Last Night In Twisted River

As a novelist, Da

In the first few years after Joe died, the cook would occasionally try to talk his son out of drinking again. “You’ll feel better if you don’t, Daniel. In the long run, you’ll wish you hadn’t gone back to it.”

“It’s for research, Pop,” Da

But the cook could see that Da

Dominic could also see for himself that his son’s sadness had endured. After Joe’s death, Ketchum observed that Da

Wasn’t it enough that Da

That kind of question drove Da

But couldn’t it be argued that Da

At first, after the accident-and again, when Baby in the Road was published-Dominic had done his best to shield his son from his fan mail. Da

“You have some weird readers,” the cook had complained one day. “And so many of your fans address you by your first name, as if they were your friends! It would u

“Give me an example, Pop,” Da

“Well, I don’t know,” Dominic said. “I throw out more mail than I show you, you know. There was one letter last week-she might have been a stripper, for all I know. She had a stripper’s name.”

“Like what?” Da

“‘Lady Sky,’” the cook had said. “Sounds like a stripper to me.”

“I think her real name is Amy,” Da

“You know her?”

“I know only one Lady Sky.”

“I’m sorry, Daniel-I just assumed she was a wacko.”

“What did she say, Pop-do you remember?”

Naturally, the cook couldn’t remember all the details-just that the woman seemed presumptuous and deranged. She’d written some gibberish about protecting Joe from pigs; she’d said she was no longer flying, as if she’d once been able to fly.

“Did she want me to write her back?” Da

“Well, I’m sure there was a return address-they all want you to write them back!” the cook cried.

“It’s okay, Pop-I’m not blaming you,” Da

“I had no idea you wanted to hear from someone named Lady Sky, Daniel,” the cook said.

Something must have happened to Amy; Da

“I was sure she was a crazy person, Daniel.” With that, the cook paused. “She said she had lost a child, too,” Dominic told his son. “I thought I would spare you those letters. There were quite a lot of them.”

“Maybe you should show me those letters, Dad,” Da

After the discovery that Lady Sky had written to him, Da

IN DANNY ANGEL’S WRITING ROOM, on the third floor of the house on Cluny Drive, there was a skylight in addition to the window with the view of the clock tower on the Summerhill liquor store. This had once been Joe’s bedroom, and it occupied the entire third floor and had its own bathroom, with a shower but not a tub. The shower was adequate for a college kid like Joe, but the cook had questioned the extravagant size of the bedroom-not to mention the premier view. Wasn’t this wasted on a young man attending school in the States? (Joe would never get to spend much time in Toronto.)

But Da