why was I not whole without it? It’s not like I spent my sandbox years telling kiddy colleagues, “Only twenty-four more years and I’ll have my PI license.”

It was a strange process. A step in this direction followed by two steps in another and then, whoops, how about one backwards? And I’d ended up in the problem-solving business.

At least I hadn’t ended down.

Or ended altogether. Not yet.